The other day, as I prepared for my 30-minute commute to my office, I let Spotify pick a playlist for me and off I went to work. You may remember in recent years, I commuted in an older car, a 2002 Mercury Sable with a few quirks that made life interesting. But now I have a 2016 Honda Accord with Bluetooth. It starts all of the time, doesn’t break down and require towing, and this means I have to look for other forms of excitement while commuting. This newer car also meant my music went from cassettes/CDs to Spotify Bluetooth in a remarkably short time, so I’m sticking my hand deep into the musical candy jar each day with Spotify (yes, I heard about it from my children). On this chilly April morning, a few songs into my Daily Mix 1 playlist, Robert Plant, the former lead singer of Led Zeppelin, came on singing the lyric, “Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . I heard the voice of Jesus say, Satan, your kingdom must come down.” I had listened to this particular song a couple of times last year and put it in a playlist I called “Offbeat Gospel” because it was, I thought, well, offbeat. Not so much the lyrics, but the combination of certain singers singing certain lyrics had a slight incongruence that I kind of liked. The playlist includes people who aren’t necessarily known as Christian artists--Alison Kraus, Marc Cohn, and Bruce Springsteen to name a few--singing songs that didn’t just feel gospel but that actually were legitimate gospel lyrics. Offbeat gospel.
As Plant sang about the impending demise of the evil one, I couldn’t help but think back to my days in community college. In my speech class, I did a paper on “backward masking,” which was taking a vinyl record and spinning it backwards on a turntable to see if there were messages “planted” (pun intended) in the song that could be heard. Sometimes, artists did actually put a message in a song that could only be discovered by playing it backwards, but mostly playing songs backwards was just a garbled mess of nonsensical sounds, except a few songs that made this list that includes Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which if played backwards had the infamous words, “My Sweet Satan.” Now I have to admit, that when I listened to Stairway backwards, I could hear the words “My Sweet Satan,” but it actually didn’t sound intentional. But of course, anything played backwards sounds kind of creepy (satanic?), and given that Jimmy Page, the group’s lead guitarist, had bought the famous Satanist Aleister Crowley’s mansion, it seemed like there may have been something to it. That was plenty of information to get a good conspiracy theory going. So I figured I’d better steer clear of Led Zeppelin given all of their Satanic associations, and I pretty much did all of these years, although it might have had as much to do with the song being so long that it was rarely played on the radio as the years went by, just like another song that is over eight minutes long, American Pie. Radio likes three-minute songs so they can sell you stuff in between the songs, and a song that starts out, “Long, long time ago. . . “ and just keeps going and going messes up the whole business model.
One thing I find ironic is that it seems like it was actually easier to play music backwards in the old days of vinyl records on turntables than it is today. I never knew how to play anything on a Compact Disc (CD) backwards and I have no idea how to play something backwards on a streaming music service like Spotify now. (A search on the site about playing music in reverse did not yield anything other than playing a playlist in backwards or reverse order.) So it seems like the days of backward masking have finally come to an end, and you are much more likely to hear Robert Plant singing “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” than “My Sweet Satan.” In my opinion, that’s probably a good thing. And if you pull up next to me at a red light over the next few months while it is warm and roll down your windows, you might even hear me singing those lyrics along with him.