These two pages are unusually autobiographical -- they are based on my own experiences and don't differ from them too much, except that I don't believe I ever had a fruity 70s unicorn on a birthday cake. But I might have, if it had occurred to me. Or I might have had a cheesy, vaguely Gandalf-esque wizard.

Because I am a big nerd.

The "another reason you should obey your parents" line, and the "great place to meet ministers" line are both direct quotes from Sunday School classes I remember from the Church of the Poison Mind. They came along well after I had disconnected from the proceedings and was just amusing myself by taking mental notes for future satire -- otherwise, that's the point where I would have disconnected.

As much as I had been a Christian since I could remember, I had also been a feminist since I could remember. Until this point in my life (early adolescence) I had never thought for even a moment that there might be a conflict between those two ideologies, that is, the teachings of Jesus and sexual equality. So now, suddenly, I had these people telling me that there was a conflict. You had to pick one. Jesus or feminism. Jesus or science. Jesus or rock music. Jesus or rational thought.

Under those terms, Jesus couldn't win.

One thing I regret from this time: that I did not keep any copies of these weird anti-rock handouts that our Sunday School class got... circa 82-83? (I sent them all to my punk-rock pen-pal.) They were crazy gold, more paranoid and creepy than Chick Tracts. Some things I remember: the KISS logo, with the lightning bolt esses, was evil because the lightning bolts represented "Lucifer falling like a lightning bolt from Heaven" and not because of the very obvious resemblance to the Nazi SS logo. The same handout identified images of light as symbolic of both Jesus (light of the world) and Satan (Because Lucifer is the morning star). The song "Hotel California" was evil because it was about being trapped in hell (well, duh) and also because it was full of secret references to the Church of Satan. (Never mind working out how a song that is clearly about being trapped in a kind of hell can also be interpreted as somehow being all "hell, yay!") And "Stairway to Heaven" was chock-full-o "backmasking."

Ah, remember backmasking? Those were the days. It was the 1980s, and you could sometimes rig up turntables to play backwards -- you had to disengage the motor and turn them by hand, and it probably ruined the records, and the needle, and maybe the motor too, but it did allow you to judge for yourself whether "Number Nine, Number Nine" played backward sounds like "turn me on dead man."

(It doesn't. It sounds like "neon rebman" and it only sounds like that because the announcer is from the BBC and turns "nine" into two syllables, "Ny-un," and because the schwa-e problem in English means that we hear "mun" and "man" as the same word.)

(Oh, and for you youngsters, a "turntable" is a device that uses a "needle" for replaying a vinyl "record." These records were a primitive but effective method for physically recording sound waves. Sound was translated into vibrations of the needle and recorded as impressions into a medium, such as wax, which then became a master for mass-producing the sound recording.The needle on the replay turntable fit into the groove copied from the movement of the original needle, and reproduced the vibrations of the original sounds.)

Anyway, being concerned about backmasking required swallowing some rather large, rotten, whoppers.

Whopper 1: Believing that your typical unsuspecting teenage Led Zeppelin fan could, somehow, without special equipment or attention, discern what a bunch of sounds would sound like if you played them backwards.This suggests that the average human has some kind of constantly operating subconscious backward sound reel, which has interesting quantum time-travel implications if true. But if it were true, you'd think it would affect our species in other ways. Also, you'd think this ability would be verified in laboratory tests. Which it is not.

Whopper 2: Believing that, once these backward messages are perceived (subconsciously), they affect behavior. This is tied into the controversial idea of subliminal advertising, which sounds more plausible than the subconscious backward sound reel thing, but again, has not been verified in laboratory tests. Even if subliminal advertising has an effect, it's difficult to imagine that it would have more of an effect than all the liminal and superliminal advertising that we are all subjected to.

Whopper 3: Believing that rock musicians are carefully constructing normal forward music that just happens to have these secret messages when played backward. One of the peculiar things about the backmasking controversy is that it never seemed to involve obvious backward recordings -- the final verse of "Rain" by the Beatles, for example. And why was that?

Because the whole thing was nonsense, beginning to end.

Anyway, now that most music is played electronically, you never hear about backmasking anymore. Is that because people realized it was stupid? Probably not. People currently believe in things that are just as stupid. But you can't play a CD or an MP3 file backward, so nobody is ever going to try it and notice that when you play Britney Spears backward she is urging young girls to put on turtlenecks and go into law school.