In recent years, Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 signature “The Sound of Silence” has been transformed from a folk-rock classic into a meme, made to soundtrack running jokes between the internet and the human race. Because of that, a new generation has been introduced to the iconic song, but they also may have missed out on its meaning, one that is just as important today as it was six decades ago.
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While it’s easy to get swept up in the tune’s haunting monotone and wispy melody – the perfect tune to set a dramatic scene – it’s easier to miss the song’s moral entirely. Now more than ever, “The Sound of Silence” is worth a revisit and a real honest listen.
The Origins
“The Sound of Silence” was penned by one-half of the folk duo, Paul Simon. The then-21-year-old fittingly found the song while alone in the darkness.
“The main thing about playing the guitar was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream,” Simon shared in an interview with Playboy (quote via Ultimate Classic Rock). “And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I’d turn on the faucet so that water would run – I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me – and I’d play. In the dark.”
Hello, darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again, the song begins against a pensive pluck of strings, mirroring Simon’s state at the song’s inception.
“The Sound of Silence” was released on the duo’s debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., but the acoustic album was initially a failure and led to Simon & Garfunkel disbanding for a spell, the former in pursuit of a solo career abroad and the latter in search of higher education.
Unbeknownst to the two, “The Sound of Silence” had perked a few ears and was seeing a fair amount of airplay in certain regions. The song’s producer Tom Wilson decided to rearrange it, adding drums and electric guitars to round out the original acoustics, and in 1965, re-released “The Sound of Silence” as the song we know today.
The new and improved tune was an immediate success, becoming an international No. 1 and leading to the regrouping of Simon & Garfunkel, a partnership that would go on to produce one of folk’s most enduring songbooks.
The Lyrics
Hello, darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again, the song immediately grabs the attention, its words casting vague, but stirring imagery across the delicate acoustics. Because a vision softly creeping / Left its seeds while I was sleeping / And the vision that was planted in my brain / Still remains / Within the sound of silence
“Really the key to ‘The Sound of Silence’ is the simplicity of the melody and the words, which are youthful alienation,” Simon once explained the tune’s meaning to NPR (quote via Ultimate Classic Rock). “It’s a young lyric, but not bad for a 21-year-old. It’s not a sophisticated thought, but a thought that I gathered from some college reading material or something.”
While the songwriter chalks up the song’s popularity to its simple sing-ability, the song resonates with a number of people who have ever felt alienated and disassociated from their present society. What lives at the heart of the tune’s existential poetry is that collectively relatable feeling.
“It wasn’t something that I was experiencing at some deep, profound level – nobody’s listening to me, nobody’s listening to anyone – it was a post-adolescent angst,” Simon continued, “but it had some level of truth to it and it resonated with millions of people.”
The narrator has no one to talk to and the only thing that understands him is the darkness and his own loneliness. In restless dreams I walked alone / Narrow streets of cobblestone. But the song reaches beyond the perspective of a single narrator, a flash of light revealing a mass of people, humanity all seeking refuge in their own darkness and their own silence.
And in the naked light I saw / Ten thousand people, maybe more / People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening / People writing songs that voices never share / No one dared / Disturb the sound of silence, the chilling verse plays, illustrating a near, all-too-real future in which interactions become all the more surface-level and indifference continues to grow.
“Fools,” said I, “You do not know / Silence like a cancer grows / Hear my words that I might teach you / Take my arms that I might reach you,” the duo sings a wake-up call to no avail. But my words like silent raindrops fell / And echoed in the wells of silence.
“The Sound of Silence” comes to a close with a warning, pointedly calling out the all-consuming consumerism and using those already lost to it as an example of what’s to come if we continue to find solace in the silence. And the people bowed and prayed / To the neon god they made / And the sign flashed out its warning / In the words that it was forming / And the sign said, “The words of the prophets / Are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls / And whispered in the sounds of silence.”
“This is a song about the inability of people to communicate with each other,” Art Garfunkel can be heard perfectly summing up the song in the below performance.
(Photo by Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)
