Is It Power Pop?!

PART ONE: Kevin Alexander

This is a guest post series about power pop featuring some of my favorite music writers. We’ll be sharing a new installment every week or two in January and February.

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Is It Power Pop?

By

Kevin Alexander

That question has long been a favorite parlor game of music nerds and fodder for countless Talmudic debates. The litmus tests are pretty straightforward: Power pop is defined by catchy hooks, the guitar-forward sound we generally recognize as pop/rock, and weapons-grade doses of harmony. It's anthemic but not overbearing, sentimental without being sappy, and sarcastic but never mean.

It seems easy enough, but the word "defined" is doing a lot of work here. What one might hear as catchy, another might not. Is that harmony? Maybe yes, maybe no. Your mileage may vary. Even as a sub-genre, it's a big umbrella, covering things like jangle pop and tracks that wade more into new wave waters.

For me, it's all of the above. In order to get my vote, the vocals (or lyrics) have to evoke a sense of want. Whether it's a lament about unrequited love, a love lost, or wanting more of a good thing, the sense of longing has to be there.

My onramp to power pop was an early one. My dad listened to jazz, and my mom's record collection was full of records by groups like The Beach Boys. As a kid, I would spend hours on the floor with two-sizes-too-big headphones, listening to whatever they'd put on for me. I'd heard it, even if I didn't know that it had a name.

That said, the tracks below are a few of my favorites. These represent elements of everything I've listed above—think of it as a Venn diagram, with "Kevin's favorites" as the overlap.

“Slipping Away” by Dave Edmunds

Speaking of fun games, mentioning MTV is a way to get someone to reveal their age. The immediate response is always a tell. People of a certain age reflexively launch into a screed about remembering when MTV used to play music. I'm gonna carbon date myself here, but there was once a time when MTV still played videos and was a viable tool for music discovery.

Seeing this song flash across the screen was a real "wait, what?!" moment for me. The muscular riffs...The oohs and ahs...Edmund's plaintive wails—to say nothing of the race cars in the video.

If this reminds you of ELO, trust your gut; Jeff Lynne wrote and produced it. But I didn't know that then, and to be honest, it probably wouldn't have much mattered—I didn't know who they were, either. With time, all of the minutiae around genres and sub-genres would come. For now, in my mind, this is what rock and roll was, and I couldn't get enough.

“Little Mascara” (Ed Stasium Mix) by The Replacements

It took almost a generation for The Replacement's Tim to get the treatment it deserved, but in 2023, Ed Stasium finally delivered. The original was flat and hobbled by a tinny sound. Some will argue that this is a feature, not a bug. For me, the remix brought up—and out—the best parts of the band. Reviewing the record, I noted that no track better encapsulates all this than the "new" version of "Little Mascara."

Westerberg has a knack for squeezing an entire story into one verse; this is no exception. Parts have been moved around and overhauled. The intro is now the chorus, each verse a step up to the next, and the whole track is now somehow even more anthemic than it was—and that's before we get to the outro, which is much longer and features a ripping solo by Stinson. The original is good, but this is sublime.

“Just What I Needed” by The Cars

Few tracks blend power pop and new wave as deftly as "Just What I Needed." It's a novel sound, but not a novelty. It's the sort of song that's impossible to grow tired of—at least for me, anyway.

I misspent a good chunk of my youth at a dive bar not too far from my house. It had worn carpet, dirty windows, and a rogues’ gallery of regulars nursing bottles of Michelob and playing Keno.

I loved it.

What they lacked in ambiance, they made up for with the jukebox, and it was almost guaranteed that you would hear The Cars. The bartender was a little guy with big hair, and he'd sing along every time, like clockwork. It never got old, no matter how many times he did it.

“Denise” by Fountains of Wayne

Power pop perfection. And who but Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger could've gifted us a lyric like "She works at Liberty Travel/She's got a heart made of gravel." Remember when people actually went to travel agencies?

A few years later, the band would have a smash hit with "Stacy's Mom" (along with the unfair burden of a one-hit-wonder tag), but in 1999, this was checking every box. Who could forget a song with riffs like these?

As I type this, this song is ~25 years old and still sounds ahead of its time. 11/10. No notes.

“Love is For Lovers” by The dBs

At some point, someone will write a book on power pop definitions. Someone will make the SparkCharts version, and it will just be a picture of The dBs' 1984 record Like This, or more specifically, this song.

If ever a track was an out-of-the-box power pop song, this is it. Listening, it seems like the band took the power pop menu and ordered one of everything. Propulsive drums, a hook designed for singing along to in the shower or car, and a blistering solo—it's got it all.

On top of that, it was a song about love. Because, of course, it was. In an ideal world, this would've been a massive hit, been featured in at least a couple of John Hughes movies, and become a staple on a Sirius XM channel or two. The reality was that their label (Bearsville) lost its distribution deal with Warner at the worst possible time. The record was released, and that was it. There was no promotion, no single in stores, and no video on MTV.

I'm not 100% certain where I first heard it; I'm pretty sure it was on a mixtape given to me at school. I am 100% sure I've been caught singing it while stopped at a red light. The band has had a couple of records reissued/remastered recently, and drummer Will Rigby hinted that Like This "might" see a similar treatment.

We should be so lucky.

So, is it power pop?

That's a good question. In the end, a listener has to use the same abstract criteria you'd use when rating something like "quantity." It's a struggle to articulate, but you know—and feel—it when you hear it.

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Kevin Alexander is an independent music journalist in Wisconsin. He writes the On Repeat Records newsletter and is the editor-in-chief of The Riff magazine.

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