Twenty Seconds Tops

is all you get before the public address announcer calls your name and the music has to end, and there’s so much to accomplish, not the least of which is getting the crowd to set down their nachos or hot dogs, to turn away from the scoreboard highlights and pay attention to the game they are ostensibly there to watch, hopefully moving them to a swell of enthusiasm that provides you with something resembling confidence or, better yet, swagger, and while “Baby Shark” might be a popular, albeit ironic, choice these days, let me suggest “Obvious Child” by Paul Simon and its bright, clear raps of repinique that open the song before diving headlong into an Afro-Brazilian rhythm that even a stiff-jointed dad two beers in can bob his head to, and there’s still the fanfare of trumpets to come, beginning a call and response with a bass voicing that’s answered by a second blast, and then, as you come to the end of the twenty seconds, the bass settles once more on the tonic, the note in music theory considered a chord’s “home,” and that’s where the song leaves you: standing at home, awash in applause on the other side of Simon’s unlikely mid-career renaissance, an adult still playing at a young man’s game, running out the same formula that made Graceland a revelation but this time without the attendant anxiety over the unrelenting disappointments of adulthood that give it its resonance because there’s a lot to be said for the way a hit record can postpone those sorts of reckonings, so while the tension between Simon’s waning virility and most urgent desires remains largely absent on Rhythm of the Saints, the one exception seems to be “Obvious Child,” a song that confronts the existential dread of death and the steady compounding of old age’s indignities — thinning hair, a leaky prostate, a dying parent — that await us all in some form or another, and though there’s no time for the lyrics that foreground this before your at bat starts, it’s that understanding of the song which ultimately makes it an appropriate choice for someone who still has to deliver regardless of what happened last time, be it a double into the gap or a strikeout looking, despite, or maybe even because of, the nagging hunch you’ll never be able to surpass what you’ve already accomplished, that these aren’t just Sonny’s blues, they’re everyone’s, eventually, and when they cheer you as you make your way to the plate, they are cheering the possibility of one more triumph against advancing age, that the home team might win after all, that you can send a ball into the stands, or, at the very least, hit it where they ain’t, that one of the twenty-seven outs we are all allotted might be postponed long enough for a new song to fill up the dark corners of our panic once again, not forever, but for a short while, twenty seconds, tops.

DANIEL COUCH is a professor of English literature and composition at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. He is a co-author of a book on Bob Mould’s 1989 solo debut, Workbook, for Bloomsbury’s esteemed 33 1/3 series. His writing has appeared in Tape Op Magazine, Portland Monthly, and elsewhere.