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“Power Pop” is one of those rare musical terms – a genre designation that effectively describes the sound of the music it refers to, like “heavy metal” or “jangle pop.”
The terms “power” and “pop” are equally important here. Yes, it’s pop music, filled with melodic hooks and tight harmonies, and generally dominated by layers of electric guitar. But it’s also muscular: power pop generally tends towards fast tempos, thick instrumental textures, and big (sometimes anthemic) choruses. The overall vibe is often joyful or celebratory, though sharper and more cynical lyrics are by no means unheard of. And given power pop’s usual tempos and propulsiveness – as well as the fact that it came to maturity in the 1970s – the line separating power pop from punk or pop-punk can be a bit fuzzy. Sometimes the only thing separating power pop from punk is vibe: power pop is never about burning things down, and very rarely about changing the world; instead, it’s almost always about winning someone’s heart or making the most of summer vacation or evoking whimsy.
Famously, the term “power pop” itself was invented in the mid-1960s by The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, as a descriptor of his band’s music (more specifically, the 1967 single “Pictures of Lily”). He said the term also described the music of other 1960s groups including the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Small Faces. If calling the Beatles “power pop” seems puzzling today, it’s probably because pop music has refracted into so many genres and subgenres in the 60 years since that Townshend interview – and, perhaps, because in retrospect the Beatles seem more or less to transcend genre. Despite the timing of Townshend’s invention of the term, it was in the 1970s that power pop really came into its own. But in a couple of ways, circumstances conspired against its success.
On the macro level, power pop’s rise came at roughly the same time as the punk explosion; this tended both to obscure its emergence (since everyone was distracted by the seismic impact of punk’s arrival) and to create a certain amount of genre confusion: were the Nerves punk or power pop? Elvis Costello’s songs show up regularly on power pop compilations – but he got lumped in with punk as well. How about the Buzzcocks, or the Jam, or XTC? Or even the Police’s first album?
On a more micro level, power pop’s fortunes experienced a significant setback with the massive success of the Knack’s “My Sharona” in 1979, which was followed by an equally massive backlash. By this point the general parameters of power pop were pretty well established and The Knack were flagbearers of the genre. But two factors led to disaster for the band: first, “My Sharona” became so ubiquitously overplayed that it created resentment among the listening public. Second, the song was about the singer’s infatuation with an underage girl, and its lyrics were, shall we say, icky. The backlash became so severe that critics and listeners actually started a “Knuke the Knack” campaign – which not only affected the band itself, but also cast a shadow over other power pop artists and releases. For most of the 1980s, “power pop” was a term guaranteed to send radio and record label executives running.
None of this means the music disappeared during that decade, of course – it existed both underground and, in slightly disguised form, above ground. Looking back, it’s hard to categorize the 1980s music of Marshall Crenshaw (think “Someday, Someway”) and Material Issue as anything other than power pop – though by the time they hit the scene, the preferred term was “alternative rock” (or, sometimes, “college rock”). Other power-popsters-by-any-other-name of the era included the Jam, the Posies, Redd Kross, and (arguably) the Replacements.
At the same time, power pop artists who had entered the scene during its pre-backlash heyday in the 1970s continued to tour and record during the subsequent decade, if not with the level of success that their earlier trajectories might have suggested they were destined for. The Romantics had a massive hit with “What I Like About You” just as the 1970s came to a close – and then one more hit (“Talking in Your Sleep”) in 1983. That was pretty much it for them. Shoes signed with Elektra in 1979, and were actually one of the very first bands to have a music video on MTV in 1981; their song “Too Late” cracked the Billboard Top 100. But while they remained active throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and then off and on through the 2010s, they never had a charting single again. Power pop’s most consistently popular avatars in the 1980s were Cheap Trick, who had established themselves as megastars overseas in the 1970s but became a consistently charting arena-rock juggernaut (and constant MTV presence) in the 1980s with hits like “I Want You to Want Me,” “Dream Police,” “If You Want My Love,” and a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel.”
The 1990s created a lot of ambiguity for power pop. On the one hand, the backlash over “My Sharona” had long since faded from the minds of executives, radio programmers, and music listeners and buyers. On the other hand, pretty much everyone had forgotten that there had ever been such a thing as power pop, and the pop music scene was instead flooded with both the much broader category of alt-rock and the more specific subgenre of grunge – the latter, in particular, spurring a new gold rush among record labels as bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden had hit after hit. From the more general alt-rock scene emerged superstars like R.E.M., The Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, and Radiohead. If all of them owed some debt to 1960s and 1970s power pop (consider the chiming 12-string sound of early R.E.M., or Weezer’s possibly-ironic embrace of goofily hooky melodies and enormous guitars), that debt may or may not have been conscious – after all, power pop always was, fundamentally, pop.
But the 1990s was also the decade when being branded a power pop artist pretty much stopped being a problem. This was when Fountains of Wayne, led by the utterly brilliant songwriter Adam Schlesinger, exploded onto the scene, and it was when Green Day came to maturity with a sound that coyly disguised Beatlesque popcraft under a thin punk-rock veneer. Matthew Sweet’s 1991 hit album Girlfriend reminded the music-listening public of how much fun sheer hookiness and straightforward guitar could be, and Fastball sold a million copies of All the Pain Money Can Buy, which sported two top-ten hits singles: “The Way” and “Out of My Head.” There may have been no purer exponents of the classic power pop sound in the 1990s than Fastball.
Since the turn of the 21st century, power pop has continued to simmer along as a vital element of the pop landscape, but one that remains stubbornly below the conscious awareness of most music consumers. Fountains of Wayne had a major hit with the borderline novelty tune “Stacy’s Mom” in 2003 and one of the band’s songs was used in NFL commercials during the 2005 season. (Adam Schelsinger, who died of complications from COVID-19 in 2020, was such a gifted songwriter that he was regularly called upon when movies and stage musicals needed good songs that wouldn’t come with an external pop-culture context.) Other current exponents of the genre include the Well Wishers (a solo project of Jeff Shelton, former frontman of the Spinning Jennies), the New Pornographers, the Click Five, Motion City Soundtrack, and the Dandy Warhols. Power pop may never experience again the degree of market penetration it enjoyed in the late 1970s, but it’s unlikely ever to disappear either.