On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, it’s a little embarrassing that it didn’t occur to me before now to write about this particularly fine chronicle of the event - especially when you consider that it inspired the name of a certain Stylus feature. Alas, it would appear this seemingly perfect moment in pop writing here at Stylus was lost.

Still, like the man referred to in “Seconds” as the “golden one,” I suppose we can still ponder what might have been. Perhaps I would have written about the subtle tension that builds in the first half of the song, the driving electronic percussion pulsing underneath the shifting synthesizer suspension chords, paralleling the anticipation of seeing the president’s motorcade pass by.

But I won’t.

Or maybe I would have mentioned how the song subtly refers to the 1966 John Frankenheimer thriller, Seconds, starring Rock Hudson - a movie, I would add, that led Brian Wilson to believe that Phil Spector was conspiring with his Jewish brethren at Columbia Pictures to nudge the Beach Boy toward insanity (not that they would need a movie to do that).

But I shouldn’t.

Possibly, though, I would just dwell on that synthetic gunshot sound in the middle of the song - how such a patently cheap theatrical device is used so effectively that it becomes positively terrifying. Or better yet, I’d discuss how the “shot that was heard around the world” is followed by a line repeated over and over, “It took seconds of your time/To take his life/It took seconds” - emphasizing the temporal nature of the event to the point the concept becomes spatial. Like the event itself.

Or blog entry, even.