Stupify

When lead singer David Draiman was young, he dated a Latina girl, and her parents never approved of him because he's Jewish. The song is about racism.

This was Disturbed's debut single. It hit #10 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, but it was far from an overnight success. The band gauged which tracks would be the biggest contenders for singles by the reaction they got during live gigs. "Stupify" got a huge response, but it was a big battle to get it on the charts. "It wasn't an instant thing at all," Draiman told Heavy Consequence in 2020. "It was a hard fight at radio. There wasn't anything like it at radio at the time. There was stuff close to it, but not close enough. You had people over at Giant Records that signed us who considered it a personal mission and battle to make that song break. They believed in the hook and what the song could do, and eventually, it started climbing, but it wasn't an instant thing by any means. It took six months to get it to where it was really cooking and getting in the Top 10. I remember hearing it in my car for the first time in the middle of downtown Chicago, stopped in the middle of traffic. I got out of my car and stood on the hood and screamed at the top of my lungs! (Laughs) It was an amazing, amazing moment, hearing it on the radio back in the day."

In the music video, the band performs in a dilapidated room where a neglected boy is forced to live, haunted by the ghostly figures around him. In a 2000 interview, Draiman said the boy represents his inner child: "This inner child has been damaged in such a way that the world he sees around him is dark and frightening and marred by life experience. It's haunted by specters and ghosts from the past."