Sounds of Silence- Ideology in Simon and Garfunkel

If none of you have actually heard this song before, here's YouTube graciously stepping in to play the music for you while you read this post- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhdGkZ6Fngw

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
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.

I started randomly singing this song when I was walking back to my room last night and kind of had this epiphany- the sounds of silence are like ideology. They're the unspoken rules and creeds that govern our daily lives, things that we can't necessarily explain because they've always been like that.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of
A neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of 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 shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

But then, when I got to this part of the song, the people talking without speaking and hearing without listening, I started thinking about Naomi Klein's corporate advertising culture and how americans seem to be really confused now about what their culture really is; is it what the advertisements tell them to buy or is it what they are buying or are the two the same or is really the fact that they are being advertised to. That's an ideology, that advertising culture, and a really good one, too; we can't say where it starts or where it ends. But that's what a culture is, isn't it?

The people writing songs that voices never shared, it's almost like the big record companies controlling the music we listen to; the music is stuff that the artist doesn't write, and sometimes I don't think it's stuff the artist even likes! Real human voices don't share some of the music before we listen to now, it's just the recordings that spread whatever message the company wants them to spread. Music is culture, is an expression of ideology, so the fact that this music is being engineered means that our culture, too, is engineered.

This also made me think about Foucault and that lingering "What about all those writers who never get published?" (I know, this song covered a lot of bases for me last night, but that's because Paul Simon's music is made out of awesome)

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.
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence

It's that corporate culture (I think it's a culture, anyway) that keeps the silence in place, that doesn't let the voices like the narrator's speak. And, the narrator is arguing, that censorship is only going to get stronger if you let it.

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 signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls,
And whispered in the sounds of silence.

A Neon God? You don't need to get any more advertising-oriented than that! But even the sign knows that there are more outlets for the unpublished, the subway walls and tenement halls that are covered in graffiti, and of course, the sounds of silence themselves, the unspoken rules that govern our interactions. Obviously Foucault and Paul Simon were thinking about this in terms of the pre-internet world, but nowadays you can self-publish on the Internet, you can have your own book bound at a Kinko's, you can stream your music through MySpace and have everyone who visits your site listen to your music. And even if only ten people read that book, it still influences the sounds of silence, the Ideology behind when and why you wrote your book.

Author's note: This post was kind of a decompressing of information to see if I understood it. I don't know if I made a point or not. I'm sure that's not the way Simon wants us to read the song, but I'm not publishing this in a nationally circulated news column, so I think I'll be okay.