Is It Power Pop?!
PART TEN: Thea Wood
This is a guest post series about power pop featuring some of my favorite music writers. We’ll be sharing a new installment every few weeks or so (while supplies last). Full series here.
Is It Power Pop?
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If you grew up in the Detroit suburbs during the ‘70s and ‘80s, you listened to power pop.
We called it pop or rock or soft rock or Top 40 (RIP Casey Kasem), but power pop was the soundtrack for middle-class high schoolers cruising Motor City burbs on Friday night in search of keg parties.
Power pop “authorities” mark The Beatles and The Beach Boys as the genre’s progenitors, mashing up the 1960s British Invasion with the California Sound. The definition expanded through the years to include punk and new wave influences, but one historic constant remains: power pop icons are men.
Of 40+ songs featured in S.W. Lauden's “Is It Power Pop?!” guest post series to date (I highly recommend reading them all), four female acts are listed. That ratio is actually more gender balanced than the power pop lists I discovered online.
As I see it, the power pop genre was and still is a chick magnet for male musicians.
Catchy dance hooks, a rockish guitar solo or rhythm guitar driving harmonic structure, and a healthy dose of sexual tension or longing. This recipe makes a girl swoon.
No wonder men love playing power pop! And no wonder listeners don’t categorize it when women record or perform this music. It’s hard slipping a high heel over a Chelsea boot.
Here are five power pop songs from female/female-fronted acts who deserve to be on the power lists. May the AI bots and SEOs add them to their algorithms and give them their proper place in music history.
“Our Lips Are Sealed” by The Go-Go’s
Not only does this single have all the girl-swoon elements, but it put a girl gang in the relationship driver’s seat. There was no one else like The Go-Go’s on the radio or MTV, and we chicks drank the fem-power kool-aid! To this day, the song’s album Beauty and the Beat marks the only time an all-female band who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
“Message Of Love” by The Pretenders
Front woman Chrissie Hynde is the beautifully-ruffled badass sixth Beatle. The Pretenders’ original lineup only lasted until 1982, but Hynde has kept the band and spirit alive, most recently releasing the albums Relentless (2023) and Pretenders Live - Kick ‘Em Where It Hurts (2025). The new music traverses power pop to psychedelic retro rock guitar jams. Fun Fact: The first 100 videos aired on MTV included four music videos from The Pretenders. Is it just me or is the full list a who’s who of power pop artists? The channel’s glory days...
“Love Is A Good Thing” by Sheryl Crow
Let’s decade jump. If I stayed in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you’d be reading about Blondie’s “One Way Or Another.” But it’s important to recognize that power pop survived the ‘90s thanks to artists like Sheryl Crow. As all genres ebb and flow with cultural shifts, male-fronted acts traded in their power pop Chelsea boots for alt-rock/grunge high tops and Doc Martens.
Crow’s self-titled, sophomore album is a juggernaut that kept power pop in play. “Love Is A Good Thing” is reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Get Back” and “Let It Be” era when pop lyrics expanded from romantic to societal relations. Remember when Walmart banned the album for the “Love Is A Good Thing" opening lyrics:
Watch out sister, watch out brother
Watch our children while they kill each other
With a gun they bought at Walmart discount stores
Walmart still sells guns, but has since banned handguns and AR-15s and their ammunition. Conversely, it now carries all of Sheryl Crow’s albums and related merchandise. One win for artistic freedom.
“Flowers” by Miley Cyrus
No song captures the heartbreak-to-self-love journey like “Flowers.” One may argue that it’s not power pop per the girl swoon definition. My argument lies in the bass line taking center stage and carrying a dance-inducing hook usually reserved for a rhythm or lead guitar. We can all relate to the post-breakup longing for TLC. Cyrus’s revelation that it can come from within helps women and men rediscover self-love. That’s pretty damn sexy. Female artists play by their own power pop rules.
“The Wire” by HAIM
This sister super trio who performs and writes their own tunes personifies California Sound power pop for this Millennium. “The Wire” is from their debut album Days Are Gone and it starts where 1979 left off. Literally. The song intro samples The Eagles’ “Heartache Tonight” and slides into HAIMs signature sound that wraps the hooks, guitars, sexual tension, and longing all into a Casey Kasem's American Top 40, soft rock, power pop smash. If they release an album that hits #1 on Billboard’s U.S. charts, HAIM will prove that The Go-Go’s may be the first but not the last all-female band to make it happen.
Previously On “Is It Power Pop?!”
Is It Power Pop?!
This is a guest post series about power pop featuring some of my favorite music writers. We’ll be sharing a new installment every few weeks or so (while supplies last). Full series here.
Great list Thea! It's helping me to further understand this "power pop" genre. "Our Lips Are Sealed" and "Flowers" definitely have the power and they are very poppy! I agree that there was a LOT of "power" or "soft rock" in the late 70s and early 80s. It seems like anything that energy (besides disco) that had energy in that era might qualify: some Kenny Loggins, the Doobie Brothers, Linda Ronstadt...right?!
When I was little, my room was plastered with posters of rock bands. My sister and I used to duel with competing stereos across the hall. I turned up heavy rock, while she cranked Shaun Cassidy. However, in 1981, she bought the Go-Gos album, and I have to admit that every time she turned up "Our Lips Are Sealed," I let her win because secretly (at the time, I couldn't show my cards), I loved that track!
She passed away in 2010, and not long after she died, I bought a copy of that Go-Gos album. Every time I listen to it, it brings both a smile and a tear.