Down With the Sickness
by Disturbed
- 89
- BPM
- Eb minor
- Key
- 2A
- Camelot
- 65
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
David Draiman has said the song was written with a pause where the noise now sits. Mike Wengren's beat was so tribal that it made him feel like an animal, he said. The "ooh-wah-ah-ah-ah" came out one day. It comes at the end of the intro and returns before the last chorus. Draiman has said his vocal cords were affected after surgery for acid reflux, and he has dismissed the rumor that heartburn caused it.
Disturbed recorded the song in 1999 and released it in 2000 as the second single from The Sickness, its debut album. Guitarist Dan Donegan tunes the bottom five strings half a step down and drops the low string to C-sharp.
A spoken segment near the end describes a child who is beaten by his mother and fights back. The band has said it is not about literal child abuse. Draiman told the Phoenix New Times it concerns the mother culture of society beating down a child who wants independence. That segment is left out of the radio edit and the video, which is live footage from Q101's Jamboree 2001 in Tinley Park, Illinois. It was Disturbed's first platinum single in the United States and reached eight-times platinum on January 17, 2025. The band usually plays it last.
Down With the Sickness runs at 89 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.7 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 674 ms. It is in Eb minor, Camelot 2A, which shares its notes with F# major and mixes cleanly with Ab minor and Bb minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.