Judas’ Kiss, with intro turned around

I’m a Christian child of the 80’s.  As such, I had the More Power To Ya album as a teen.  That album had a song titled “Judas’ Kiss” that had an interesting intro.  It was obvious that speech (or something) was being played backwards.  This was a tongue-in-cheek (and backwards) message from the band to the Christian community.

When played backwards, the intro said “What’re ya lookin’ for the Devil for, when ya oughta be lookin’ for the Lord?”  In the 80’s it was a pretty popular teaching (in fundamentalist circles certainly and maybe it was more widespread) that rock music had hidden meanings embedded in it that were influencing us all to do bad things.  I remember that the refrain “Another one bites the dust” was supposedly turning around to say “It’s fun to smoke marijuana” in our heads.  And there were supposedly other more evil sayings embedded in other songs — I remember “Hotel California” by the Eagles being a popular target.

The whole “back-masking” idea is pretty ludicrous, of course.  However, I remember being taught this in my church.  I explained it to my father and he quickly straightened me out.  He asked me to theorize a band playing on stage and having some backup singers that were chanting evil messages to me, but those messages were being spoken in German or Italian or some other language I didn’t know.  Would my brain be able to decode those messages and have them influence me?  “No, I guess not” I admitted.  My Dad quickly replied, “At least those are actual languages!  You’re talking about noise that isn’t even a language.”  That kind of pulled me off the looking-for-Satanic-messages-in-music bandwagon.

I don’t know what Petra actually thought of the whole back-masking goofiness.  But they did put that piece of backwards speech at the front of “Judas’ Kiss”.  And, of course, we all had to find out what it said!  I remember playing it backwards on my turntable to find out the secret message, and then laughing out loud when I heard it!

Anyway, I’ve recently embarked on a project to rip all my old CDs and tapes and convert them all to MP3s.  Today, I ripped the “Petra Means Rock” best-of collection which has a copy of “Judas’ Kiss” on it.  So I thought it would be cool to have a version of the song where the intro has been reversed so that you can clearly hear the backwards message.  This was trivial to do digitally, so my MP3 album of “Petra Means Rock” has one extra track on it now.

Since technically this (maybe?) qualifies as some kind of mash-up, it isn’t a copyright problem for me to make the MP3 available here (??).  So here’s Judas’ Kiss (with intro reversed) for anyone who thinks that would be neat to have.