Instead of heeding the narrator’s exhortation to break free of the conforming power of the crowd, the people do the opposite. Like the worshippers of the golden calf in the book of Exodus, the crowd starts to pray to a false idol of its own construction. Mass conformity is now revealed as deeply anti-individual and even sinful. A false god, made of “neon,” the artificial substance par excellence, precludes all chance for true spiritual experience. Then, unexpectedly, the neon sign reveals a hidden message. “The words of the prophets,” it says, “are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.” The revelation addresses the major problems introduced at the beginning of the song, conformity and alienation. It is the non-conformists, it implies, the people society considers crazy or marginal – those who write on subways and live in tenement housing – who are the potential prophets. No prophetic voices, in other words, are coming from the ten thousand people conforming to the rules of the crowd. At the same time, the extremity of alienation has forced the non-conformists into marginal spaces, into darkness, silence, and dirty and dank environments. The price for non-conformity is social alienation. Though the members of the crowd are alienated from one another, they are still able to bow down to the same false god. They are still able to be together. The ones who refuse the “neon god” maintain their individuality but at a high cost – social exclusion. 

That conformity and individual alienation were the central issues in Simon’s song are not surprising. By the mid-1960s, conformity was a well-established concept in American culture. In the counter-culture, which grew together with the “conformist” 1950s, existed the notion that conformity didn’t lead to interpersonal fulfillment but rather to alienation (from others and from one’s self). These ideas formed the central insight in the pioneering sociological work, The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published in 1950. 

Conformity as a subject of inquiry was not limited to the realm of sociology. Social psychologists tried to understand what made people ready and willing to follow the crowd – to sacrifice their individual “self,” including their instincts and their moral center. In 1963, social psychologist Stanley Milgram published the findings of his “Obedience Experiment” in which he detailed how people, despite grave moral scruples, would administer serious or even lethal punishment to other people upon the direction of a figure of authority, in this case a medical doctor. In literature, writers like Arthur Miller, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and others focused on tensions between the social impulse to conform and deeper needs of individuals. These tensions, like in the case of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in the Catcher in the Rye (published in 1951), led to rebellion and alienation. The Beat movement, too, posited alienation as a coping strategy or necessary path to regaining a semblance of selfhood. Allan Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” reads like a non-conformist’s encyclopedia. Tellingly, Ginsberg’s heroes exist in those same spaces as Simon’s prophet’s – tenements and other spaces hidden from respectable middle-class view. In the context of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” however, Simon’s dream scene revelation seems incredibly sanitized.    

By setting the non-conformist narrative in a dream, Simon attempts to bolster it with rhetorical force and spiritual depth. The dream revelation takes on a sense of psychological truth, perhaps even a grander objective truth. The implication of the song is that people have within themselves a certain depth of understanding that cultural conformity strips away. At the same time, the song holds out the possibility of a more prophetic or meta-physical realm above the human realm, one which can infiltrate the human mind in its passive sleep state. The song’s revelation is simple and straightforward: true wisdom won’t come from the conforming masses but form social outsiders. These outsiders might be alienated from mainstream society, but they are not alienated from themselves. In contrast, the conforming population is alienated from both. 

 

Lyrically, the “Sound of Silence” does not seem to approach the level of creativity or profundity of contemporaneous commentaries on the relationship between the individual and the community. The long American tradition of thinking about this relationship, stretching back to the poet Walt Whitman, finds but a mediocre and derivative expression in the song’s lyrics. The solution to the problems of conformity and alienation the song offers – breaking the collective “silence” by looking to the social margins – are not especially instructive, certainly not unique. What, then, gives the song its undeniable power? I suspect that it is the combination of the understated music, the eerie cadence of the singing matched with the developing dreamscape that grabs hold of the listener. The music and voice allow the dreamworld to unfold, they help the dreamspace crystallize – and most importantly they make the listener experience the emotions of alienation and the haunting threats of mass conformity in a way that transcend the banality or pedantic nature of the lyrics.