Van Halen's Icelandic warning

[snopes]

Comment: It was recently mentioned in a Techdirt article
(http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...sts-week.shtml) that if you play the second side (presumably
from the cassette release) of Van Halen's album "1984," you can hear lead
singer David Lee Roth warn in Icelandic of a future in which the
government tracks people's thoughts. My bets are on this is bogus, but I'd
like it to be included here for the record.

[Not_Done_Living]

i just have to wonder how/why people think "entertainers" who are associated with drugs and alcohol, would be privvy to the inner circles and plans of a shadow government.

[Skeptic]

Originally Posted by Not_Done_Living

i just have to wonder how/why people think "entertainers" who are associated with drugs and alcohol, would be privvy to the inner circles and plans of a shadow government.

And considering that the only people who speak Icelandic are those from Iceland, you'd think they'd pick a more well known international language like Spanish, French, or English.

[lfrere]

Originally Posted by Not_Done_Living

i just have to wonder how/why people think "entertainers" who are associated with drugs and alcohol, would be privvy to the inner circles and plans of a shadow government.

LOL

Never overestimate the networking capabilities of someone in the music industry.

But seriously, lol.

[Alarm]

Do they mean the second side of the casette LP or the single for the instrumental "1984"? (which I don't believe was released as a single?

Also, does David Lee Roth even speak Icelandic?

I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will make up lots of little gems to answer these questions.

I had the 1984 casette in my youth and I don't remember any foreign gibberish being shouted. (except if you count Roth Screaming on certain songs)

[Richard W]

If he was going to record an obscure speech in Icelandic about a future in which the government tracks people's thoughts, why would he have picked an album called "1984" on which to do it? Wouldn't he worry that his warning to the few who understood it might be overshadowed by the title of the album, referring to a work by George Orwell in which a government tracks people's thoughts? Or was he trying to hide his dire predictions in plain sight somehow?

The only odd thing about this is that he might have said something in Icelandic on the B-side. Is there a section where he sings or speaks in various languages? I've never heard the album. In fact I only know of its existence from this thread...

[boogers]

Reminds me of a joke we all used to share, which was that the government had a giant computer which stored all the information on you. If you ever hacked the computer, you would find that the government knew things about you that you didn't even know.

[snopes]

I think the whole point was that the author of the OP was attempting to liken an onerous technological development to something out of 1984, but with tongue firmly planted in cheek he referenced Van Halen's work of that title rather than Orwell's.

[musicgeek]

Yup.

(Psst. Try copy-pasting the Icelandic at the end of the article into google translate. Van Halen fans can probably guess it just from the construction.)

[TrishDaDish]

I think the first clue that this isn't serious is when he describes the Van Halen album 1984 as "the grim masterpiece" (because "Panama" and "Hot for Teacher" were such emo depressing songs. Well, if the term "emo" had been invented then).

[Ramblin' Dave]

(presumably from the cassette release)

Okay, it's one thing if the person who wrote that is too young to remember vinyl, but how odd is it that they wouldn't know about records but would know about cassettes? Odd.

[Auburn Red]

I don't know, I had cassettes long after vinyl. Many of the large CD player stereos had tape decks. I don't think that it wasn't until well into 2005-2006 when I stopped seeing them.

i just have to wonder how/why people think "entertainers" who are associated with drugs and alcohol, would be privvy to the inner circles and plans of a shadow government

I used to run a small library at my Mom's church and it had two books by
Jeff Godwin, The Devil's Disciples and Dancing With Demons. You all would have loved the guy. He misinterprets lyrics to portray Satanic messages (Some of them were even way off the mark), believes just about every urban legend on rock singers and puts them down as fact including the whole blackmasking thing, and is a huge conspiracy theorist.

His big theory is that all rock and pop singers sign a pact with Satan and are part of this gigantic "Aquarian Conspiracy" to bring about a New Age through their music. Even supposedly "altruistic" songs like We Are The World were actually about this "Aquarian Conspiracy." So I suppose Van Halen's 1984 would fall neatly into this paranoid fantasy of his.

[Ramblin' Dave]

Originally Posted by Auburn Red

I don't know, I had cassettes long after vinyl. Many of the large CD player stereos had tape decks. I don't think that it wasn't until well into 2005-2006 when I stopped seeing them.

Yes, but you knew about records even if you were no longer buying them, didn't you? It sounds to me like the writer of the OP has only heard of cassettes, which seems odd.

It also occurred to me after my last post that it's a lot easier to play a record backwards than a cassette. I think I maybe recall seeing one tape-deck back in the day that had a reverse-play button, whereas most turntables enable you to spin the record backwards.

[jimmy101_again]

Originally Posted by Ramblin' Dave

It also occurred to me after my last post that it's a lot easier to play a record backwards than a cassette. I think I maybe recall seeing one tape-deck back in the day that had a reverse-play button, whereas most turntables enable you to spin the record backwards.

I've never seen a tape deck that would "play"backwards, though it would be trivial easy to make most cassette players do that since they already reverse the motor direction (for decks that can play both "sides" of the tape without having to flip the tape over).

It would probably be pretty easy to hack an auto-reverse cassette deck to get it to play backwards, you would just need to disable the small head movement that aligns with the audio tracks for the A vs. B "sides" of the tape.