!sdrawkcab tnew I dna ynoT keew sihT! Backwards – or reversed – audio became a possibility with the advent of recording technology, and has been employed by artists and producers across decades to ornament songs and intruige listeners. On the show this week we looked at a range of uses of reversed and backwards audio, including hidden messages, obscured narratives, odes to Shakespeare, and straight-up psychedelia.
Jimi Hendrix & Judas Priest
Are You Experienced? was released as the title track from The Jimi Hendrix Experience‘s 1967 debut album. Are You Experienced? was an immediate critical and commercial success, and reached number five on the Billboard Top LPs chart, where it remained for 105 weeks. The album drew influence from a variety of genres including rhythm and blues, free jazz, and psychedelia. Are You Experienced? was recorded at London’s Olympic Studios on April 3rd, 1967, and betrays the influence of both jazz and psychdelia on Hendrix. The entire composition is largely based on one chord – A-flat major – and features both recorded guitar and drum parts played backwards. The song pre-dates ‘scratching’ by over ten years, but the sound of Mitch Mitchell‘s reversed drums in many ways anticipate the effect.
Love Bites by Judas Priest was released as the third single from their 1984 album Defenders of the Faith. The song contains a ‘backmasked’ phrase; the song’s title lyric “in the dead of the night, love bites”. Backmasking is the name given to playing recorded messages backwards, and its use was promoted first as training for magicians by occultist Aleister Crowley (the subject of Mr. Crowley by Ozzy Osbourne). Backmasking was popularised in music by the “Paul is dead” rumour: a DJ claimed that, when played backwards, Revolution 9 contained the message “turn me on, dead man”, which in turn gave rise to the rumour that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced with a lookalike. Love Bites was involved in a civil trial over backmasking in 1990. It was alleged that Judas Priest were responsible for the 1985 suicide attempts of 20-year-old James Vance & 18-year-old Ray Belknap in Reno, Nevada, US. Vance’s parents and their legal team alleged that a subliminal message of “do it” in Judas Priest’s cover of Spooky Tooth’s Better by You, Better than Me (1969) had been included in the song, a command that had triggered the attempt. Lead singer Rob Halford testified that there was no such message, and that the band had only included a backmasked message on one song: Love Bites. Thejudge ruled in a pre-trial motion that subliminal messages were incapable of being protected speech as they were by definition not noticeable, and the case was dismissed.
The Stone Roses & Nas
The Stone Roses released Full Fathom Five in 1989 as the B-side to their single Elephant Stone. Full Fathom Five is, in fact, Elephant Stone in reverse! Elephant Stone was the group’s third single, their first on Silvertone Records, and was later inserted as an additional track into the tracklisting of (U.S. pressings of) the band’s self-titled debut album in 1989. It was written by singer Ian Brown and guitarist John Squire, and produced by New Order bassist Peter Hook in his own studio. Full Fathom Five is named after a Jackson Pollock painting, and a version of the painting is the cover art for the single.
Rewind was released on Nas’ fifth studio album Stillmatic in 2001. The album explores socially conscious and philosophical themes similar to his 1994 debut Illmatic, and was a commercial and critical success that helped re-establish Nas’ career following a period of critical disappointment with his previous album Nastradamus (1999). Stillmatic debuted at number eight on the US Billboard 200, and sold over 342,600 in its first week of sales; it went on to sell 2,026,000 copies in the US, and has been certified Platinum by the RIAA. Rewind is widely regarded as one of the most innovative storytelling tracks in hip-hop, as Nas narrates an entire story backwards. He recounts a dramatic night of revenge, betrayal, and murder in reverse chronological order, and details each moment in reverse sequence (a bullet returns into the gun, smoke goes back into a blunt, etc.), and includes dialogue delivered backwards (“shoot don’t please”, “Outside right we”, etc.). The song was partly inspired by Memento, a 2000 Christopher Nolan movie starring Guy Pearce.
Missy Elliott & Billie Eilish
Missy Elliott‘s Work It was written and produced by Elliott and frequent collaborator Timbaland for her fourth studio album Under Construction (2002). The track was heavily inspired by old school hip hop from the early 1980s, and samples Run-DMC‘s Peter Piper (1986) and Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three‘s Request Line (1984), as well as Heart of Glass by Blondie (1978). During the chorus, the lyric “I put my thing down, flip it, and reverse it” is immediately followed by the same line played in reverse; later in song, the phrase “Watch the way Missy like to take it backwards” is also reversed. Work It peaked at number two on US Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks, and reached the top ten or top twenty across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The song also won a Grammy Award for Best Female Rap Solo Performance, a Billboard Music Award for Top Rap Song, and multiple ASCAP, NAACP, and Teen Choice honours.
Billie Eilish released TV as part of a two-song EP Guitar Songs (2022), along with The 30th. TV was co-written with Eilish‘s brother Finneas O’Connell, who produced both songs on theEP. Eilish debuted the song during a concert in Manchester as part of Happier Than Ever, The World Tour (2022–2023); the outro of the song samples the crowd during this performance. TV explores topics of abandonment and a desire for numbness as a distraction from the world’s problems, and references the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, as well as eating disorders, mental health, and the defamation trial between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. At 1:35 the song contains a backmasked message, though it is unclear what it says; the backmasked message is the result of reversed reverb used throughout song’s production.
One Direction vs The World
Our soundslike this week explored a (generic and therefore commonplace!) similarity between You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ by The Righteous Brothers (1964), Hang On Sloopy by The McCoys (1965), Summer Nights from Grease (1978), and What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction (2011).
Backwards Quiz
For our quiz this week, you heard famous backwards sections of songs, played forwards – guess the artist and song!
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. With a new show comes a new Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs featured on the show:
And you can still listen to our old mega-playlist here.
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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