For both evangelicals and rap DJs, the vinyl LP was not a transparent vehicle of an originally live performance, but a source of musical meaning itself, a material site of potential codes, messages, and deformations of time. Though one doubts that Minister Mills was chillin’ with Grandmaster Flash or DJ Kool Herc, rap musicians and Christian evangelicals both recognized that popular music is a material inscription, one that can be physically manipulated in order to open up new vectors of sense and expression. In retrospect, what stands out most in the backmasking controversy is the marvelous image of all these preachers screwing around with turntables. While most people, Christian or otherwise, found all this rather silly, these fears did reflect more pervasive fears that the media had become a subliminal master of puppets-fears that would themselves come to inspire some 1980s metal. Soon backmasking became the Satanic panic du jour, giving paranoid Christians technological proof that rock bands like Queen, Kiss, and Styx (!) did indeed play the devil’s music. Noting wryly that words “certainly do have two meanings,” Mills argued on one program that the “subconscious mind” could hear these phrases, which is why sinful rock musicians put them there in the first place. The idea that some rock records contain “backmasked” messages goes back to the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” which was rumored to contain the reversed announcement that “Paul’s a dead man.” As far as I can tell, Christian anti-rock crusaders got into the act in 1981, when a Michigan minister named Michael Mills hit Christian radio with the news that phrases like “master Satan,” “serve me,” and “there’s no escaping it” were hidden in the grooves of the Zeppelin hit. The darkest supernatural myth about Zeppelin’s most mythic song is that if you play the recording backwards, you will hear Satanic messages encoded in Plant’s vocals. I thought about all this again when I read Erik Davis’s piece at Salon, “ What exactly lurks within the backward grooves of ‘Stairway to Heaven?” I quit the band and stopped listening to Zeppelin for a while. The classic example was Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” This news was a shock to me since before my conversion I had been in a band (we only practiced, never played a gig) that played a lot of Zeppelin, including the iconic “Stairway.” I took my new evangelical faith (as I understood it back then) very seriously. I joined the evangelical fold as a high school student in the mid-1980s and quickly “learned” that “secular” rock bands often used backmasking to pass along Satanic messages. Perhaps the most famous case of backmasking was the Beatles’ White Album in which the words “Paul’s a dead man” was apparently heard when one of the songs was played backwards. This was the practice of placing secret messages on records that could only be heard when the record was played backwards. Some evangelicals in the 1980s were obsessed with backmasking. Barack Obama chats with surviving members of Led Zeppelin in 2012 during Kennedy Center Honors event (Wikipedia Commons)
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