Who is ‘The Boxer’ in the Simon & Garfunkel song?
Every artist’s greatest strength is toeing the line between being ambiguous and candid. Even though it might be easy to write the most detailed lyric sheet of all time, sometimes the best course of action is to take some pieces out, letting the listener use their imagination to fill in the gaps for themselves. While Paul Simon had made countless timeless melodies by the end of Simon and Garfunkel, he did admit that there was a clear person in mind when writing one of their final masterpieces.
Across the band’s first few albums, it looked like Simon would be considered a footnote of rock history for a while. Despite his songwriting ability being way above any other writer in the business, the initial response to songs like ‘The Sound of Silence’ did nothing, with fans passing them over as a shallow folk duo before moving on to other albums by Bob Dylan.
Once the band got a new lease on life thanks to the rock and roll version of their signature tune, albums like Bookends saw them developing in the pop mould, creating songs as pointed as they were catchy on tracks like ‘America’ and ‘Mrs Robinson’. For all of the great chemistry they had onstage, though, that didn’t mean they didn’t garner their fair share of criticism.
Even though Simon could write circles around most of the rock scene, he admitted that he didn’t have the tone to bring across certain tracks. When talking about his Bob Dylan pastiche ‘A Simple Desultory Phillipic’, Simon admitted that he could never sing a Dylan song because his voice sounds far too sincere compared to Dylan’s dry wit.
This left Simon in a spot of trouble. He felt hamstrung by his own abilities. He could write lyrics, creating deeply textured poetic thoughts within the framework of a pop ditty, but attempting to sing them with the same reverence was tough.
So, who is ‘The Boxer’?
While many critics lambasted Simon for his lighthearted tone of voice and softer take on folk-rock, Simon would retort on the duo’s next album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Despite latching onto the Garfunkel-led title track, ‘The Boxer’ was a better indicator of what was happening inside Simon’s mind then.
When talking about the track, Simon said that he fit into the protagonist’s spot because of how much ridicule he had to dodge, saying, “I think the song was about me: everybody’s beating me up, and I’m telling you now I’m going to go away if you don’t stop. By that time, we had encountered our first criticism…[They thought] Maybe we weren’t real folkies at all. Maybe we weren’t even hippies”.
Although Simon may have pointed the finger at the critics, those sparring sessions also happened in the studio. Since Garfunkel had started to focus on an acting career midway through the album’s production, Simon didn’t like the idea of having to write songs with him in mind all the time, leading to a distinct rub between the pair.
The sentiment of him leaving would also become hauntingly prophetic, with the duo calling it quits shortly after the album was released and Simon moving on to a solo career. For all of the great music that Simon and Garfunkel made together, ‘The Boxer’ practically serves as the bridge that connects both phases of Simon’s career.
