Songs About Mind Control and Mind Reading: Pink Floyd's Brain Damage, Master of Puppets and the Voice in Your Head

The song people mean when they ask about a voice in the head is the ninth track of The Dark Side of the Moon, released on March 1, 1973 and recorded at Abbey Road over the previous year. "Brain Damage" was written by Roger Waters, sung by him, and built on a figure he called the lunatic, who is first on the grass, then in the hall, then, in the final verse, inside the narrator, whose head has acquired a second occupant; the album's closing track, "Eclipse," follows without a break and lists everything under the sun before declaring that the sun is eclipsed by the moon. Waters has said the lunatic was Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd, who had written its first hits, taken too much acid, stopped functioning on stage and been left out of the band in 1968; the grass, he said, was the lawn behind King's College in Cambridge, where he and Barrett had grown up. The song's laughter was the band's road manager, Peter Watts, and the spoken fragments about having been mad for years were Abbey Road staff answering the cards the band had handed out.

The album is the most complete record ever made about the pressures that unseat a mind, and its other tracks are the pressures: time, money, travel, conflict, the fear of death, the great gig in the sky. It was engineered by Alan Parsons, who would make his own mind-reading song a decade later, and it stayed on the Billboard album chart for more than fourteen years. Pink Floyd returned to control from outside in "Welcome to the Machine" (1975), sung in the voice of an industry that has planned the listener's dreams, in "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" (1979), a number one in which schoolchildren refuse thought control, and in "Comfortably Numb," on the same album, in which a performer is injected, sedated and sent on stage; The Wall is the story of a mind sealing itself, and its climax is a trial inside one.

Metal took the controller literally. Metallica's "Master of Puppets" (1986), the title track of the album that made them, is sung by the drug to the addict, a master who pulls the strings, dictates the meals and laughs at the promise of freedom; James Hetfield wrote it about cocaine and has never pretended otherwise, and the song's second life, in the finale of Stranger Things' fourth season in 2022, put it in the top forty for the first time. Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime (1988) is a concept album about a hypnotised assassin, Nikki, programmed by a Dr. X to kill on hearing a single word, the Manchurian Candidate as a rock opera; Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986) is about a military laboratory that builds a sound that kills, with a video the BBC would not show on Top of the Pops; the Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles" (1979) imagines Governor Jerry Brown running a smiling police state by meditation and organic food. Nine Inch Nails' "Mr. Self Destruct" (1994) opens The Downward Spiral in the voice of whatever runs the listener: the drug, the need, the media, all claiming control in the same breath.

Muse have made the subject a career. "MK Ultra" (2009) is named for the CIA programme and describes a mind being opened and rewritten; the album Drones (2015) is a story about a soldier brainwashed into a killer, and its single "Psycho" has a drill sergeant screaming the process; "Thought Contagion" (2018) is about ideas that spread like infection. Matt Bellamy has said in interviews that he read the declassified MKUltra material and the disclosure books with equal attention, and the band's alien songs, in the songs about aliens article, come from the same shelf.

The mind-reading song is a different genre, quieter and more sinister. The Alan Parsons Project's "Eye in the Sky" (1982), the biggest hit of the engineer who had recorded The Dark Side of the Moon, is sung by a watcher who can read the listener's mind and make the rules, and Parsons has said the title came from the surveillance cameras in casinos; the Police's "Every Breath You Take" (1983), the decade's wedding song, is a stalker's promise to watch every move, and their "Voices Inside My Head" (1980) is a groove around a single sentence about the voices that will not stop. John Lennon's "Mind Games" (1973), by contrast, is benign, a call to a guerrilla war of the mind on the side of love, and the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" (1966), which Lennon wrote from Timothy Leary's adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is the founding song of the mind altered on purpose, its instruction to surrender to the void delivered through a Leslie speaker.

The psychedelic years produced the mind-altering songs that the mind-control songs answer: the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" (1966), banned by some radio stations for its drug reading; Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" (1967), which follows Alice's pills to the chessboard; Hendrix's "Purple Haze" (1967), in which the narrator cannot tell whether it is day or night. Radiohead closed the century with the mind administered: "Karma Police" and "Fitter Happier" (1997), the second a computer voice reciting a self-improvement checklist, and "2 + 2 = 5" (2003), named for Orwell. The telepathy song in pop is gentler still, BTS's "Telepathy" (2020) being a lockdown love song about minds meeting across distance; the alien version, in which the visitors speak without mouths, belongs to the reports.

MKUltra was real, and worse than the songs. The CIA programme, approved in April 1953 and run by the chemist Sidney Gottlieb, spent twenty years testing whether a mind could be controlled with drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and electroshock, dosing unwitting subjects with LSD in safe houses in New York and San Francisco, funding a Montreal psychiatrist, Ewen Cameron, to erase patients' memories with weeks of induced sleep and taped repetition, and losing at least one man, the Army scientist Frank Olson, who fell from a hotel window in 1953 after being dosed without his knowledge. Director Richard Helms ordered the files destroyed in 1973; a box of financial records survived, Seymour Hersh's reporting in The New York Times in December 1974 and the Church Committee in 1975 exposed the outline, and the 1977 Senate hearings on the surviving papers made MKUltra a proper noun. Muse named a song for it; Operation: Mindcrime's Dr. X is Gottlieb with a leather jacket; The Manchurian Candidate, published in 1959 and filmed in 1962, was the fear before the facts.

The voice in the head has its own file. In 1961 the neuroscientist Allan Frey reported that pulsed microwaves could produce the sensation of sound inside the skull, the Frey effect, and the finding has fed sixty years of rumour about weapons that put voices into people, from the "voice of God" devices of the 1990s to the Havana syndrome cases of 2016 onward, in which American diplomats reported sounds and injuries with no agreed cause. The UFO lore keeps the same fear in a different frame. The beings of the Hill abduction spoke to Barney Hill without moving their mouths, abductees describe information downloaded into them, the alien implants article covers the objects they say were left behind, and the glossary's entries on MILAB, the military abduction, and the screen memory are where the CIA story and the saucer story meet. Sammy Hagar's account of a wireless connection to a craft, in the musicians who saw UFOs article, is that meeting told by a singer; Uncle Martin, the mind-reading Martian of 1963, is the friendly version.