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Playing records backwards to reveal hidden messages in the music is an idea from the first age of vinyl, when the record player was the principal medium of music's transmission. To reach into the machine and disrupt the revolution of the disc, to distort and reverse the sound, must have felt subversive - even miraculous - to the pre-digital listener. Reflect that this was a time when deference to "the album" still made sense; a time before the digital deconstruction of the idea that recorded music existed in an order - pressed in vinyl, set in stone - so reversing the spin of a  disc by hand must have had profane connotations even in the abstract. Then, when some tried to convince others that certain records contained actual communications from evil forces, the context was set already for the plausibility of this idea.  Of course, this ignores the existence of pareidolia and anyway, there is no reason to think that even if the music genuinely contains a backwards message, that the message will be absorbed when the music is played forwards. [1]  That's not the point though and still, hidden ("occult" in the non-silly-pseudo-satanic sense) messages in popular music remains a pervasive mythos, an idea worth exploring for its own sake. There is something unsettling about the sound of backwards language, whether spoken or sung - evocative of a rupture in the experience of time as a linear phenomenon - something that opens us to a less tangible, oneiric mode of awareness, in which apparently meaningless sounds can find their sense.

In their long and venerable tradition of getting things wrong, Fundamentalist Christians tend to understand backmasking as they understand the Bible - as a literal and linear phenomenon, something with a single message, a single author and a single purpose. But it's only in abandoning this way of thinking that we really come to understand what a sacred text is, and what it can do. A bible plays a role in an ancient culture that a "classic" artifact of pop music plays in ours; an embodiment of that sinister sceptre we call the zeitgeist; concentrated feedback loops and fragmentations of cultural consciousness riffing forever on each other for reasons any one participant in that culture can only begin to guess at. It is in being regarded as sacred that it attains its significance, its authority, and takes on its own life quite apart from whatever intention (if any) lay originally behind it.

Synchromysticism, the internet subculture that emerged in the mid-noughties, is a fascinating blurring of boundaries between rational and irrational thought, taking the best (and sometimes the worst) aspects of conspiracism, geek culture, Jungian psychology, wordplay, the superficially frivolous symbolism of pop culture and the occult and weaving them into a dense metanarrative for our hyper-accelerated, multimedia-saturated age.  As with backmasking, the reality - the truth - of what is going on is beside the point (or beyond our reach).   Appearances can be descriptive.

1997, the year of OK Computer's release, also saw the election of Tony Blair's "New Labour" Party to government in the UK, and the end the opposing Conservative Party's reign that had begun in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher's motley band of Friedmanite monetarists, what we know today as "neoliberals". The year marks the beginning of the end for those who ever hoped for a return to the post-war socialism of Atlee or his inheritors. Having famously abandoned its "Clause Four" just after Blair's election as their Leader, Labour rebranded itself "New Labour", becoming genuinely electable only through a lunge away from leftist ideology and into to the murky centre. For mainstream British politics, the last battle between capitalism and socialism that had existed in the West against the backdrop of the Cold War for almost as long as anyone could remember, had now been fought and won.

What happened?

Ironically enough, the new version of Clause Four actually described Labour as "socialist" party where its original version had not.  Practical to the core, it promised,

"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service."

It's doubly ironic in fact, because, notwithstanding its purple post-Victorian expression, this is still incomparably more tangible than its 1995 replacement:

"The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect."

"Common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange" is a defining principle of socialism: the idea being that the state regulates the labour market to ensure that it benefits those people, the "working class" who actually labour within it, allowing all classes of people to enjoy the benefits of organised civil society. Taken to extremes, this has taken the form of totalitarian communism, as occurred after the exuberance of the Russian and Chinese revolutions settled and solidified into the brutal dictatorships that rose up to perpetuate them. At the opposite extreme, we have the dominant political philosophy of our age - free market capitalism - under which the state is supposed to play as small a role as possible in the distribution of wealth, allowing markets to arrive at the best obtainable system of popular administration and control, to borrow the original Clause Four's phrasing. The battle lines are clear: for the left, it is government that sets us free; for the right, it is the market. British politics from 1945 to 1997, all things considered, was a pragmatic meandering across this spectrum.

"They don't speak for us..."

New Labour's replacement of Clause Four lays down no such solidly ideological lines, which is of course the whole point. After all, who doesn't believe that "by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone" in one context or another; and when the cosmetic frivolity of party-political bickering fades away, who doesn't want to "live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect"? There is much to be said about this whole phenomenon of - what to call it?! - the "de-etymologisation", perhaps? - suffice it for now that what the election of New Labour represents, metafizzically speaking, is the triumph of a kind of post-ideological, post-semantic worldview, under which obfuscation is clarity, ideas are just words - war is peace, and ignorance is strength.

It's into and out of this world that OK Computer emerged, almost exactly 30 years after the release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  It fell only six weeks after Blair's victory, a midsummer shower of marvelloustopia.  The lyrics are famously oblique - Thom Yorke described the album at the time as "polaroids in my head" [2] - transient, sickly but ethereal snapshots of a world where the ordinary human is "crushed like a bug in the ground", pestered by "unborn chicken voices" and just one of billions of "disappointed people clinging on to bottles" - but the most pervasive theme is that of sedation, an induced state of consciousness that's as welcome as the "pretty house" of No Surprises but probably never really desired - "a handshake of carbon monoxide" and certainly never voluntary.  The corollary of this chemical pessimism is the ecstasy of being, "born again...in the deep, deep sleep of the innocent...amazed that I survived" - or the desperation to be freed from the wreckage of "the air crash...'cos I'm your super hero".  In Exit Music (For a Film) Romeo-Yorke begs the listener to "wake from your sleep", for "today we escape". As the original Romeo put it before his own handshake with the quiet life, "I descend into this bed of death". [3]   "All the things we see when awake are death, even as the things we see in slumber are sleep", said Heraclitus.

To sleep: perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub - and it's the higher, gnostic associations of sleep with death, with timelessness (the "everlasting peace" of Exit Music's climax) and with the next world (war) that should draw our focus back to the idea of hidden meanings in mainstream events and artifacts.  If Blair's election in 1997 is the last nail in the coffin of ideology prefigured by the end of the Cold War (and, it was believed, the end of history) earlier that same decade, and if this timeless end of time took the form of some lapse into shared unconsciousness, then that would explain why OK Computer seems to echo so powerfully as if from some distant (but also imminent, and immanent) future into which we all, like idiots, may already have fallen.  As with the baskmasked salutations to the lords of the left hand path by pop culture's own deities, from what and into what we fell has yet to become clear.

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