The Heavy-Steel 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 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 sort of factor, but it surely appears they’ve now put that sen­si­bil­i­ty behind them — or at the very least most­ly behind them. “If you happen to’re within the temper for an underneath­canine sto­ry,” writes that web site’s Luke Winkie, “I rec­om­mend perus­ing Invoice­board­’s Onerous Rock Dig­i­tal Tune Gross sales chart. It’s house to, gen­uine­ly, one of the sub­stan­tial feats of endurance within the his­to­ry of pop­u­lar music, and it reveals no signal of gradual­ing down any­time quickly. I converse, in fact, 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 huge 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” could be, that transfer­ment had lengthy since flamed out by 2015, when Dis­turbed document­ed their cov­er of Simon & Gar­funkel’s sig­na­ture tune. As an alternative, they take the hang-out­ing aus­ter­i­ty of the orig­i­nal in a grand­ly mourn­ful direc­tion, dri­ven by piano, strings, and the sort of cav­ernous sen­si­tiv­i­ty by which met­al acts occa­sion­al­ly indulge.

“Simon & Garfunkel’s ver­sion is greatest 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 may need defined the tune’s decade-long dom­i­nance of the afore­males­tioned Onerous Rock Dig­i­tal Tune 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.

by way of Slate

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Launch, and Simply Get Hang-out­ing­ly Wager­ter with Time

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

Primarily based 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 via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly generally known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.