The Message That Wasn’t There: The Battles Behind Styx’s ‘Snowblind’

In the winter of 1982, members of the California State Assembly gathered around a turntable to listen to rock records being played backwards. A year later, the Arkansas State Senate voted 86 to 0 to force warning labels onto albums suspected of hiding secret messages in reverse. Caught in the middle of that strange American moment was a Chicago band famous for piano ballads and a song they had written as a warning. The song was called “Snowblind,” it was about the helplessness of cocaine addiction, and it became the most famous “Satanic” record in the country — not because of anything Styx put on it, but because of something their accusers insisted could be heard when the record was spun the wrong way.

This is the story of how an anti-drug song got drafted into a culture war: how a phantom sentence — “Satan moves through our voices” — was projected onto a few seconds of reversed singing, how that projection traveled from church-basement seminars to network television to actual legislation, and how Styx answered with anger, mockery, and eventually an entire concept album built to throw the accusation back in its accusers’ faces. It is also the story of a band at its commercial peak discovering that success made it a target, and of the first cracks in the lineup that the fight helped to open.

A Devil in White

“Snowblind” appeared in January 1981 on Paradise Theatre, the album that carried Styx to number one in America. It was never the album’s flagship. The flagship songs were Dennis DeYoung’s “The Best of Times” and Tommy Shaw’s “Too Much Time on My Hands,” both Top 10 singles. “Snowblind” was the dark room off the main hall: a grinding, slow-burning rocker about a man being eaten alive by cocaine.

The subject was not hidden. From the song’s first verses, the narrator is staring at a version of himself he no longer recognizes, courting what the lyric calls a devil in white — the white powder that promises energy and delivers a stranger in the mirror. Writing in Newsday in April 1981, critic Wayne Robins described the song plainly as a portrait of cocaine addiction, and nobody in the band ever pretended otherwise. The title itself is the diagnosis: snow, the street name for the drug, and blindness, the addict’s inability to see what everyone around him can see.

Musically, the song is built as a cycle. The verses move slowly, heavy and brooding, while the choruses accelerate into something harder and more frantic. It is the rhythm of the drug itself — the drag of the comedown and the rush of the next high — laid out in tempo. Critics at the time treated the track as one of the album’s serious statements, and album-rock radio agreed: released as the B-side of “Rockin’ the Paradise,” “Snowblind” nevertheless reached number 22 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, a respectable showing for a song with no pop sheen at all.

None of that should have made it controversial. Anti-drug songs were a rock staple. What made “Snowblind” explosive was not what it said going forward. It was what a growing army of anti-rock campaigners claimed it said going backward.

Its position on the album deepened the effect. Paradise Theatre is sequenced as the life of a grand old movie palace, and “Snowblind” sits in the record’s darker second half, among the songs of decline, when the marquee lights are failing and the neighborhood has turned. Inside the concept, the addict’s story is one more portrait of American rot — which is precisely what DeYoung intended. Taken out of that context by people who played the record in reverse in church halls, it became something else entirely: a confession extracted from a band that did not know it was confessing.

The song also had a stage life that outlasted the controversy’s first wave. Styx kept it in their concert sets as a showcase for the Young–Shaw vocal contrast, and the version preserved on the live album Caught in the Act — recorded at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans in April 1983, in the middle of the fight — captures the band performing the song with undiminished venom at the very moment legislatures were debating what it secretly meant.

Two Voices, One Addict

The song was written by the band’s two most combustible talents, keyboardist Dennis DeYoung and guitarist James “J.Y.” Young, with uncredited lyrical contributions from guitarist Tommy Shaw. On the record, the writing split became a vocal split. Young sings the verses in a low, grinding register, the voice of the addict at the bottom of the cycle, barely able to lift his head. Shaw takes the choruses, faster and sharper, the voice of the same man lit up and racing.

That division of labor mattered to the band’s chemistry. Styx in 1981 was a three-front-man band, and Paradise Theatre was its most deliberate attempt to hold the three sensibilities — DeYoung’s theatrical pop, Young’s hard rock, Shaw’s rootsier melodic rock — inside a single frame. “Snowblind” is the track where the frame groans most audibly, and that is part of its power. The addict in the song is not one voice but two, arguing with himself at different speeds.

Shaw, looking back thirty years later, was blunt about where the song’s authority came from. In a 2011 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, he recalled researching the lyrics from the inside: cocaine, he said, was simply part of the furniture of the music business at the time — “If you were going to a party back in those days, cocaine was just one of the things on the menu.” He added, with the clarity of a survivor, that cocaine “just makes you stupid,” and that the insanity of the era was how users sorted drugs into acceptable and unacceptable piles while sliding downhill on the acceptable ones.

That candor is worth remembering, because the battle to come would paint the band as secretive corrupters hiding coded messages. In reality, “Snowblind” was one of the most direct things Styx ever recorded — a band staring at the drug that saturated their industry and describing, in plain forward English, what it did to a man.

There is a final biographical irony folded into the story. Styx had formed in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood, where twin brothers Chuck and John Panozzo recruited their teenage neighbor Dennis DeYoung; when the band needed a new name in the early 1970s, they settled on Styx, the river of Greek myth that separated the living world from the underworld. It was a classics student’s name, picked from mythology, carrying no more occult intent than a high-school textbook. But in the seminars of the anti-rock crusade, the name would be read aloud like a fingerprint at a crime scene — proof, to the already convinced, that the band had announced its allegiance all along.

The Theatre at Number One

To understand why Styx drew fire, it helps to understand how big they were when Paradise Theatre arrived. The album was a loose concept piece built around a fictional Chicago movie palace, from its glittering opening night to its decayed closing — DeYoung’s metaphor for an America he believed was sliding from promise into decline. The original vinyl even carried laser-etched artwork, a piece of early-eighties showmanship that turned the record itself into a souvenir.

Commercially, the album was a coronation. It became the first Styx album to top the Billboard 200, spending three weeks at number one, and it completed a remarkable run: Styx became the first act in chart history to score four consecutive triple-platinum albums. “The Best of Times” reached number three on the Hot 100, “Too Much Time on My Hands” number nine, and the band toured as one of the biggest live draws in the country.

The idea gives the album its structure: the theatre opens in a blaze of optimism — the overture is literally titled “A.D. 1928,” the year of the palace’s fictional birth — enjoys its golden age in songs like “The Best of Times,” and then rots, through loneliness, addiction, and small-time despair, toward closure. “Snowblind” belongs to the rot. Its narrator is one of the palace’s lost patrons, a man the bright lobby lights can no longer reach. DeYoung, the band’s unabashed theatrical thinker, had built the whole record as an argument that something in American life was hollowing out — and the addict’s monologue was among his darkest exhibits.

That scale is the first key to the “Snowblind” affair. The anti-rock crusade of the early 1980s did not waste its energy on cult acts; it aimed at the records actually sitting in teenagers’ bedrooms. Styx — suburban, melodic, omnipresent — were exactly the kind of band whose albums were in millions of homes, owned by exactly the kids the crusaders claimed to be protecting. The irony that the crusade’s Exhibit A was a band best known for the tender ballad “Babe” was not lost on DeYoung, who would later splutter, “Can you imagine attacking the guys who made ‘Babe’? I mean, please.”

The second key is timing. Paradise Theatre landed at the precise moment when a loose network of fundamentalist lecturers was professionalizing an old fear — that rock records contained hidden messages, audible only in reverse, planted to corrupt listeners at a subliminal level. Styx had the misfortune to release a dark song about cocaine just as that network went national.

Corporate Devils

There is a third key to the affair, and it is the strangest: Styx were attacked from opposite directions for opposite sins, at the same time, by people who despised each other.

From one side came the rock press. By 1981, Styx had become the standing example in a critical argument about “corporate rock” — the charge that bands like Styx, Journey, and Foreigner manufactured emotionless product for arenas, all polish and no soul. Rolling Stone and its peers treated the band’s success as evidence against them; the more records Styx sold, the more certainly they were presumed to be frauds. Suburban kids adored them, which in the critical economy of the day was practically a conviction.

From the other side came the pulpit. To the Truth About Rock circuit, this same band — too slick for the critics, too popular to be respectable — was a vanguard of Hell, smuggling Satan into the suburbs one reversed chorus at a time. The critics said Styx stood for nothing. The preachers said Styx stood for the devil. Both camps found the band’s very popularity sinister; they simply disagreed about the direction of the conspiracy.

The band could feel the pincer closing. DeYoung’s “attacking the guys who made ‘Babe’” line lands so well because it compresses the whole absurdity into one sentence: the balladeers of “Babe” and “The Best of Times” were simultaneously dismissed as harmless product and prosecuted as a spiritual menace. A band cannot be both a focus-grouped sedative and a Satanic weapon, but Styx in 1982 were required to be both at once, depending on which enemy was holding the microphone.

That double exposure shaped the vehemence of the response. Styx had spent a decade being told, by people who considered themselves arbiters of taste, that their music did not count. Now they were being told, by people who considered themselves arbiters of morality, that their music counted for far too much — that it could damn a teenager through a speaker cone, backwards, at a level below conscious hearing. Of the two insults, the second was at least a backhanded acknowledgment of power. Kilroy Was Here, when it came, would answer both camps at once: a big, theatrical, defiantly uncool concept album about censorship, made by a band that had decided being respectable was a loser’s game anyway.

Playing God Backwards

The terror of the reversed record was older than Styx. In 1969, the “Paul is dead” phenomenon sent Beatles fans spinning records backwards in search of clues, and the idea that a vinyl groove could carry a second, secret text entered pop folklore. Through the 1970s, the notion mostly lived as a parlor game. What changed around 1980 was organization.

A circuit of traveling lecturers began working America’s churches and Christian schools with a new and darker thesis: the reversed sounds fans hunted for fun were not accidents but weapons — deliberate “backward masking,” planted by Satanic forces in the record industry to bypass the conscious mind. Jacob Aranza’s 1982 book Backward Masking Unmasked gave the theory a title. Pastor Gary Greenwald of Eagle’s Nest Ministries in Santa Ana, California, toured with seminars on the subject. Dan and Steve Peters, two brothers from Minnesota whose Truth About Rock ministries had been presenting anti-rock seminars since 1979, built an entire catalogue around it, including the 1983 volume Backwards Masking: How Subliminals Affect You.

Their method was theatrical and effective in a hall. A lecturer would play a famous record forward, then reverse it, then tell the audience what to listen for — and once the words were suggested, audiences reliably “heard” them. It was a textbook demonstration of suggestion and phonetic expectation, but in a darkened auditorium, with a preacher narrating, it felt like a revelation. Record burnings followed the seminars in town after town, and the fever occasionally consumed the crusade’s accidental allies: five radio disc jockeys were fired during the furor after encouraging listeners to go hunting for backward messages in their own collections.

What the crusade consistently blurred was a genuine distinction. Deliberate backward masking does exist as a studio trick — the Beatles had experimented with reversed sounds in the 1960s, and Electric Light Orchestra’s “Fire on High” opens with a truly reversed voice intoning, when spun backward, “The music is reversible, but time is not.” Such messages are recorded backward, syllable by syllable, precisely so they will resolve into words in reverse. The Satanic “messages” in songs like “Snowblind” were nothing of the kind. Nobody had recorded them. They were the accidental phonetics of ordinary singing played in reverse — raw material for the imagination, no more a communication than the shapes in a fire. The crusade’s entire case rested on refusing to recognize the difference.

The claims followed a pattern. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was said to contain a reversed hymn to Satan. Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” supposedly urged listeners, in reverse, to smoke marijuana. And Styx — whose very name, borrowed from the river of the Greek underworld, made them irresistible to the crusade — were accused over “Snowblind.” In January 1982, William H. Yarroll appeared on the PTL television network claiming that a majority of rock artists practiced Satanism and hid subliminal messages in their music. By April 1982, the crusade had reached the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, which aired a segment exploring the backmasking supposedly found in records by Led Zeppelin, ELO, and Styx. The accusation had escaped the church hall.

Satan, Move Through Our Voices

The specific charge against “Snowblind” was this: a single line of the song — “I try so hard to make it so” — when played backward, was alleged to say “Satan moves through our voices.” The phrase had a lurid poetry to it, which helped it travel. It also had a pedigree problem: it existed only after it was suggested.

Researcher William Poundstone, who systematically tested the era’s backmasking claims in 1983, took the “Snowblind” allegation seriously enough to investigate — and reported a flat negative. Despite repeated listenings, he wrote, it was not even possible to identify which part of the reversed track the accusers were talking about. The reversed phonemes were, at most, a vague sludge onto which a determined listener could project the suggested sentence, the way a shape can be projected onto a cloud. Played without the suggestion, there was no message. Played with it, the mind obligingly supplied one.

That is the engine of the entire affair: not a recording technique but a listening trick. “Snowblind” became the crusade’s favorite demonstration precisely because its alleged sentence was so on-the-nose — a band named for a hellish river, supposedly confessing in reverse that Satan sang through them. The tidier the story, the faster it spread. Congressman Robert K. Dornan of California distributed a mimeographed list of suspect records in Washington, and “Snowblind” was on it, its supposed confession itemized like a charge sheet: Satan, move through our voices.

The accusation also arrived with an industrial apparatus behind it. The Peters brothers’ Truth About Rock operation issued books, tapes, and a monthly report; lecturer Jeff Godwin, who wrote that he had been converted to the cause after watching the CBS segment and attending a church rock seminar, expanded the canon in his 1985 book The Devil’s Disciples. The Skeptical Inquirer, examining the movement a few years later, noted how the same small set of examples — the same handful of reversed fragments, “Snowblind” always among them — circulated from seminar to book to sermon, gathering the appearance of evidence through sheer repetition. Nobody in the chain ever added a new fact about the song. They only added audiences.

Notice, too, that the sentence would not sit still. In Congressman Dornan’s mimeographed list, the reversed line supposedly said “Satan move through our voices.” In the New York Times, it had become “Satan moves through our voices.” Other retellings rendered it “Satan, move in our voices.” A genuine recorded message has fixed wording; it can be transcribed. This one dissolved and re-formed from one account to the next, changing its grammar the way a rumor changes its details — because that is what it was. The instability of the quotation is itself a piece of evidence, and it points the opposite way from the accusation: you cannot misquote a recording. You can only misquote something that was never said.

For the band, the absurdity had a specific sting. They had written a song against the thing destroying people around them, sung it in two voices to dramatize the addiction cycle, and watched it converted — by people who, as far as anyone could tell, had not much listened to it forward — into evidence that they served the devil.

Washington Takes the Stand

In 1982, the crusade acquired letterhead. Congressman Dornan introduced House Resolution 6363, a federal bill to require warning labels on records containing backward masking. The proposed label text was extraordinary, a piece of legislation written in the language of an exorcism pamphlet, warning that a record “contains backward masking that makes a verbal statement which is audible when this record is played backward and which may be perceptible at a subliminal level when this record is played forward.”

The federal bill went nowhere, but the states took up the cause. In California, Assemblyman Phil Wyman became the crusade’s champion. Wyman appeared on the CBS Evening News in April 1982 warning that young people who had heard “Stairway to Heaven” hundreds of times were having pro-Satanic incantations implanted in their subconscious. His bill moved through the Consumer Protection and Toxic Materials Committee, where a hearing was staged at which “Stairway to Heaven” was solemnly played backwards for the legislators. Wyman framed the labeling scheme as ordinary consumer protection, likening it to the warning on a cigarette packet.

The following year, California passed a law making the distribution of records with undeclared backmasking an invasion of privacy for which a distributor could be sued — a statute whose language warned of messages that “can manipulate our behavior without our knowledge or consent and turn us into disciples of the Antichrist.” The phrase “disciples of the Antichrist,” it is worth pausing on, appeared in a law of the State of California. Rock musicians who had grown up on First Amendment assumptions discovered that the machinery of government could be set in motion by a mimeographed list and a reversed tape.

Styx were never hauled before a committee themselves. They did not need to be. Their song was named in the lists, their name was in the news segments, and the fight was about to be carried into a statehouse where the vote would not even be close.

Arkansas Votes 86 to 0

In February 1983, the Arkansas State Senate passed its own backward-masking bill by a vote of 86 to 0. There was no dissent to record. The Arkansas measure required that all records containing backward masking be labeled as such by the manufacturer, and the debate around it named the usual suspects by name: albums by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Electric Light Orchestra, Queen — and Styx. The warning sticker the Arkansas law contemplated read: “Warning: This record contains backward masking which may be perceptible at a subliminal level when the record is played forward.”

Consider what had happened, in plain terms. A state legislature had voted unanimously to regulate a phenomenon that no one had demonstrated to exist, on the evidence of demonstrations that depended on telling the listener the answer in advance. The New York Times covered the spread of the bills in March 1983, with Stephen Holden noting the “Snowblind” accusation directly — the charge had now been laundered from church mimeographs into the paper of record, reported not as true but as consequential, which in some ways it was.

The laws, in the end, changed little on the ground. The Arkansas labeling requirement was aimed at a practice the industry denied engaging in, and enforcement against phantom messages proved as elusive as the messages themselves. But the votes mattered anyway. They announced that rock music — the dominant youth culture of the country — could be legislated against on the basis of vibes, and they arrived just as a new and better-organized pressure group was forming in Washington. The fight over “Snowblind” was the rehearsal. The main performance opened in 1985.

Before that, though, the accused had begun answering in the only language fully available to them: their own records.

The Band Fights Back

Styx’s public response, whenever a microphone appeared, was fury wrapped in ridicule. James Young, the song’s co-writer and the voice of its verses, told the Daily Herald in 1982 that the charges were “rubbish,” adding: “If we want to make a statement, we’ll do it in a way that people can understand us and not in a way where you have to go out and buy a $400 tape player to understand us.” It remains the crispest rebuttal anyone offered during the whole panic — a working musician pointing out that covert reverse messages were a bizarre way for a hit-making band to communicate.

DeYoung, never as terse, gave the era its most quoted dismissal on the syndicated radio show In the Studio with host Redbeard. “Anyone who plays their records backwards is the Antichrist,” he said. “We have enough trouble making these records sound right forward. People have nothing better to do. It’s the name Styx. Can you imagine attacking the guys who made ‘Babe’? I mean, please.” Behind the jokes sat a genuine grievance: the band’s name, chosen from Greek mythology, kept being entered as evidence, as if a classics reference were a confession.

Neither man conceded an inch, because there was no inch to concede. The band had not hidden anything; the song’s meaning ran forward, in the open, against the drug. But the experience left a residue. Styx had spent years being mocked by critics as corporate and toothless. Now the same band was being legislated against as a Satanic threat. The whiplash was disorienting — and it handed DeYoung, the band’s resident conceptualist, the plot of their next album.

Kilroy Answers

Kilroy Was Here, released in February 1983, was DeYoung’s counterattack dressed as a rock opera. Its villain is Dr. Everett Righteous, founder of an organization called the Majority for Musical Morality — a transparent stand-in for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the crusade that had targeted “Snowblind.” In Kilroy’s near-future America, rock music is banned, records are burned at rallies, and the state polices art with a censor’s fist. The hero, a framed rock star played by DeYoung, escapes to fight the regime.

And then there is the joke at the album’s heart. On James Young’s track “Heavy Metal Poisoning,” Styx placed a genuine backward message — recorded properly this time, deliberate and undeniable. Played in reverse, it resolves into Latin: Annuit coeptis, novus ordo seclorum — “He has favored our undertakings; a new order of the ages” — the mottos printed on the Great Seal of the United States, the words on the back of the dollar bill. The “secret Satanic message,” when Styx finally made one, turned out to be the most patriotic sentence in the national iconography. The album’s packaging played along, carrying a mock-official warning that by order of the Majority for Musical Morality, the album contained secret backward messages.

It was a brilliant riposte and, commercially, it worked: Kilroy Was Here went platinum and “Mr. Roboto” became a number three hit — with “Snowblind,” in a final irony, riding along as the B-side of the “Mr. Roboto” single. But the album split the band it was defending. Its elaborate theatrical stage show — a short film to open the concert, band members performing in character and costume — pushed Styx further down the road of spectacle that Shaw and Young already resented. What had begun as a songwriter’s argument about America had become, on stage, a pageant its own guitarists had to act in. Shaw quit after the Kilroy tour, releasing his solo album Girls with Guns in 1984, and the classic lineup was finished. The crusade against “Snowblind” had not broken Styx. But the album Styx made to answer it helped do exactly that.

The PMRC Years

The wider war, meanwhile, escalated on schedule. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center — co-founded by Tipper Gore, wife of Senator Al Gore — published its campaign against “porn rock,” and the organization condemned “Snowblind” by name as “Satanic,” four years after its release. The PMRC’s Senate hearings that September became a national spectacle, with Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, and John Denver testifying against the labeling campaign, and the outcome — the recording industry’s agreement to voluntary “Parental Advisory” stickers — reshaped record retailing for a generation. The machinery that the backmasking crusade had prototyped in Little Rock and Sacramento, naming “Snowblind” as it went, had found its permanent form.

It is worth noting what the PMRC’s interest in the song proves about the accusation’s durability. By 1985, “Snowblind” was an old album track, tied to no current single, no video, no campaign. It had no commercial presence left to attack. What it had was a reputation — a sentence that four years of sermons, lists, news segments, and floor votes had attached to it so firmly that a Washington pressure group could cite it as settled fact. The phantom message had achieved the one thing phantom messages are for: it could now be quoted without the record ever being played at all, in either direction.

The logic of the “Snowblind” charge also reached its grim courtroom conclusion at the decade’s end, when Judas Priest were sued in Nevada in 1990 over the claim that subliminal commands in their music had driven two young men to a suicide pact. The judge ruled that any subliminal content was not a protected form of speech — but found that the plaintiffs had not proven the band planted a command or that it caused the deaths. The case collapsed, as every backward-message case ultimately did, on the same rock: nobody could demonstrate the messages existed, let alone that they worked.

The labeling regime, meanwhile, acquired a quieter and more durable power than any statute: retail. Major chains could and did refuse to stock stickered records, which meant the “voluntary” label functioned as a soft ban in the stores where much of America actually bought music. The road from a reversed Styx chorus to that outcome ran through every stage of the machinery — seminar, broadcast, bill, hearing — and it is why the “Snowblind” episode matters beyond its comedy. It demonstrated, early and completely, how a claim with no evidence could be converted, step by respectable step, into rules that governed what the public was allowed to buy.

Psychology had delivered its verdict even earlier. In a widely cited 1985 study, psychologists John Vokey and J. Don Read tested listeners on reversed speech and found that people could not extract meaning from backward messages — they heard, essentially, what they had been primed to hear, and nothing more. Listeners played reversed passages without preparation could not say what language they were hearing, let alone transcribe Satanic slogans; listeners told in advance what a passage “said” duly reported hearing exactly that. The conclusion was devastating in its simplicity: backward speech carries no decipherable meaning to the human ear, conscious or otherwise. The “Snowblind” sentence was exactly that: a Rorschach blot pressed into vinyl, legible only to those told in advance what it said.

Why It Endures

“Snowblind” endures for two reasons that have nothing to do with each other, and everything to do with each other. The first is the song itself: a stark, two-voiced portrait of cocaine addiction from the moment the drug ruled the industry it was ruining, sung by men who knew the territory. Played forward — the only direction Styx ever intended — it remains one of the hardest and most honest tracks on a number-one album, still aired in the band’s live sets and still carried by that grinding verse and desperate chorus.

The second reason is the battle. “Snowblind” became the purest case study of the 1980s Satanic Panic as it applied to music: a song condemned for a message that did not exist, by campaigners who had to tell you the message before you could hear it, in hearings and statehouses that voted 86 to 0 against a mirage. It helped provoke a protest album, fed the machinery that produced parental-advisory stickers, and left behind the definitive rebuttal — a band planting its one real backward message in Latin, borrowed from the dollar bill.

It also shares its name, by pure coincidence, with a very different song. In 1972, Black Sabbath had released their own “Snowblind” — a woozy celebration of cocaine that so defined its album that the record was nearly titled after it. Rock thus owns two famous songs called “Snowblind,” both about the same drug, standing at opposite moral poles: Sabbath’s addict grins through the blizzard, while Styx’s addict begs to escape it. That the lament, not the celebration, was the one dragged before legislators as a Satanic text tells you everything about the era’s priorities. The crusade was never really about what a song said. It was about who got to say what songs meant.

And in the strangest twist of all, the accusation preserved the song. Dozens of worthy album tracks from 1981 have faded into the back catalogues, but “Snowblind” remains a reference point — in documentaries about the panic, in histories of censorship, in every account of the PMRC era — because strangers once tried to ban it for a crime of phonetics. The men who claimed Satan moved through Styx’s voices were wrong about the record. But they guaranteed that people would still be talking about it, and playing it forward, more than forty years later.

Listen to it today and the strangest thing is how ordinary the supposed crime sounds. There is no Satan in the grooves, forward or back. There is just a man who cannot stop, a band at its peak, and an America briefly convinced that the devil needed a turntable that ran in reverse to get his message across. The message that was actually there — the warning, in plain English, about the white devil and the blindness it brings — has outlasted all the people who refused to hear it.