I’ve been busy with writing and work and such lately, so fewer posts and less substantive material. More pop culture musings.
Anyway, today Francine, fresh off the New Pornographers’ concert we attended, wonders about power pop:
The suggestion is that "power pop" stems first from bands like Big Star, and had more recent appearances in the work of, for example, Matthew Sweet. I am already puzzled. Wasn’t Big Star said to influence the Replacements and the dB’s? The Replacements seem far more punk rock, and more attuned to the rockabilly elements of Alex Chilton’s musical style, than any kind of pop. Plus, that song "Holocaust"? Ain’t no pop in there.
Okay, let’s look at it from another angle. How about Cheap Trick? Many consider them to be an epitome of power pop. But for me, that band only brings up memories of the bad-hair metalhead who sat next to me in math class in tenth grade.
…. What are some other power pop bands? And does anyone have a better definition — or a definition at all — of power pop?
I guess the short answer is that there’s a narrow, prescriptive definition and an inclusive, descriptive one. Big Star is a touchstone of the former, because they combined the barre chords and forced rhythms of the blues-driven rock typified by Led Zeppelin (the "power" part) with the naive lyrics, three-part harmonies and augmented chords of 60s pop. For their efforts they were summarily ignored by their record company and by contemporary audiences, but since then a few bands have reprised the formula: Game Theory, Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, a bunch of not-too-popular late 70s power pop revivalists in the U.S., and a couple of bigger acts (Cheap Trick, the Knack, the Romantics) that took took that revival and popularized it. (If Cheap Trick puts Francine off, it’s likely because they lean closer to the Zeppelin/AOR ethos than the BoxTops ethos in power pop.)
Big Star served as an inspiration for bands that don’t sound all that much like Big Star: Southern jangle-pop, including R.E.M. and Let’s Active; the dBs; and the Replacements, who Francine points out sound more punk than pop. For these, power pop was less a music template than a model of how to merge postpunk muscle with 60s pop influences. Though both the Replacements ("Alex Chilton") and Guided by Voices ("Glad Girls") could do a pretty good pastiche when they wanted.
More broadly, "power pop" applies to any quotation of 60s naive chord structure within a harder contemporary song. Bands like Tuscadero, the Buzzcocks, or the many "punk-pop" acts popular right now. Also, acts like Fountains of Wayne seem removed from the Big Star sound by three degrees: influenced by Cheap Trick, influenced by the 70s revival, influenced by Big Star. Ditto New Pornographers, though I suspect their influences are broader than my musical knowledge. Since the Beatles, Kinks, Who and 50s/60s rock in general get recombined in so many permutations, a large number of acts fit this definition. Hence the confusion.
The wikipedia definition, by the way, lies somewhere in between these two.
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