Maggie Turns to Backmasking
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
I've always known it - Not in My Airforce by Robert Pollard is a masterpiece. A friend of mine once gave it to me because he thought the album was crap. But listening to Bob Pollard is like finding treasures at a garbage dump.
The issue of backmasking has become of interest again in the Netherlands ever since some obscure people discovered that a hitsong of the immensely popular K3, a girlband aiming at children, contained some very disturbing backward messages. In forward mode, the song is about 'Grandma's at the Top'. Played backwards, the listener distinctly hears the chorus 'grote massamoord' (big mass murder') and also 'godverdomme leuk' ('goddamn nice'). Coincidence?*
An awesome place to check out some examples of alleged backmasking is Jeff Milner's Backmasking Site. Many alleged cases of backmasking are dubious and probably many are coincidental (as we may hope for the k3 case). However, some are obviously intentional, especially if backward speech patterns are audable in normal playing mode.
Such is the case with the intro of the first song of Not in My Airforce, 'Maggie Turns to Flies'. Reversing music is very easy in this digital age (and it doesn't spoil any needle), so I grabbed the song and turned it around.
Played forward, you hear a pounding beat and then the swelling voice of Pollard, obviously reversed, together with a reversed acoustic guitar:
