“The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Music of the Previous Decade”: imagine that headline, and the contrarian culture piece practically writes itself. Not so way back, Slate was notorious for publishing that type of factor, but it surely appears they’ve now put that sensibility behind them — or a minimum of mostly behind them. “When you’re within the temper for an underneathcanine story,” writes that website’s Luke Winkie, “I recommend perusing Invoiceboard’s Onerous Rock Digital Music Gross sales chart. It’s house to, genuinely, probably the most substantial feats of endurance within the history of popular music, and it exhibits no signal of sluggishing down anytime quickly. I converse, after all, of Disturbed’s cover of the Simon & Garfunkel classic ‘The Sound of Silence,’ which has been at, or close to, the apex of that chart since 2015.”
Whilst you nearly certainly know Simon & Garfunkel, you could not know Disturbed, who’ve been steadily popular within the metal world because the launch of their debut album The Sickness in 2000. Listen to that album’s large single “Down with the Sickness,” and also you’re instantaneously transported again to the flip of the millennium, when the exaggeratedly rhythmic and aggressive substyle of “nu metal” reigned supreme.
Entertaining although the sheer incongruity of a nu-metal version of “The Sound of Silence” could be, that transferment had lengthy since flamed out by 2015, when Disturbed fileed their cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s signature tune. As a substitute, they take the hang-outing austerity of the original in a grandly mournful direction, driven by piano, strings, and the type of cavernous sensitivity by which metal acts occasionally indulge.
“Simon & Garfunkel’s version is finest swimsuited for The Graduate,” writes Winkie, “whereas Disturbed’s take appears tuned for the end-credits scroll of a Transtypeers flick.” Inclusion in a Hollywooden blockbuster might need defined the tune’s decade-long dominance of the aforemalestioned Onerous Rock Digital Music Gross sales chart: a minor arena in itself, however one by which this perpetual victory displays a wider cultural phenomenon. Although younger people could never have heard Disturbed’s “The Sound of Silence” — or certainly Simon & Garfunkel’s — it’s drawn intense and abiding enthusiasm from listeners of their sixties, seventies, and eighties, for whose approval metal bands haven’t conventionally angled. Neverthemuch less, it needed to mark a excessive level in Disturbed’s profession when, after pertypeing the tune on Conan, they acquired excessive reward from one particularly distinguished member of that demographic: a certain Paul Simon.
Related content:
Paul Simon Tells the Story of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970)
Paul Simon Deconstructs “Mrs. Robinson” (1970)
Fred Armisen & Invoice Hader’s Comedic Tackle the History of Simon and Garfunkel
Who Invented Heavy Metal Music?: A Seek for Origins
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
