Backmasking
backward recording technique
Backmasking is a recording technique in which a message is recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward. It is a deliberate process, whereas a message found through phonetic reversal may be unintentional.
Artists have used backmasking for artistic, comedic and satiric effect, on both analogue and digital recordings. It has also been used to censor words or phrases for clean releases of explicit songs.
In 1969, rumors of a backmasked message in the Beatles song "Revolution 9" fueled the "Paul is dead" urban legend. Since at least the early 1980s, Christian groups in the United States alleged that backmasking was being used by prominent rock musicians for Satanic purposes, leading to record-burning protests and proposed anti-backmasking legislation by state and federal governments during the 1980s, as part of the Satanic panic movement of the time.
Many popular musicians were accused of including backmasked messages in their music. However, apparent backmasked messages may in fact be examples of pareidolia (the brain's tendency to recognize patterns in meaningless data), coincidental phonetic reversal, or as deliberate responses to the allegations themselves.
History
Development
The backwards playing of records was advised as training for magicians by occultist Aleister Crowley, who suggested in his 1913 book Magick (Book 4) that an adept "train himself to think backwards by external means", one of which was to "listen to phonograph records, reversed". In the movie Gold Diggers of 1935, the end of the dancing-pianos musical number, "The Words Are in My Heart," is filmed in reverse motion, with the accompanying instrumental score incidentally being reversed.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Backmasking” is backward recording technique. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Backmasking, backward and recording, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1062629. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1913 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Backmasking” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.