Backmasking, Li Peng and telefon rosak

One of my childhood memories involves my family getting really paranoid about backmasking - if you were around in the 1980s, then no doubt you would have known about it. Now backmasking is the concept that a sound or message is recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward. This was a technique made popular by the Beatles in 1966 on their album Revolver, but the paranoia about backmasking took on a life of its own in the 1980s after Christian groups used this to attack popular culture, claiming that this was a technique used to brainwash innocent children with evil satanic messages. Now to actually play a track backwards involved quite a complex operation that wasn't possible with ordinary cassette players that you would buy from the store those days, even if you took a cassette tape apart, you're unlikely to be able to put it back together. However, the rumours claimed that backmasked messages could bypass the conscious mind and reach the subconscious, where they would be unknowingly accepted by the listener. Cue moral panic over 1980s rock music. Here's a wonderful classic from that era: Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart.

It wasn't just my family that got paranoid - millions of people in the late 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s believed that was the case. I wasn't allowed to listen to Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart because someone had told my sister that it contained satanic messages that would send your mind to the dark side and worship Satan. It seems totally laughable now (I did look for any suggestion of hidden messages in Total Eclipse of the Heart), but good grief, without having the convenience of doing a Google search to understand just what backmasking was, we were genuinely stupid back then. Even in 1990, my sister told me that I couldn't listen to Enigma's Sadeness Part 1 because she was certain that it contained satanic messages: when really, as I look at the song today, there is nothing untoward in the lyrics which features sampled Gregorian chants (which when translated are pretty standard Christian prayers) and then there's the rant in French which sounds sexy because the Marquis de Sade was French of course. I speak French fluently today and can confirm there's nothing that controversial about the lyrics to lure young minds to the dark side, but because my sister didn't speak French, she just assumed the worst of it for no better reason than the fact that she was conditioned to do so.

The funny thing is that nobody talks about backmasking anymore in 2017 - it was something those of us old enough to have been around in the 1980s talk about. The fact is the internet makes it very easy for anyone who wants to spread any kind of message to be totally open about it these days, so if you wish to look into various kinds of Satanism, there's a very detailed page on Wikipedia. But let me save you some time, I read the page halfway and gave up as I got bored quickly. It wasn't that interesting actually. Backmasking was a way for people to get messages out there back in an age when there was much stricter censorship, way before the advent of the internet. But in this day and age, the internet has well and truly changed the laws of censorship so that removed the need to sneak anything into the public domain when you can simply put it on the web for all to find. This reminded me of another case in China back in 1991, when a poem by Zhu Haihong full of patriotic cliches had a hidden message if you looked hard enough, by reading a line of characters diagonally through the poem, you will uncover the message, "李鹏下台平民怨" (Li Peng step down the people are angry). Well, that's cute, poetic and so Chinese - but if you wanted to criticize the Chinese regime these days, you wouldn't need to resort to publishing clever poetry with hidden messages, no you'd just do it online in a far more direct manner.

I had a vague memory of the 李鹏下台平民怨 story - 1991 was a long time ago, but thanks to the power of Google, I was able to piece the story back together in a matter of minutes. What would we have done back in the day, without the luxury of doing a search online? Well, having grown up in that era, I can tell you: people were incredibly ignorant and were often misleading each other! Have you ever played the game 'Broken Telephone' (also known as 'telefon rosak' in Malay)? Well if you're old enough, you may have heard about it. It is the kind of game that we would play at a camp fire with a large group - separate the players into two groups and each group would send a player to receive the message. The player would be told a long story with many details and then the players returns to their respective groups: the players form a line and the first person in the line whispers a message to the ear of the next person in the line, and so on, until the last player is reached. The last player would then present their story and the team whose story most closely matches the original wins - although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Well, imagine if we played the game and told a story about backmasking - think of how the story gets corrupted each time we passed it on and that was exactly how information was corrupted in the 1980s, ending up with my sisters genuinely believing that listening 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart' would lure you to the dark side. Personally, I do prefer the cheesier 1995 Nicki French dance version of the song.

I belong to the generation now when we simply look something up Google the moment it comes up in a conversation. When I was in an Uber with my colleagues last year, we nearly got involved in an accident. There was a collision in front of us and our driver slammed on the brakes really hard. It gave us all a fright of course but we were extremely lucky not to have been hurt. Our CFO then started talking about how safe the roads are in the UK compared to other countries he has visited: within moments, he had the statistics of traffic accidents and road safety on his phone. He then asked all of us to guess which country was the most deadly when it came to road safety accidents and none of us actually got the answer right - Iran. I had guessed Sri Lanka because I had been there and personally experienced the chaos on the very crowded streets of Colombo and the horrors of the poorly maintained roads in the countryside. Iran didn't even cross my mind as well, I had never been there and I wouldn't necessarily associate Iran with road accidents. This is a perfect example of how we would default to our own experiences and knowledge if we are unable to verify something like that via a Google search. You don't need to be an expert in a field to have the right information when all you need is your phone to do a Google search. That means there is absolutely no excuse to be ignorant anymore in this day and age.

I am off to Singapore in a few days - in fact I arrive on the morning of the 5th of September and I will be visiting my parents. I am quite nervous about it because my parents belong to a generation whereby they don't know how to use computers, the concept of doing a Google search is alien to them and you'll be amazed how many times they have played 'broken telephone' with information that has been passed onto them. My father always retells this story to justify that white people are racist: back in the mid-1980s, my neighbour Mrs Fong went on holiday in Europe and she was treated rudely by some white people. That much I can remember: but the details are very fuzzy, which country was she in? What actually happened and who said what to whom? Was this in a restaurant or in a hotel? Was this actually racism or something else (like a misunderstanding because of  a language barrier)? The reason why I am not certain of the facts is because my father changes the details each time he retells the story to justify that white people are racist - I just roll my eyes each time in disbelief it comes out differently, "here we go again, telefon rosak." I believe that something did happen to my neighbour back in then, sure, but without actually knowing what really happened, how can we make any assumptions on that basis? I don't even want to approach my neighbour to dig up that old story for it happened over 30 years ago - I am not sure even she would remember the details, yet this story has formed a huge part of my father's inherent racism towards white people. Ironically, my father has more European blood than me and we are Eurasian.

Another story that comes out somewhat different each time was the time my father alleges that he experienced racism in Japan - we were visiting the 1985 Tsukuba World Expo in Japan when he tried to buy some candy for us. He said the woman behind the counter jabbered at him in Japanese and refused to serve him because he wasn't Japanese. I know, because I was there - I was just 9 years old then but because I was standing close enough to him at the time, I remember the incident. Now my calculated guess was that this was a misunderstanding based on a language barrier: the standard of English in Japan was terrible in the 1980s and perhaps a well-educated banker or lawyer would speak some English, but not an old lady selling candy. No way. We had only arrived in Japan the night before so I suspected that my father only had big notes from the money changer and that old lady was telling him that she didn't have change for such a big note, given that she was working at a small hawker stall selling cheap candy. In any case, it was not like we were in a small village in Japan, no this was a World Expo that had attracted visitors from all over the world - we were surrounded by plenty of non-Japanese people, all of whom were also buying food from the same place with little trouble and I even recall the soba noodles I had later, which once again, we purchased with little trouble. I even remember the detail on the Japanese Narutomaki fish cake, the pink swirling pattern on the slice of fish cake is somehow etched in my memory. You see, I actually can remember a lot - but each time my father tries to retell that story, it is telefon rosak all over again. It is one thing to corrupt a story that our neighbour told us 30 years ago, it is another thing to play telefon rosak with yourself and change the details of your own story each time you retell your story - but that's my dad for you.

Yes I do have a good memory - not quite Mike Ross from Suits but my memory has served me extremely well over the years, that's probably why I can learn a new language very quickly because my brain can just memorize vast amounts of vocabulary very quickly. But here's the thing, with modern technology, we're no longer reliant on our feeble, human memories anymore - I am incredibly reliant on my phone for work: if I have anything important to do, then I will simply stick a reminder in my diary. And in using my blog as a diary, I can always revisit interesting stories that I have written years ago, so I can read what I wrote when the event was fresh in my mind, rather than try to play telefon rosak several years later. What makes me frustrated about dealing with my parents is that they have not moved on from the telefon rosak mentality and because they are quite autistic, they are unaware of how frustrating that can be when dealing with them. Let me give you a simple example: my parents visited me last winter and they were under the impression that it would snow instantly the moment the temperature fell below zero - now that clearly isn't the case. It can be very cold but snow isn't guaranteed. I tried to explain it to them but they just wouldn't listen. My mother looked very confused and I felt like I was explaining calculus to a cat. It felt impossible to get them to acknowledge the fact that they didn't have to live within the limits of their knowledge of the world - that they can easily access a wealth of knowledge on the net, or at least the wealth of knowledge that I can bring to them. Regardless, it makes any kind of conversation with them so frustrating.

So there you go, perhaps those of you young enough to have grown up with the internet, say if you were born after 1990, you wouldn't be aware of just how ignorant people were back then and how everyone played telefon rosak, inevitably misleading each other. What do you think? Do you remember what people were like back then? Did you hear about backmasking? Are you the kind of person who would reach for your phone and Google something the moment it comes up in a conversation? How would this technology, this ability to Google anything instantly change our society - would this help eradicate ignorance? Or in the era of fake news, is it impossible to discern what is true anymore - we all know that just because something is on the internet doesn't mean it is true. Leave your comments below, many thanks for reading.