Simon and Garfunkel, "The Boxer"

I saw The Graduate as an impressionable teenager and, much like the hero of (500) Days of Summer, I misread it on first viewing. I didn't see in the ending (which is famous, by the way, though I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet) all the uncertainty with adult life that the characters Ben and Elaine faced, as they fled from everything they'd known previously with at best a brief idea of who the other person was. The songs of Simon and Garfunkel dominated the soundtrack (the propulsive, mostly instrumental version of "Mrs. Robinson" that played as Ben drove up and down California looking for Elaine was hard to get out of my head when I was driving, primarily because my first car didn't have a working radio), and while I was familiar with their stuff, I wouldn't say that I was a fan necessarily. I liked "The Sound of Silence," and "I Am a Rock" was good, but a lot of their stuff sounded a little cheesy to me. It was probably their folk leanings (they had been caught up in that movement thanks to early Bob Dylan, but once he went electric so did they) which sounded wispy and a little wimpy to a kid who rocked out to the Who. But gradually, over the years, I developed a grudging admiration for the work of Paul Simon, with and without his white-boy-Afro-ed partner in crime.

"The Boxer" is one of those songs that I discovered thanks to a friend, though I'd been aware of it before. It's funny how, when you care about someone, sometimes you raid their cultural preferences for things that you might like yourself, either to ingratiate yourselves with them or because you genuinely feel drawn to that particular artifact. I'd bought a Genesis best-of under the sway of this new acquaintance (who had simply mentioned once that she like Phil Collins), but I was hesitant about going in for S&G in all their close-harmony glory. I made the call to pay for the "best of" CD if I ever came across it used, and so when I did see it in a record store I had to put up or shut up.

I have mellowed in my musical tastes as I've gotten older, and the guy who listened to punk rock exclusively was never really "just" listening to the Sex Pistols or the Clash (I seem to remember that guy also having a hidden affinity for ABBA, too, though he would probably deny it out of some misguided sense of machismo). Simon and Garfunkel didn't really do it for me as a teenager, aside from the context of Dustin Hoffman wondering if Anne Bannecroft was trying to seduce him, but now they seem just right.

And while I have other songs that are my favorites ("Kodachrome" and "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" stand out solo-Simon-wise, for example), I do like "The Boxer." Whether it's just because a certain someone likes it or because I came to identify with the narrator of the song as events have transpired in my life, I can't say. But if a song moves you, it moves you. It is what it is.