Let’s Argue About Power Pop!
By: S.W. Lauden
Tags: Rock And Roll, Music, Debate, Pop Culture, Rock

Let’s Argue About Power Pop!

Spend some time exploring power pop fan pages on Facebook and three things become quickly apparent:

1. This is a passionate and opinionated community of music-lovers.

2. There are a lot of super obscure bands you’ve likely never heard.

3. Almost nobody can agree on the definition of “power pop.”

This third point, the lack of fundamental clarity about what defines the genre, underscores a lot of discussions these days; delivering endless joy and bottomless frustration to fans who will happily spend hours extolling and debating bands like Shoes, 20/20, the Producers, the Shivvers, the Nerves, Phil Seymour and other lesser-known 70s and 80s “Golden Era” acts. Pop in for a while (some groups are open, others require you to join) and you’ll also find a few newer, gatekeeper-approved acts like the Lickerish Quartet, Foxycontin, the Reflectors, the Corner Laughers, mylittlebrother and White Reaper. If you love guitar-based pop, it’s a great way to discover new-to-you music from around the world and across decades.

All in all, power pop is pretty tame as far as musical subcultures go. Of the hundreds of conversations happening online at any moment, the vast majority are cordial. On the flip side, though, you sometimes see total strangers hurling personal insults at each other over bands that broke up in obscurity decades ago. And, of course, there is the occasional shit-posting troll.

Just about everybody agrees that the Knack is power pop.

Go a level deeper and key personality types begin to emerge across fan groups. You have the “Purists” who really only want to talk about a handful of bands from the 70s and early 80s, and maybe a few from the 90s. Then you have the “Enthusiasts” who mostly seek new guitar pop music, regardless of when it was recorded or if it fits strict definitions. Next come the “Flag Wavers,” those with internet radio shows, blogs or even indie record labels to showcase and support their favorite bands. “Flag Wavers” are naturally aligned with the “Artists,” former and current band members promoting their work. Last come the “Newbies” who are either cheered or chided as part of a nerdy hazing ritual.

Taking the good with the bad, it’s endearing to see (mostly) middle-aged fans unabashedly gush about their favorite musicians. The discussions can be informative, entertaining and sometimes last for days, but underneath it all the question remains: What exactly is power pop?

I co-edited an essay collection about this hotly-debated genre in late 2019, so I revisited those essays to see what our contributors had to say on the topic. Let’s start with my publishing partner in crime, Paul Myers. “Explaining the meaning of power pop is a little like explaining what love is. You know it when you feel it, but damn if it’s not different for everyone who experiences it,” he writes in the introduction to Go All The Way: A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop (Rare Bird Books).

If that isn’t abstract enough for you, try this poetic definition from Michael Chabon’s Go All The Way essay, ‘Tragic Magic:’ “Power pop is a prayer offered by atheists to a god who exists but doesn’t hear.”

They’re both right in their own way, but neither observation gets us closer to a clear definition. So let’s focus on a few bands who are considered canon: Badfinger, Raspberries and the Knack (even this brief list will spark debates — “What, no Big Star?!”). Cautiously using those three as a holy trinity of power pop, you’d be tempted to define it as primarily a 70s and early 80s genre, but watch your step. Turns out the term “power pop” was coined by Who guitarist, Pete Townshend, in 1967: “Power pop is what we play — what the Small Faces used to play, and the kind of pop the Beach Boys played in the days of ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ which I preferred.”

Great, so it’s a 60s genre! Not so fast. Unfortunately, it’s now widely accepted that the Who was not itself a power pop band in the strictest sense. And neither, for that matter, are the bands that Townshend lists in his infamous quote. The same goes for contemporaries like the Kinks, the Byrds and even the Beatles, who, along with the Beach Boys, are all viewed as core inspirations for the genre.

Confused yet? Welcome to the power pop party!

“Whatever power pop is — and arguing about its definition is one of the many pleasures of being a power pop fan — most reasonable people can agree that the Beatles, particularly pre-1967 Beatles, provide the working blueprint for the genre,” singer/songwriter Jeff Whalen writes in his essay, ‘Power Pop As Beatles Obsession.’ “Are the Beatles themselves power pop? No, and for a number of reasons! One being the fact that nostalgia for the Beatles is a key propulsive element for the power pop band.”

Whalen argues that every rock band starts off imitating the artists they love, but that for true power pop bands all roads lead to the Fab Four. Among the primordial elements of the genre that can be traced back to the Mop Top era, he lists hooky, three-minute pop songs; four guys who often dress alike; and a two-person singer/songwriter approach with lots of harmonies.

Kate Sullivan concurs in her essay, ‘Strange Magic: ELO and Power Pop.’ “If power pop was a person, and you asked them about their idea of heaven, here’s what would happen: They’d think for a moment, and then they’d say, ‘That scene in A Hard Day’s Night when the Beatles are playing cards on the train, and they’re sitting in that cage, and then suddenly they have their instruments and they’re singing ‘I Should Have Known Better.’ That’s heaven.’ Power pop would be happy to ride that train all night, forever.”

Simple enough: power pop is music made by devoted Beatles fans. That seems pretty accurate for the small handful of acts we’ve discussed so far, but a lot of music has been written and recorded since the 60s and 70s. With each iteration the direct line to songs like “Love Me Do,” “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” or “It Won’t Be Long” gets stretched pretty thin. Even bands like Big Star, Cheap Trick, and the Records from the 70s; the Go-Go’s, the Smithereens and the Posies from the 80s; and Teenage Fanclub, Material Issue, Sloan and Fountains of Wayne from the 90s — all commonly listed as at least power pop adjacent, if not stalwarts — come under serious song-by-song scrutiny when such Beatles purity tests are applied. (Get the sense power pop is a dude fest? You’re not alone: “The main difference between the sexes when it comes to power pop is this: there are — and always have been — far fewer females plying the trade than males. Exactly why is anybody’s guess,” John Borack writes in his essay, ‘They Got The Beat: The Women of Power Pop.’)

The list above delivers us into the 90s, which is when pop punk derails the power pop discussion. First wave punk rock came and went on roughly the same 70s/early 80s timeline as “Golden Era” power pop and is sometimes seen as its evil twin. “Power pop and punk went hand in hand: Both actively chose to be seen as the dumbest. One was cheerful about it, the other was angry,” writes Heather Havrilesky in her coming-of-age essay about Blondie, ‘Power Pop, Peaches, and Parallel Lines.’

Click to read my full Fountains of Wayne essay from “Go All The Way: A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop.”

Both genres resurfaced at the end of the Millennium, but pop punk broke into the mainstream. Power pop “Purists” openly (angrily?) scoff at the notion that Green Day or Blink-182 qualify as even slightly power pop, but many younger fans — and flexible power pop “Enthusiasts” of all ages — often disagree. And don’t get me started on Brit pop which checks many power pop boxes, but somehow managed to create a totally new genre. Probably because very few of those line-blurring 90s bands, whether pop punk or Brit pop, proclaimed themselves to be power poppers at the time. This seems to be less about stylistic choices and more about commercial viability, since power pop has become a “kiss of death” in the eyes of the music industry, perhaps dating back to the rise of “My Sharona” and the mainstream “Knack-lash” that followed.

“Power pop might be the most inconvenient genre in rock ‘n’ roll,” writes Marko DeSantis in his essay, ‘Surrender.’ His band Sugarcult was accused of fitting the genre early on. “Most contemporary bands that get called power pop immediately dodge the classification in order to avoid the likelihood of forsaking their chances of having a go at mainstream success. Instead, they wisely assimilate neatly into more user-friendly categories like indie rock, modern rock, pop rock, and such.”

This is primarily because, outside a handful of notable exceptions, very few power pop bands achieve commercial success. And even fewer manage to make a career out of it. Or, as Chabon so accurately sums it up, “power pop at its purest is the music of hit records that miss.”

“Pick up any of Not Lame’s International Pop Overthrow collections or the numerous sets that Rhino has issued over the years—Shake Some Action and Come Out and Play, or the three volumes of Poptopia—and you will find that from about 1970, when Badfinger released the first true power pop record, ‘No Matter What’ (which admittedly went to #8 on the US chart), an astonishing amount of effort and genius and chops have been expended by the practitioners of power pop to create a large number of equally well-crafted, tightly played, buoyant-yet-wrenching surefire hit songs that went nowhere, moved no units, never made it out of the band’s hometown, or came heartbreakingly close to Hugeness before sinking, like the Records’ ‘Starry Eyes’ or Bram Tchaikovsky’s ‘Girl of My Dreams,’ back into the obscurity that is the characteristic fate of all great power pop,” Chabon wrote. “Something—maybe it’s the self-consciousness, or the darkness, or that handclap of irony—dooms the would-be hit songs of power pop, so that the Raspberries’ wonderful, parenthetically telling ‘Overnight Sensation (Hit Record),’ with its backup singers hopefully, achingly praying ‘number one!’ over and over in its chorus, never rose any higher than number eighteen.”

Power pop continues to elude easy definition. We know where the term came from, we know the bands and music that inspired it, and we know a few key artists who have played it from the 70s to the present, but none of that gets us any closer to consensus. Instead, it fuels endless debates that many fans seem to relish—and maybe that’s the point.

“A great artist can make you feel like he’s speaking directly to you,” Dave Holmes writes in ‘Thanks for Dancing: Tommy Keene and Other Places that are Gone.’ “It doesn’t matter whether ten or ten million other people had that same feeling. What matters is that we did.”

In other words, each of us probably has our own slightly skewed definition of power pop and we know it when we hear it. For a lot of power pop fans, the ‘fun, fun, fun’ begins when somebody dares to tell us we’re wrong.

Click here to pre-order the sequel to Go All The Way — Go Further: More Literary Appreciations of Power Pop (May, 2021 from Rare Bird).