All of This and Nothing: The Boxer

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

The Famous songs this year are largely - especially now that I'm getting towards the end of the year, hitting things that are older than I am - hugely famous, massively culturally important. They're things I felt didn't really fit into previous years because of that: what can I claim specifically about a Simon & Garfunkel song that's been a world-wide favorite for longer than I've been alive?

But, this year, I thought I might as well. What I get out of The Boxer might not be vastly different than anyone else, but there's probably plenty of people who have never heard it. There are new people every day; everyone has to do everything for the first time once. (And we all have only limited time, so, as the world goes on, new people will have time to experience a smaller and smaller fraction of the cultural world that existed before they did - it's just math.)

This is one of the great songs of the 20th century. It's told in an elevated, storytelling tone - slightly artificial, the same way that the harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel are that bit artificial to begin with.

The singer is young, we think - probably a bit full of himself, with that fancy language. He's been kicked around, and clearly isn't succeeding the way he wants to.

Asking only workman's wages
I come looking for a job,
But I get no offers.

He doesn't tell us he's not giving up. He sounds defeated and tired, at the end of his strength. He doesn't say what's next for him at all. But the last verse is about someone else, the boxer of the title. And he's not giving up, not going anywhere. And, sometimes, that's all we can hold to: an image of someone broken but unbowed, still in the ring, still going on.

It's one of those songs that feels big and all-encompassing, with that lie-lie-lie chorus that fights against any kind of coherent explanation. The best songs mean more than they say, imply more than any specifics. This is one of the songs with the biggest gap between what the words say and how the song feels.