Subliminal Criminals

[Doug Alan <nessus@mit.edu>]

The following is from an article in the September 4th Village Voice
entitled "Subliminal Criminals".  It is an article on the recent
trial of Judas Priest where they were being sued for allegedly putting
subliminal messages on their albums that caused the suicides of two
Reno teenagers:

	[...] a 32-year-old engineer/producer named Andrew Jackson
	(called to testify because he served as assistant engineer on
	the "Better By You" recording session 13 years ago) is asked
	if he knows any backmasked lyrics in the rock industry.

	"Yes, I do," he says with a Cockney accent so thick he has
	Judge Whitehead straining to understand him.  "I produced a
	band just last month that had a song with the lyric, 'And I
	need someone to lie on. / And I need someone to rely on.'
	Played in reverse that becomes 'Here's me, / Here I am. / What
	we have lost. / I am the messenger of love.'"  (The singer
	memorized the backward phrase, with all its reversals and
	sibilants and plosives, sang it on one track, and that track
	was used -- backward -- as a forward running vocal overdub.)

At a later part in the trial, one of the band members -- to help
defend against the claim of backward subliminal messages -- says that
he recently listened to one of his records backwards and noticed that
there are lots of phrases that sound forwards when played backwards,
even though this was not done intentionally.  It apparently just
happens this way naturally, and you could find such weird backward
nonsense phrases in any forward speech.  He plays a tape he has made
of some backwards excerpts from the album:

	A blast of heavy bass and Glenn Tipton's 32nd-note trill
	accompanies the fragment, "strategic force / they will not,"
	from "Invader."  Its reverse is the insane-sounding but
	entirely audible screech: "It's so fishy, personally I'll owe
	it."  When Halford plays, "They *won't* take our love away,"
	from the same song, the backward, "Hey look, Ma, my chair's
	*broken*," has the court room howling.  McKenna and Lynch are
	livid.

	After a week of suspending my own disbelief, I lost it
	completely when Halford plays his last discovery -- the lines
	"Stand by for Exciter. / Salvation is his task" -- which come
	out backward with an emphatic and high-pitched, "I-I-I as-sked
	her for a peppermint-t-t / I asked for her to *get* one."

|>oug