Deviate With Rolf Potts

“There are the actual facts of what was happening in popular culture in the 1980s — and then there was this tantalizing notion that music played backwards was going to seed our minds with evil. Which was scary, but also kind of cool to a certain kid-like way of thinking.” — Rolf Potts In this rebroadcast episode of Deviate Rolf delves into the idea of “backward masking” in rock music, and how it came to influence notions of “Satanic Panic” in America over the course of the 1980s. Returning to the show for this musical deep-dive are Jedd Beaudoin (@JeddBeaudoin), who hosts the syndicated music show “Strange Currency,” and Michael Carmody (@Carmody68), a musician, record collector, and entrepreneur. Together they discuss preacher Jacob Aranza’s underground-classic 1983 anti-rock book Backward Masking Unmasked and its idiosyncratic take on popular music (4:00); the history of rock and roll and American culture that led up to Satanic Panic in the 1980s (31:10); how rock acts exploited the idea of Satanism to sell