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| From | "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com> |
| Subject | Re: quintessential power pop |
| Date | Thu, 21 Aug 2003 03:29:17 -0500 |
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> Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 10:38:40 -0400
> From: "josh chasin" <jchasin@nyc.rr.com>
> To: <audities@smoe.org>
> Subject: Re: quintessential power pop
> Message-ID: <004201c36728$bfbb9400$053b8a0a@vnuusa.org>
>
> When my wife asked me to define Power Pop, I declined, opting instead to
> make her a mix CD for her car that would define it for her. I did it in
> chronological order. The first two songs on it are "The Kids Are Alright"
> and "Ticket to Ride."
>
It's probably no accident that those are the same two songs that I
would've picked as 1965's most effective blueprints of power pop. I'm
guessing that a lot of people would pick those two as well.
> Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 11:07:49 -0400
> From: "josh chasin" <jchasin@nyc.rr.com>
> To: <audities@smoe.org>
> Subject: Re: quintessential power pop
> Message-ID: <00cd01c3672c$d23f6da0$053b8a0a@vnuusa.org>
>
> If indeed it all started with Chuck Berry (and with "No Particular Place
> to
> Go" ringing in my head I can't say I disagree) then you can draw a
> straight
> line back from Chuck to his influences, through T-Bone Walker to Charlie
> Christian--
>
Don't forget Louis Jordan, whose postwar jump-blues style was
Berry's most direct antecedent.
> meaning Power Pop has at its earliest ancentry very similar
> roots as the blues.
>
> Like I said, interesting to me...
>
It just goes to show that music styles, unlike the goddess Athena
(speaking of the Who!), don't usually spring to life already fully formed.
One evolves into the next, which evolves into the next, and so on and so
forth.
> I am distinctly reminded of the interview with Chilton in the middle of
> the
> live CD from WLIR on Long Island where they ask him why he plays such
> anachronistic music. I often think that "power pop" didn't become a genre
> until time passed it by; in other words, when the Searchers, Byrds,
> Beatles,
> Who, Kinks, etc. dominated the charts, it didn't need a name-- it was just
> "top-40." When Badfinger, Big Star, and the Raspberries (I tend to toss
> Todd Rundgren in that group as well; Something/Anything was contemporary
> with all their early releases) came out after the "singer/songwriter" and
> glam years, with music borrowing heavily from the verities of 1965,
> suddenly
> you had a genre on your hands. And we all know, genres need names.
>
I think that you hit the nail on the head, Josh. I doubt that there
was any reason to distinguish power pop as a discrete style, much less give
it a name, until it became clear that as an ongoing variation of rock'n'roll
it particularly stuck out like a sore thumb. And in the case of power pop,
much to the chagrin of many of us, the sore-thumb aspect arises from the
fact that it's usually out of fashion, which was as true in 1972 as it is
today.
> Ever since, there have been Power Pop bands, no matter what else was
> happening in music. No question that there was power pop in the mid-70s.
> In the punk/new wave years, well, a lot of that music is classic power
> pop.
> In the synth-laden 80s we got bands like the Romantics, Marshall Crenshaw,
> and the Bangles (who's first album remains a power pop touchstone in my
> book.) The grunge years? Jellyfish, Posies, Teenage Fan Club, Matthew
> Sweet, the Lemonheads. On to today and bands like Fountains of Wayne and
> Weezer (and I'm trying to stick to the relatively populist.)
>
There's certainly always been power pop bands, inasmuch as there's
always been bands that traffic heavily in that style and are closely
identified with it -- even if not all of their songs, as is the case with
Big Star, clearly fit into the power pop category. Sometimes artists are
closely identified with power pop who actually hate that term -- Tommy Keene
springs to mind. And there are plenty of bands who're generally associated
with other subgenres, such as the Ramones (punk) and Kiss (hard rock) who
actually did a lot of songs that fit into the power pop template as well. I
personally think that if the best power pop song of 1977 wasn't "Sheena Is a
Punk Rocker", it was Blue Oyster Cult's "Goin' Through the Motions"
(cowritten by Ian Hunter, by the way). Heck, there's entire subgenres out
there that're really nothing more than power pop with a specific lifestyle
tacked onto it -- glam and mod, f'rinstance.
I tend not to take the narrow view of power pop as being restricted
to certain bands that have a particular slant on clothing, boy/girl lyrics,
haircuts, or the presence of the definite article in the band's name.
Instead, I prefer Adam McIntyre's dual definitions of power pop as being
"rock music with really catchy pop hooks, or pop songs played with power."
> In 1999, Tom Petty said something about rock'n'roll that I think applies
> to
> power pop: "Rock'n'Roll, "he said, "will never go out of style. The
> design
> is flawless."
>
Agreed, and it appropriately came from a guy who has written and
recorded a fistful of power pop classics. If "Ticket To Ride" and "The Kids
Are Alright" were the power pop blueprints of 1965, "American Girl" was a
deathless masterpiece of the form circa 1976.
Gregory Sager
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