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front-row seat to a Menudo concert, I propose we start a support group.)
    Every year or so I got to review a band I liked, such as R.E.M. or Concrete Blonde or Steve Earle. But for the most part I was writing about Winger and Alabama and Reba McEntire and Vixen and Poison and George Strait, whom I reviewed four times, making me the onlyJew (that I know of) to have his work excerpted in
The George Strait Newsletter
.
    The coolest band I ever got to review was Los Tigres Del Norte. Los Tigres was considered a
norteña
band,
norteña
being that jaunty, synthesized stuff that blares from the storefront speakers of border towns. But Los Tigres played everything: waltzes, boleros,
cumbias
, and their songs were really short stories about immigration and drug trafficking, about the desperation of living in a poor country hard up against a rich one. I can remember sitting high in the bleachers of the El Paso County Coliseum, amid the
viejos
swigging from dented flasks, as down below five thousand couples danced, the women beaming in pink and green dresses, twirling like bright ribbons around their shy mustached men.
    I should mention, mostly for the sake of my own embarrassment, that I was called upon to review many other genres about which I knew next to nothing, such as jazz and classical, the latter including a young harpist whom I inevitably compared to Harpo Marx. My central concern as a critic wasn’t the music, but the mechanics of hitting my deadline. Specifically, would the Radio Shack TRS-80 upon which I worked crash before I could attach it to the “modem.” This was a giant rubber phone cuff that somehow whisked the words from my portable computer to the newsroom. It all seemed quite magical back in 1989.
    Did it ever occur to me to learn more about music? Not really. Technical expertise could be established by using a word such as “polyrhythms” from time to time, but it wasn’t required. I worked for a Gannett paper. The whole point was to write at a fifth-grade level.
The Rock Crit Paradox
    Am I making excuses for being such a lazy and frankly suckass reviewer in El Paso? Yes. But I was also, in my own frankly suckass way, up against an ontological dilemma: the description of one sort oflanguage (physical, auditory, intuitive) by another (abstract, intellectual, symbolic).
    Talented critics can, of course, describe music with sonic precision. Take, for example, this passage from Sasha Frere-Jones’s review of the Canadian singer Feist in
The New Yorker
, a magazine I keep stored in my bathroom for research purposes:
    The song is built around Feist’s vigorous acoustic-guitar strum: she plays like a street busker, strong on the downstroke and evenly loud. A three-note motif on a glockenspiel and an organ runs through the song, softening the forward motion of the guitar. In a short chorus, the guitar stops and Feist sings harmony with herself: “Ooh, I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart, I’ll be the one to hold the gun.” Then Gonzales plays a rising and falling two-note ostinato on the piano, subtly coloring the song. The accretion of felicitous musical details is typical of the album’s smart, unfussy arrangements.
    Frere-Jones is certainly not messing around. He covers instrumentation, performance style, and lyrical content. True, he risks losing those of us who are musical dolts, but it certainly didn’t kill me to look up the word
ostinato
, which means “a musical phrase persistently repeated at the same pitch” and which I plan to incorporate into every discussion I have for the next ten years. The real problem here is emotional. The prose, for all its technical fidelity, conveys almost nothing about what the music
feels
like.
    Consider the famous chord progression that Angus Young plays at the beginning of “Back in Black.” A good writer could tell us about those grinding, seismic chords, the distinct rhythm of their deployment, even that sly, arpeggiated little five-note lick that acts as