Music is apparently a great place to hide secret messages. The Underground Railroad supposedly coded escape plans into slave work songs, and Mozart's music features more secret Masonic symbolism than the back of a dollar bill. Well, it turns out some of the most popular musicians of the past 50 years have been getting in on the action too, and just not telling anyone. It's almost like they knew the internet would be invented, and that the music fans who hang out there would have way too much time on our hands. How else can you explain ...
#10. Jimi Hendrix's Hidden Alien Message
But what's even trippier about it is that if you adjust the speed of your record player to play the song like a 45 rpm vinyl (a format usually reserved for singles), you can suddenly hear two aliens talking by radio as they approach Earth. What's an alien message doing in an album about simple topics like kidnapping ladies and burning stuff? Nobody knows.
Although we have some theories.
But if you want creepy, you can always trust Nine Inch Nails to take things to the next level: The track "Erased, Over, Out" from their remix album Further Down the Spiral is long and repetitious ... perhaps intentionally, because if you fast-forward through it on a regular CD player, you can clearly hear the words "ERASE ME" being repeated over and over and over. So if you ever heard that song at regular speed and afterward felt an inexplicable urge to format your hard drive, now you know why.
Purging your data is a perfectly natural response to NIN.#9. Radiohead Hides Entire Booklet (and a Conspiracy)
On a purely unrelated note, this is Radiohead's manager.
It may have also been Thom Yorke's rejected children's book, You Will Never Sleep Again.
Thom Yorke's bed-sheets and walls are covered in "previews" like this.
#8. Radiohead's Decade-Spanning Secret Album
This is what doing a whippet on the highway looks like.
Don't believe us? Just listen to it. To get the full effect, you need to set your player with a 10-second crossfade between tracks (more 10s!), but you can notice most stuff without doing that. Then shit your pants.
Is Thom York moody, or is he acting like he just crapped his pants
as a really subtle clue?
Alternate way to sum it up.
Oh, look, two 10s. Huh.
The band has never officially confirmed any of this, though Puddlegum claims Thom Yorke was annoyed by how long it's taken people to figure it out. Come on, dude -- not all of us are insane alien geniuses.
#7. Tool's Epic Do-It-Yourself Song
You can't spell "diVersity" without some of the letters in "Voltron"!
By themselves, the songs seem completely different: "10,000 Days" (11:13) is a long prog-rock number, "Wings for Marie" (6:11) is a quiet song that builds up into a crescendo, and "Viginti Tres" (5:02) is just a bunch of weird noises. 6:11 plus 5:02 adds up to 11:13 -- that's because you're supposed to put "Viginti Tres" and "Wings for Marie" together (in that order) and play them at the same time as "10,000 Days."
Sobriety is optional, but not recommended.
The band has never acknowledged any of this, but if you listen to the full song it's pretty obvious that they did this intentionally ... which is both mind-blowingly awesome and a little bit insane.
Also like Voltron.#6. Aphex Twin Gives You Nightmares
Calling Richard D. James (the founder and sole member of alternative rock band Aphex Twin) an eccentric is hardly a stretch. He lives in a converted bank office owns a tank and submarine, and has a deranged compulsion to plaster his face all over shit, as seen most prominently in the insanely terrifying music video for "Come to Daddy."
Things like this should not happen in music videos. Or anywhere.
... (fans just call it "[Equation]," unless they're real douchebags). Five minutes and 30 seconds into the song, a metallic, buzzing noise is heard, which is frankly nothing out of the ordinary for Aphex Twin. What IS fucked up is that when you run that section through a spectrograph (a program that converts sound waves into visible images), this comes out:
You weren't planning on sleeping tonight, right?
Richards isn't the only one who has done it, though. Nine Inch Nails hid part of their album's cover art in two songs from the album Year Zero, and lesser-known electronic artist Venetian Snares included spectrographic pictures of his cats ... in an album titled Songs About My Cats.
OK, now we can't decide which one is scarier.
#5. Pink Floyd's Real Backward Message Putting backward messages into music (also known as "backmasking") was all the rage back in the 80s -- and by "all the rage" we mean "the subject of congressional inquiries." Bands such as Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin were accused of including subliminal satanic mind-control messages in their songs, in what was undoubtedly one of the stupidest moral panics in American history.
We're beginning to think these guys may not be the best role models.
Hundreds of pages of blotter acid counts as an aesthetic reason, right?
"Hello, hunters. Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont--"
... and then the speaker is interrupted by a female voice saying someone is on the phone. Not exactly "DELIVER YOUR ANUS UNTO SATAN." We're afraid that's about as exciting as real instances of backmasking get -- unless you count grunge band Ash hiding an entire song on their debut album, Trailer. When reversed, pitch-shifted and sped up, the noise at the end of Track 5 actually turns out to be a demo track of another song on the album. What's so neat about that? The album was released in 1994, when the cost of the audio equipment and/or software to hear the song would have put it out of the reach of the vast majority of listeners. That's several layers of hidden. This would all be a whole lot more impressive if anyone actually knew or cared who Ash was.
These guys look more like the roadies than the band.#4. Monty Python Album Makes You Question Your Sanity
That is literally the only way that scenario can play out.
Lots of vinyl albums used lock grooves. That's when the needle reaches the end of the album and instead of, you know, ending, it keeps playing the last part in a loop. The Beatles did it with Sgt. Pepper's, which ended with a "sound designed to annoy your dog" and an endless loop of laughter and gibberish.
In case you were wondering why they'd do that.
We're fairly certain Graham Chapman was an Elder God.
#3. Led Zeppelin's Changing Album Art
Why have they stopped trying to make us feel uncomfortable?!
But the album art is only boring on the surface ... literally. If you wash the inner sleeve with water, those lame black and white drawings become permanently colored. And since no one intentionally gets water on their albums, this means most people probably found out about this when his asshole roommate spilled bong water on it.
"Hey, what the fuck are you ... Whoa."
#2. Public Enemy Hidden Track Gives Critics the Finger
You probably know about hidden songs at the end of a CD, typically after a long silence or multiple blank tracks. Some, like "Endless, Nameless" from Nirvana's Nevermind, are famous in their own right. On the final track of One for the Kids, Yellowcard has a hidden song that shows up only after a silence that lasts for exactly 4:20, because they're very subtle.
It isn't easy to find photos of Yellowcard concerts that aren't obscured by billowing clouds of blunt smoke.
Before the first track on any CD, there's a section of data called the pregap, which is typically used to store structuring data for the disc itself. But a few enterprising artists found a way to place audio in the pregap, which is like putting the salami on top of the bread. To access the pregap, you must go against your every instinct by pressing and holding the rewind button at the beginning of the first track, until it can't go back any further. This will often show a "-1" in the display window, with all the creepy associations that brings to Super Mario Bros. players.
Aaaaaahhh!
Public Enemy is usually associated with old-school hip-hop, but in this album, Chuck D recorded and hid a full freestyle rap titled "Ferocious Soul," with lyrics mocking the critics who had accused the band of being "anti-black" for saying that gangster rap had negative messages, since it promotes unrealistic things like ridiculous wealth, being constantly surrounded by titties and owning insane amounts of jewelry (shaped like titties). Old-school hip-hop's lyrics were considered silly in comparison by rap fans.
Pictured: A far less silly representation of life in urban America.
And all you have to do to listen to this rare gem is press rewind. Simple, right? Well, it would be, if it wasn't for the fact that most pregap songs aren't accessible anymore. Nowadays, electronics manufacturers have to build their products to a standard known as Red Book audio, and pregap audio goes against those standards. As a result, the majority of stand-alone CD players and computer optical disc drives can't read pregap audio. ITunes and other media players won't recognize it and the tracks are typically not available for sale from online music retailers. On the upside, this means those tracks the artists meant to hide are really well-hidden now.
#1. Information Society Hides a Text File ... on Vinyl
Cracked offices, circa 1988.
But despite utterly failing in the hair and scarf department, they did do one amazing thing no other band managed to do: hide a text file on a vinyl record. On their 1992 release Peace and Love, Inc., the band included a track titled "300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or Ascii Download)." What probably seemed like a load of gibberish to most listeners was actually a set of instructions: If you take a standard modem, configure it with those settings, dial into it with a phone and play the track from the album into the receiver, you'll end up with a plaintext file detailing an insanely exaggerated story about the band being extorted by the Brazilian government. Here's a sample:
If this is as urgent as they say, you sort of question the logic of why they'd hide it in such an impossible-to-retrieve format. Most listeners at the time had no idea something like this was possible (shit, we live in 2010 and we didn't either), so even if they were computer-savvy enough to understand the title of the song, they probably thought it was an obscure joke.
"How do we make sure that only huge, huge nerds listen to our music?"
Before Information Society, other bands had used a similar method to encode stuff like lyric sheets, promotional information about the band and even a full adventure videogame in all its pixelated glory (you can play in your browser by clicking here). In those cases, you had to record the songs into an ordinary audio tape and then play the tape in a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer to watch the results (provided your mom didn't yell at you while you were recording the audio, because then you were fucked). None of these were actually hidden, since they were all intentional and advertised features, but they're still pretty awesome.
Artists from decades ago were so much more productive. All we get out of Kanye are a bunch of retarded tweets.
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