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Someone mentioned this web page tangentially in a thread in Skepticism & Debunking, but it deserves its own thread here in GD.
http://www3.telus.net/jefmil/stairwaybackwards.htm
Everyone's heard the claim that certain songs contain hidden messages if played in reverse, but you (or at least I) never actually get to hear some examples. Consider that quandary squashed!
It's a really interesting mini-psychology experiment to listen to the reversed clips without reading what the supposed reversed lyrics are, and then compare that to what it sounds like when you reveal the reverse lyrics and read along. Meaning emerges from formerly meaningless noises, just because of your expectations. (By the way, the Pink Floyd clip actually does happen to be an intended hidden message.)
It's also a pretty striking coincedence how some of these clips seem relevant to the artists who wrote the original songs. Led Zeppelin always had a dark mystique about them, and the reverse clip from Stairway to Heaven here is a quite disturbingly worded tribute to Satan. John Lennon's cry for a utopian world, Imagine, contains a reverse clip that seems to play an all too realist foil to the song's idealistic lyrics. Britney Spears even pleads in reverse, "sleep with me, I'm not too young!"
Perhaps the listeners who actively sought out such reverse messages were just purposely looking for something meaningful, or (more interestingly) perhaps the apparent semantic cues and ties were noticed on a subconscious level and played an important role in forming the semblence of an apparent linguistic message in the first place. (Especially if there's any truth to the comical and prototypical image of this kind of listener, the 70s stoner-- the hugely inflated sense of significance and conceptual interconnectedness that marijuana induces, along with more subtle perceptual distortions, would be extremely conducive to 'discovering' these sorts of messages.)
Of these clips, my personal favorite has to be the Pokemon Rap. After laughing that hard, my life expectancy has probably been extended by a year or two.
http://www3.telus.net/jefmil/stairwaybackwards.htm
Everyone's heard the claim that certain songs contain hidden messages if played in reverse, but you (or at least I) never actually get to hear some examples. Consider that quandary squashed!
It's a really interesting mini-psychology experiment to listen to the reversed clips without reading what the supposed reversed lyrics are, and then compare that to what it sounds like when you reveal the reverse lyrics and read along. Meaning emerges from formerly meaningless noises, just because of your expectations. (By the way, the Pink Floyd clip actually does happen to be an intended hidden message.)
It's also a pretty striking coincedence how some of these clips seem relevant to the artists who wrote the original songs. Led Zeppelin always had a dark mystique about them, and the reverse clip from Stairway to Heaven here is a quite disturbingly worded tribute to Satan. John Lennon's cry for a utopian world, Imagine, contains a reverse clip that seems to play an all too realist foil to the song's idealistic lyrics. Britney Spears even pleads in reverse, "sleep with me, I'm not too young!"
Perhaps the listeners who actively sought out such reverse messages were just purposely looking for something meaningful, or (more interestingly) perhaps the apparent semantic cues and ties were noticed on a subconscious level and played an important role in forming the semblence of an apparent linguistic message in the first place. (Especially if there's any truth to the comical and prototypical image of this kind of listener, the 70s stoner-- the hugely inflated sense of significance and conceptual interconnectedness that marijuana induces, along with more subtle perceptual distortions, would be extremely conducive to 'discovering' these sorts of messages.)
Of these clips, my personal favorite has to be the Pokemon Rap. After laughing that hard, my life expectancy has probably been extended by a year or two.
