The Devil’s Music
I’ve been listening to Uptime/Downtime a lot again. Uptime is the half of it that I prefer, and I urge you to listen to it if you haven’t already. At the end of “Deeper Sand” and the start of “MKY Da HVN” is a sample of what sounds like a Christian evangelist. He mentions the line “the music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back”—which is a backmasked line from Electric Light Orchestra’s “Fire on High”.
The rest of the sample from Uptime wasn’t there, however, and it didn’t sound the same as the “Fire on High” sample reversed, so I wondered where it came from. The “Fire on High” backmasked sample is relatively well known, and is apparently in there as a swipe at Christan evangelists who had earlier claimed that Electric Light Orchestra’s song “Eldorado” contained backmasked Satanic messages.
This makes it all the more amusing that the sampled evangelist in Uptime, Michael Mills, uses this as an example of hidden Satanic messages in rock music during a 1981 radio show. The Introduction and Electric Light Orchestra pieces are definitely worth listening to; the rest is dependent on how much of it you can tolerate. It’s also scary in that there are probably a lot of people out there who believed it then, and still believe it now, and have made various cultural and education decisions accordingly.
Uptime uses two samples spliced together; the “time is reversible” portion is the second half and comes from the segment on Electric Light Orchestra, but I haven’t found the sections that “there’s no difference between a record like this and a satanic bible” or “because of the beat, they’re mesmerized by the music” are from.
Thanks to Micah for pointng out that YouTube has Hell’s Bell’s: The Dangers of Rock ’N’ Roll.
03 Sep 2010 at 00:00
The “because of the beat, they’re mesmerized by the music” sample is from the piece on Kiss, which is another classic.
03 Sep 2010 at 05:54
tool.
03 Sep 2010 at 16:18
Nah, they were formed well after this guy did his radio show, so they’re not mentioned.