Mark Kozelek singing about boxing is like David Foster Wallace writing about tennis. By that I mean it’s completely and utterly worth your time whether you care about boxing/tennis or not.

His verse about Prince Nassim comes around four minutes in to a seven-minute, growling stream of consciousness taken from his collaboration with Justin Broadrick’s Jesu. As always with Kozelek, he uses pugilism to get at something so much more than the act of punching another person senseless. By the time he’s done singing about boxing on Duk Koo Kim or Tavoris Cloud or Good Morning My Love, you come over all Ernest Hemmingway who apparently sucked at boxing, and so do you probably. So don’t try taking it up at 30.

Here’s a good quote:

“Hemingway was lost in the romance of a sport that has no romance to those seriously pursuing it; the romance strictly belongs to spectators.”