Top Ten Songs

Top Song - The Grand Finale by Set It Off
Top Ten:

2) Let it Be- The Beatles
3) Bohemian Rhapsody-Queen

4) One Headlight- The Wallflowers 

5) You Are the Sunshine of My Life-Stevie Wonder

6) Come On Eileen-Dexy's Midnight Runners

7) Redemption Song-Bob Marley

8) I Wanna Be Sedated-Ramones

9) Tiny Dancer-Elton John

10) Roxanne-(Moulin Rouge soundtrack version)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUOEXKcFJBA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Above is the singer, Cody Carson's description of the song and how he wrote it.

Lyrics:

He plants his feet remaining still
A front row seat to incomparable thrill
Reflecting on anything he had ever craved
The sunrise never seemed so sweet,
Entranced by the final ocean breeze,
As the world beneath him starts to shake

Run, run
Run to the hills
Leave behind your dollar bills
The value of paper means nothing now
When everything around you is crumbling down

While finding shelter for the end
They begin reflecting on everything
I mean everything
All the life they spent till then

She turns the page in frantic despair
While hoping that auspicious answers are there
She calls off the search
Accepts her fate
Sits by the window no will to escape

Stay, stay
Right where you are
While death waits outside your door
The sirens are screaming
They're letting you know
To sit back relax and enjoy the show

While finding shelter for the end
They begin reflecting on everything
I mean everything
All the life they spent till then
As rock and ash fall from the sky
So surreal
They hold on to anything
I mean anything
Hoping that life won't pass them by

Non-existing answers
We are now condemned my friends
This is the end

Stay, stay
Right where you are
While death waits outside your door

While finding shelter for the end
They begin reflecting on everything
I mean everything
All the life they spent till then
As rock and ash fall from the sky
So surreal
They hold on to anything
I mean anything
Hoping that life won't pass them by

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Fiction Story

                         

                Okay kid, here’s the story. It’s a story of a guy and a gal, common, trite little happy love story; I’ll bet you’re thinkin, right? Wrong. So, so wrong. Let me tell you what happened. All of this craziness went down about a year ago, and things were good at the start. None of us had any problems with each other. Me? Well my life was just grand. We had no problems, things were good, carefree.    
              That one day though, that’s when it all went south.    

              We see a man-he’s neither old nor young-and by the looks of it, he has money. He ducks into a large black car. It’s a Cadillac with a wide bumper and classic design. We hear the soft thump of the car door closing, and it peels away quickly disappearing around the corner.      
             It’s late morning now, a little after eleven AM. There is a brisk feeling to the air, it is just cold enough to make you wish you had a coat, but sunny enough that you are fine without. You can feel the anticipation. Something big is about to start here, it’s just this hunch you have. We are situated in front of a large and old stone building. The same black Cadillac as before slows to a stop, the gravel of the enormous driveway crunching under the wheels. The door opens and a man, presumably the same man as before, (we cannot yet see his face) steps out and leisurely takes his time up the walk; glancing up at the foliage around him, stopping to adjust his coat. 
             He is dressed in a somewhat peculiar manner, however, it is very befitting of the way he is carrying himself; poised, dignified. A bowler hat sits atop his dark hair, and he has a crisp pair of pinstripe slacks on. He holds a cane, yet walks with no apparent limp. It adds a certain finesse to his image though, and is obviously intended to give that effect.
He walks into the building, and now we are back where we started.
It was in the beginning of November if I’m remembering right. This guy I mentioned… the one who the story is about? Yeah, well this day was the day that his business had been runnin for 3 years. It was going pretty well, or at least we thought, but I guess he was up to his eyeballs in financial problems. The guy, let’s call him Knife, had this knack for conniving money out of people. He was sneaky; he made ya think that everything was a million times better than it was.

          Knife had worked for me ever since he was a little kid, and his parents didn't have much money. Even if they did I've got this feelin that he would've been pretty much on his own anyways, cause he always seemed to be independant. He was always a good kid from the start, I never figured out why he got to being so conniving. 

So anyways, I was real proud of him when he opened up that business. In a world where things always seem to go wrong he managed to have them go right. It was a good feeling; gave everyone a little more hope. Well, at least before we realized what a bandit Knife was. 

            We are inside the large building now, and the man walks up the staircase and down to an ornate doorway at the end of the hallway. Hesitantly, he knocks on the door. 

         "Come in!" speaks a slightly muffled voice. The fact that the speaker is female-and expecting him- is apparent by her tone and the man's reaction. The room is handsome and thoughtfully furnished. A woman is seated on a black couch, and springs up at the sight of him. (Perhaps this is not whom she was expecting to meet) 
          "Oh," she whispered "OH!" Louder this time. "But wait, you didn't go through with it?"

Backmasking vs Reverse Speech

             The use of backmasking and reverse speech in music has been openly criticized and controversial since its start. Through listening to a song played in reverse rather than forward, as all songs are intended, people have found secret “messages” and references, be them intentional or not. Occasionally, one will hear a song where forwards it only sounds like gibberish yet in reverse the phrases make complete sense. This is intentional backmasking. When the words make sense going forwards, but are then reversed and still seem to make out coherent phrases, this is reverse speech, and it is hard to tell whether this is always intentional or merely an odd coincidence. Oftentimes, these messages are referencing satanic praise and have vulgar meaning, so this adds to the controversy of the whole situation. As this reversal of music became more popular, more and more of these backmasked and intended messages were heard, usually, it seems, parodying the ideas of those who abhorred the “Devil’s music.”         

            Backmasking grew to be more and more prevalent in music when people began to find their own examples, and clearly many of the ones created after all of the dissention regarding this backwards music were flat-out mockery, or very specifically placed in order to be found. Electric Light Orchestra was accused of referencing Satan on their song Eldorado, so later they added messages to their songs as a way of creating a joke. In the reversal of the song “Fire On High” the words say “The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back!” and their album appropriately titled Secret Messages has one point where it says “You’re playing me backwards.” These examples clearly display the backmasking used in the songs. Another blatant demonstration of backmasking can be seen in Choking Victim’s song “Hate Yer State” where played forwards, the whole start of the song makes no sense, and in reverse one can hear firstly a great deal of swearing and then “So stay in school, say no to drugs, oh yeah! Hail Satan! Good night boys and girls, pleasant dreams." Considering all of the accusations placed on artists for corrupting the youth with satanic references, and the fact that this was recorded very intentionally to be heard in reverse, it is safe to say that this example is most likely a mockery of how people can make something out of nothing. Chiodos even put in their album lyrics that the beginning of their song The Lover and The Liar was meant to be played in reverse.     

            Reverse Speech in song is something that people have debated over greatly. Sometimes such as in Eminem’s song “My Name Is” when you play a part of it in reverse one can make out the words, “It’s Eminem” repeatedly, and this was probably figured out through trial to make the words work to be coherent whether they were played forwards or backwards. The same goes for the song “Another One Bites the Dust” where in reverse these words seem to sound a lot like “It’s fun to smoke marijuana.” Presumably this was intentional and listening to it forwards and hearing how specific the diction is makes that more apparent. However in the song Umbrella by Rhianna, people claim that she intentionally uses reverse speech to say “He is taking my faith, he is murdering,” and that it is secretly about being possessed by the devil. This, in honesty, is very hard to back-up as it is difficult to hear. Also, to do something like this without simply recording ones voice in reverse and putting it in the song, but in the forward LYRICS, it takes a deliberate delivery of those words, and she did not write the song. Therefore, how could these “messages” have been delivered properly? This is one situation where it seems as though somebody was reading into the reversed phrases too much.

            Where backmasking is something that is always intended, yet not always crystal clear, reverse speech faces much more judgment. Sometimes it appears that the hype about these hidden messages caused people to hear more than was really there, and to make connections to satanic things when these connections do not truly exist. If the majority of the people we encounter daily do not secretly praise the devil or openly worship him, what makes it justifiable that so many musicians would partake in a satanic faith? A few of the examples may truly be subliminally corrupt and definite references to the devil, but the number of songs and artists that people have discovered, they think, to have done this looks a bit too high. Every human is entitled to their own opinions though, and some simply hear things that others do not. Unless a song clearly says something if the artist owns up to the claims against them, reverse speech and backmasking will always be debatable.