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10 Hidden Subliminal Messages In Pop Music

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Pop’s biggest hits keep getting picked apart frame by frame, and the internet never runs out of “hidden messages” to find.

Long before anyone had a smartphone to freeze-frame a music video, fans were already convinced their favorite pop songs carried a second layer of meaning. TheThings Celebrity’s “10 Hidden Messages In Pop Music” runs through ten of the most-repeated claims about mainstream pop tracks and videos — from coded shots at ex-partners to symbols fans insist point toward secret societies. None of it requires a tinfoil hat; it’s built on the same close-reading habit that’s turned lyric annotation sites and slow-motion video breakdowns into a cottage industry of their own.

• The video revisits backmasking, the practice of hunting for reversed phrases hidden under vocal tracks — a controversy that dates back to rock records from the 1970s and 1980s and has since been recycled against contemporary pop acts.
• Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber videos are singled out as frequent targets for fans convinced coded lyrics or visual cues are aimed at former partners.
• Katy Perry and Beyoncé videos get flagged for recurring occult-adjacent imagery — the all-seeing eye, pyramid shapes, and checkerboard flooring associated with Masonic and Illuminati folklore.

The Ex-Lover Callouts

Nothing fuels pop-culture forensics like a breakup. Taylor Swift’s catalog has functioned as an open case file for fans trying to match lyrics to specific relationships for years, and her videos get the same treatment — outfits, props, and even background extras get scrutinized for supposed digs at former boyfriends. Justin Bieber’s videos draw the identical brand of scrutiny, with viewers parsing scenes for what they read as pointed references to past relationships rather than generic breakup imagery. It’s less about proof than pattern-matching: once an audience decides an artist writes in code, every music video becomes a puzzle with a built-in answer key.

That instinct isn’t unique to this video — it’s the same appetite that’s turned artists who seem nothing like their public image into a recurring genre of pop coverage, where fans assume there’s always a hidden version of the story behind the polished one.

Illuminati Imagery and Occult Symbolism

The all-seeing eye. The pyramid. The black-and-white checkerboard floor. These three visual motifs show up again and again in the videos the segment highlights, and they’ve become the default shorthand whenever fans want to argue a pop star is flashing Illuminati or Masonic symbolism on camera. Katy Perry and Beyoncé videos are named specifically as repeat offenders in this reading, with choreography, set design, and even lighting rigs getting mapped onto conspiracy theories that have circulated in pop culture for well over a decade.

Play the vocal track backward, the theory goes, and a phrase turns up that nobody was ever supposed to hear.

It’s worth remembering none of this symbolism is new to pop specifically — Katy Perry has spent years as a lightning rod for this kind of internet scrutiny, whether the topic is her public conduct or, in this case, what her set designers supposedly buried in a video shoot.

Backmasking’s Long, Weird History

Reversed-audio panic didn’t start with pop music — it goes back to rock records from the 1970s and 1980s, when fans and, in some cases, moral crusaders claimed backward-playing vinyl revealed satanic messages buried in the mix. The video applies that same decades-old technique to today’s chart-toppers, running clips backward to argue certain phrases emerge that supposedly weren’t audible playing the track forward. It’s the same accusation, just aimed at a new generation of artists and a new format — streaming instead of vinyl.

The Wider Cast of Pop Acts Under the Microscope

Beyond Swift, Bieber, Perry, and Beyoncé, the broader series this video belongs to has run the same type of analysis on Shakira, One Direction, and Ed Sheeran videos, treating choreography, wardrobe choices, and set pieces as evidence rather than production design. That pattern mirrors how boy bands in particular get picked apart by fans looking for subtext in everything from lyrics to lineup changes — the same scrutiny that’s fueled coverage of boy band beefs long after the groups themselves moved on.

TheThings Celebrity built this entry as one installment in a running listicle format, and the appetite for it isn’t going anywhere — every time a major pop act drops a video with an unusual prop or a slowed-down vocal bridge, somebody’s going to hit rewind and start hunting for the message nobody else caught.