“The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Tune 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, however it appears they’ve now put that sensibility behind them — or not less than mostly behind them. “In the event you’re within the temper for an beneathcanine story,” writes that web site’s Luke Winkie, “I recommend perusing Invoiceboard’s Arduous Rock Digital Tune Gross sales chart. It’s house to, genuinely, probably the most substantial feats of endurance within the history of popular music, and it reveals no signal of sluggishing down anytime quickly. I communicate, 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 virtually certainly know Simon & Garfunkel, you could not know Disturbed, who’ve been steadily popular within the metal world for the reason that launch of their debut album The Sickness in 2000. Listen to that album’s huge 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 track. As an alternative, they take the hang-outing austerity of the original in a grandly mournful direction, driven by piano, strings, and the type of cavernous sensitivity wherein 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 track’s decade-long dominance of the aforemalestioned Arduous Rock Digital Tune Gross sales chart: a minor arena in itself, however one wherein this perpetual victory displays a wider cultural phenomenon. Although younger people might 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 track 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 initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
