Backward music gets its turn up front

NEW YORK – Long before people were hawking food items on eBay with alleged imprints of famous faces, people were finding secret meanings in rock music.

“People have a natural curiosity for hidden messages and the unknown,” says 26-year-old Jeff Milner, who has fashioned himself into somewhat of an expert on the topic. “People like being in on the secret.”

For years Milner had heard the rumors: Play Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” backward, and you’ll hear “It’s fun to smoke marijuana.” Or listen to the Eagles’ “Hotel California” in reverse to hear, “Satan he hears this.” But it wasn’t until the advent of digital audio editing technology that he was able to investigate for himself.

“I was curious whether there was something there, but I didn’t actually have the time or inclination to bother,” says the student at the University of Lethbridge in Canada.

Finally armed with the editing software called Audacity a couple years ago, Milner tested portions of a few songs long-purported to contain bits of wisdom in reverse. And he didn’t stop there. In early 2003 he decided to share the samples – played forward and backward – with a few dozen friends on the Web site jeffmilner.com/backmasking.htm.

As word of Milner’s site made it into blogs and even the Wall Street Journal, his audience grew, and he now averages around 5,000 visitors a day.

Milner hopes the attention helps rekindle an interest in the decades-old fad that began, as a lot of things in rock music do, with the Beatles.

In 1969, rumors began to circulate that Paul McCartney had died in a car accident and was replaced by a look-alike. Conspiracy theorists pointed to many things, like album covers, photographs and lyrics to back their claims. But it was the band’s “White Album” that was said to offer definitive proof. The gibberish at the end of “I’m So Tired” supposedly rendered “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him” when played backward on a turntable. Similarly, the repeated words “Number nine” in “Revolution 9” became “turn me on, dead man.”

The key to backmasking, according to another backmasking expert, is that until someone tells you what to listen for, reversed speech is all gibberish.

“If someone tells you to look for, ‘The devil will kill you,’ it sounds clear after you’re told to listen for it,” says Eric Borgos, who runs a Web site, TalkBackwards.com ( www.talkbackwards.com) that lets visitors upload audio files and play them backward. “Your mind just isn’t trained to pick up that kind of thing.”