Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

“Life must be understood backwards,” wrote famed existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, and sometimes the same can be said of pop music. 

For almost half a century now, musicians have implanted backwards lyrics, sounds and musical passages into their songs — in the process eliciting befuddlement, controversy and panic. In 1957, when French musique concrete composer Andre Popp (recording as “Elsie Popping and her Pixieland Band”) incorporated backward-recorded singing and playing in his groundbreaking (and bizarre) DELIRIUM IN HI-FI, the technique of “backward masking” was seen as little more than a clever musical gag. 

But that same year, an increasingly paranoid United States saw its mounting anxieties further stoked by the release of best-selling author Vance Packard’s THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS, a diatribe against the rising tide of so-called “motivational research” in the advertising world.  One man referenced in Packard’s book was James Vicary who, on September 12, 1957, announced that he had planted the subliminal message, “Eat popcorn — drink Coke,” into a print of Joshua Logan’s soapy PICNIC at a Fort Lee, New Jersey theater.  Vicary reported that sales of Coca-Cola at the theater went up by 18-percent and popcorn by 58-percent, although he refused to release the details of his study.  Subsequent efforts to replicate his results by other researchers were unsuccessful, and five years later, Vicary admitted that the test’s data was “too small to be meaningful” and called subliminal advertising “a gimmick” and “a very weak persuader.”  But by then the damage was done, and a full-bore panic over the use of hidden messages had spread like wildfire over the country, its flames fanned by politicians like Utah’s Representative William Dawson, who called the technique “worrisome, if not frightening” and demanded that the FCC ban it outright.

The furor over subliminal messages reignited in the 1970s, thanks to popular gadfly Wilson Bryan Key.  Key’s best-selling SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION detailed Madison Avenue’s efforts to airbrush sexual slogans into the ice cubes and cigarette packs depicted in its advertising and although its premise was scientifically iffy, the book and its sequels were highly influential.  Nearly 20 years later, Key would testify against the heavy metal band Judas Priest during the 1991 trial in which they were accused of encouraging the suicides of a pair of troubled teenagers in Nevada with the subliminal message of “Do it!” on their 1978 album, STAINED CLASS.  (Strangely, no one has tested whether Nike sales have seen a spike among headbangers.)

The 1980s witnessed this fear of the subliminal drifting stench-like into the world of pop music.  Bands such as the Beatles and ELO had woven backward sequences into their songs since the mid-1960s, usually as elaborate in-jokes, like Pink Floyd’s reversed reference to original member Syd Barrett on THE WALL.  But paranoid factions among fundamentalist Christians and Muslims began to perceive Satanic sayings even in more innocent fare, as when one church group reportedly discovered a mephistophelean message hidden in the theme to MR. ED!

We’ll talk more about (and hear examples of) backward masking in a future NOTES podcast.  Check back to discover how “pop” spelled backwards is still… er, “pop.”