The Heavy-Metallic Band Disturbed Lined Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” Ten Years In the past, and It is Nonetheless Topping the Charts
“The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Track 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 no less than mostly behind them. “Should you’re within the temper for an belowcanine story,” writes that website’s Luke Winkie, “I recommend perusing Invoiceboard’s Arduous Rock Digital Track Gross sales chart. It’s house to, genuinely, one of the crucial substantial feats of endurance within the history of popular music, and it exhibits 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 massive single “Down with the Sickness,” and also you’re on the spotly 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” can be, that transferment had lengthy since flamed out by 2015, when Disturbed reported their cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s signature music. 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 during which metal acts occasionally indulge.
“Simon & Garfunkel’s version is finest go well withed 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 music’s decade-long dominance of the aforemalestioned Arduous Rock Digital Track Gross sales chart: a minor arena in itself, however one during 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 music 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 guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
