These are some of the things that power pop is. It is colourful, dumb and emotional. It is good music to play when you wake up and the sun is shining.
Like most genres, the term power pop is not particularly accurate, and it doesn’t reflect the real world - like the way that ‘punk’ doesn’t just mean any three chord music from 1977, so power pop does not delineate one time-one place. It covers lots of bands, lots of sounds. I can’t talk about them all here, or even a small percentage, but I will describe some of my favourites.
So what is power pop? Well, the ingredients are simple. The lyrics should be about girls, or summer, or girls in summer, or cars, or getting drunk, or getting drunk in a car, or parents telling you what to do. The theme is the minutiae of youth. So the songs are not just the all-encompassing “life is good” or “life is shit”, but “Life is good because I look really fucking cool in these jeans” or “life is shit because I have to mow the lawn.” It’s small things, but feeling them in a really intense way. Maybe youth is the wrong term, since you can be old and make good power pop, but the idea is to look at everything with youthful wonder, as though nothing could ever be more important than right now.
The actual sound is easier to pin down. Guitars must be chime-y, 12 strings preferable, like The Byrds or the best parts of ‘Revolver’. Drums are close and compressed, bass warm and simple. Melodies are primitive, catchy, double tracked and sung by as many people as possible. Singers do not, however, have to be tuneful, but they do have to mean it. Sounding dumb can help, or snotty, or desperate.
Songs are short (it’s pop, right?), less than three minutes, closer to two is better, less than two is ideal. Guitar solos should either follow the vocal melody, or be played with spastic simplicity. Structures are verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo and then repeat the chorus a lot of times. A LOT of times. Don’t try and do anything clever, unless you do it really badly and it sounds funny, which is fine. Sometimes power pop comes down to trying to do something very simple in an intelligent way, by refining each bit to get as much across as quickly as possible. Other times it is doing something simple in a particularly retarded way. Both work. The first can be achieved by hard work and talent, the second by getting really drunk before writing the songs - or by being retarded.
Power pop has its roots in 50’s rock n roll, quick fast injections of heartbreak and cars and milkshakes. Bobby Fuller’s I fought the law could easily be classified as power pop. The sound of power pop, as mentioned, has been lifted from the mid-60s stuff of The Beatles and The Byrds, except without all the crap about love and peace and seeing weird shit on the back of your eyelids. And most power pop people never got famous, and don’t appear in current documentaries glorifying their own past (see Roger ‘cunt’ McGuinn for an example of this phenomenon). Nor are they ever likely to, since power pop never pretended to mean anything.
The Beatles own label were responsible for signing Badfinger, one of the first bands to be classified as power pop. Lots of compression, lots of Abbey Road-style guitars. Check out Baby Blue for an example. The Raspberries were another group in the same vein. And, also ripping off The Beatles, were Big Star, who first perfected the power pop sound, both sonically and lyrically. Thirteen is a fantastic example of what a power pop song should be about: some guy wants to walk a young girl home from school, see her in a swimming costume, take her to a dance, tell her dad to piss off because The Rolling Stones are awesome and he is a dick for not agreeing, and eventually run away and be happy together forever. Yes! It is the ultimate romantic (male) dream for those not just concerned with only getting their end away. At this point, as if it were not already obvious, I will say that power pop is a male world, both in terms of artists and subject material.
At about the same time as punk bands were getting big so were a lot of power pop bands. These guys were thrown in with the punks, and they shared a lot in common – simple songs, simple lyrical themes, lack of technical skill – but they brought a different approach, less snotty, more romance, fewer piercings, less pretensions, no politics. Think My Sharona by The Knack. The best of these bands, and maybe the best power pop band of all, were The Nerves, a one-single-wonder band packed to the brim with song writing talent, so much so that they burst apart almost immediately. These are the guys who wrote hanging on the telephone which Blondie made famous, Gimme some time is a two minute lesson in what it is to be lonely and, my personal favourite, why are you walking out on love? which manages to fit every feeling of frustration at being dumped into one minute twenty seconds and yet still repeat the chorus ten times. After splitting up the band members went on to form other classic power pop acts Paul Collins Beat and The Plimsouls. Paul Collins still tours and is still cool.
The other stand-out band of this era, coming at it from a different angle were The Real Kids. The Real Kids replaced the lonely/confused/heartbroken songs with songs about how awesome chicks are, and isn’t it great to be alive, let’s go out and have some fun cos summers here and it won’t ever end!!! Classics include All kindsa girls about how there are all kinds of girls to fall in love with, Rave on about raving on, and Do the Boob about...not really sure about what Do the boob is about, actually, and I think that is the point.
The late seventies were the golden era, when hundreds of kids decided they could write super awesome pop classics with their friends. Compilations like ‘Yellow Pills’ and ‘Roots of Power Pop’ document the hundreds and hundreds of excellent releases, much like the ‘Nuggets’ do for 60s garage rock. You can pick up a whole load of these for not much money and attract the opposite sex with your great music taste. You can then listen to all the songs about heart break when that person leaves you for being a loser.
All was good in the world of power pop. Then came the eighties, and things were not so good. A lot of the bands from the late 70s had put out a few 7” records, and generated some hype. Then they got signed and produced eighties albums. The problem for power pop is that, at its best, it is right on the edge of being too much, too cheesy, too throwaway...eighties production values pushed it too far, and it became really really irritating. That most evil thing – the eighties drum sound – had struck again. Some good stuff did survive the gated-snare onslaught, like the aforementioned Paul Collins Beat, but much is worth avoiding.
As for the nineties...Teenage Fanclub, anyone? And right now power pop continues, through bands like Gentleman Jess & His Men or some of Nobunny’s stuff.
There are thousands and thousands of power pop records out there, and I hardly mentioned any of them, so don’t bother whining about it because I don’t care. Just go out and buy some of it, live in the moment, treat every day as a Saturday, in a world of excitement, beer, women, cheap cigarettes, cool clothes and all that other stuff you know you want but never knew you needed. Power pop is everything good about being young, not in age, but in spirit.
Essential Listening: Bomp Records - The Roots of Powerpop Yellow Pills - Volume 1 Real Kids - Real Kids Nerves - One Way ticket Big Star - #1 Record/Radio City
Further Listening: The Toms - The Toms The Incredible Kidda Band - Too much, too little, too late Nick Lowe - The Jesus of Cool The Quick - Mondo Deco The Boys - To hell with the boys