If you've seen Batman v Superman: Dawn Justice, you've probably seen the viral video of a depressed-looking Ben Affleck staring off into the void while "The Sound of Silence" plays in the background.
Heck, even if you haven't seen Batman v Superman, you've probably seen Sad Affleck. The YouTube video has been viewed nearly 22 million times in the two weeks since its creation, and the popularity of it all has helped catapult "The Sound of Silence," a song from 1966, into the Billboard Rock Top 10 chart.
Simon & Garfunkel's classic tribute to sadness and despair can currently be seen at No. 6 on the chart, rubbing shoulders with bands like Disturbed and Coldplay. It's a weird world in which we live.
Billboard has plenty of stats on the song's meteoric rise in the past two weeks as well. Most of the plays of the song come via streaming, with the song actually coming in at No. 2 on the Rock Streaming Songs charts with 5.6 million U.S. streams. Unsurprisingly, 5.1 million of those streams came from YouTube. Sales of the song have increased 46 percent as well, with more than 5,000 downloads of the song in the days following Sad Affleck's arrival.
However, it's not only Simon & Garfunkel's original that is seeing a rise in popularity. Disturbed's cover of the song (from the band's latest album, Immortalized) broke into the Hot Rock Songs list after the band's March 28 performance of the track on Conan. The performance was so great that Paul Simon (the Simon in Simon & Garfunkel) even praised the rendition on social media. Disturbed's version is the most popular single from the band to date, as it currently sits at number 51 on the Billboard Hot 100, several places ahead of the band's previous chart-topping song, "Prayer."
This is all to say that Internet memes are powerful, powerful things that aren't to be taken lightly. More than five decades later, a rock song about sadness and despair is back in the limelight, thanks to a terrible superhero movie, a depressed Ben Affleck and a cover by a metal band. In light of all this, please meme responsibly.
