No Matter What
Even Power Pop Purists Agree On Certain Songs
Diehard power pop fans love to debate.
There’s nothing devoted, factoid-wielding genre addicts enjoy more than mixing it up about which artists, albums and songs qualify as power pop and—perhaps, more importantly—which ones definitely do not.
The endless back and forth happens because there is no universal definition for our beloved subgenre. We know it when we hear it and boy do we want everybody to know when we hear it…often getting even louder when somebody else’s opinion is wrong.
Pete Townshend coined the term in in 1967 to describe The Who’s “Picture of Lily”:
Power pop is what we play—what the Small Faces used to play, and the kind of pop The Beach Boys played in the days of ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ which I preferred.
That quote—which avoids mentioning The Beatles, a key influence for most power pop bands from any era—eventually launched a style of music that has evaded consensus for 50+ years. Yet for all the strong opinions, gatekeeping, and purism, there are a handful of core songs most fans can agree on.
I recently posed this question on Substack’s social platform Notes: What is the single best power pop song of all time?
I sometimes do this to draw out other power pop fans in my orbit. Despite the endless bickering, there’s a general sense of underdog camaraderie among supporters of Beatlesque guitar pop. Selfishly, there’s simply no better source for discovering hidden gems from the past and modern artists flying the genre’s tattered flag.
The responses to my most recent post didn’t disappoint. Many artists from the power pop pantheon were praised (Badfinger, Big Star, Raspberries, Todd Rundgren, Flamin’ Groovies, Cheap Trick, Shoes, The Records, Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, et al.). And there were quite a few welcome surprises as well (The Cyrus Erie, The Heats, The Monroes, Dow Jones & The Industrials, Miracle Brah, and many more).
I personally felt The Nerves—who wrote and recorded “Hanging on the Telephone” before Blondie made it famous—were criminally overlooked. (See? So many opinions!)
Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and Big Star’s “September Gurls” were among the two most mentioned.
That reminded me of a power pop bracket tournament I initiated in 2021. Hindsight being, er, 20/20, I’ll admit it was a questionable idea—but it seemed like a fun, never repeated experiment at the time. As the Fab Four might say, “We were having a larf.”
Paul Myers and I were promoting Go Further: More Literary Appreciations of Power Pop, the second essay collection we co-edited for Rare Bird Books. We enlisted contributor/power pop aficionado John Borack and cooked up a list of seed tracks.
COVID-era online power pop groups were still flourishing back then, so the bracket tourney got a solid response. It didn’t hurt that fans could predict the winner to score a Big Stir Records gift card, or copies of Go Further and Borack’s The Beatles 100.
You know, marketing.
It started with 32 songs by 32 different artists.
Putting that list together was a nearly impossible task for the three of us. We easily could have started with 64 songs—maybe even 128—but we wanted to keep the tournament short and sweet like many of our favorite tracks:
“Go All the Way” — Raspberries
“September Gurls” — Big Star
“No Matter What” — Badfinger
“Couldn’t I Just Tell You” — Todd Rundgren
“Shake Some Action” — Flamin’ Groovies
“Cynical Girl” — Marshall Crenshaw
“I Can’t Take It” — Cheap Trick
“Yellow Pills” — 20/20
“Starry Eyes” — The Records
“Girl of My Dreams” — Bram Tchaikovsky
“My Sharona” — The Knack
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” — Pezband
“Precious to Me” — Phil Seymour
“Teenline” — The Shivvers
“Zero Hour” — Plimsouls
“What I Like About You” — The Romantics
“Too Late” — Shoes
“The Good In Everyone” — by Sloan
“She’s So Young” — The Pursuit of Happiness
“Somebody Made for Me” — Emitt Rhodes
“Rock ‘n’ Roll Girl” — The Beat
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” — The Rubinoos
“Places That Are Gone” — Tommy Keene
“I’ve Been Waiting” — Matthew Sweet
“What You Do to Me” — Teenage Fanclub
“Diane” — Material Issue
“Behind the Wall of Sleep” — Smithereens
“I’m On Fire” — Dwight Twilley Band
“Dreaming” — Blondie
“Solar Sister” — The Posies
“Little Red Light” — Fountains of Wayne
“She Say Yea” — The Scruffs
There were five rounds of public voting over one week on a self-service bracket contest platform. In the end, Badfinger’s “No Matter What” beat out Big Star’s “September Gurls” in the finals to be crowned the champion.
Here are the songs “No Matter What” had to beat:
Round 1: “Zero Hour” — The Plimsouls
Round 2: “Girl of my Dreams” — Bram Tchaikovsky
Round 3: “Shake Some Action” — Flamin’ Groovies
Round 4: “Starry Eyes” — The Records
Round 5 (Finals): “September Gurls” — Big Star
By comparison, here’s who “September Gurls” bested:
Round 1: “Baby It’s Cold Outside”— Pezband
Round 2: “Go All The Way” — Raspberries
Round 3: “Behind the Wall of Sleep” — The Smithereens
Round 4: “Couldn’t I Just Tell You” — Todd Rundgren
It’s no surprise to me that the two finalists were excellent examples of power pop’s first golden age. “No Matter What” was a single from Badfinger’s 1970 album, No Dice; “September Gurls” was a single from Big Star’s 1974 album, Radio City.
“No Matter What” was a top 10 hit, remarkable given that chart positions are often elusive in power pop. “September Gurls” flopped on release, but Big Star (and that track in particular) got a second life starting in the late ‘70s and throughout the ‘80s.
Sadly, Badfinger and Big Star both came to their own tragic ends in the ‘70s—a few years before a new wave of groups like Shoes, The Records, The Knack, and 20/20 arrived—but both bands have earned their rightful place as power pop progenitors.
Moral of the story is that everybody wins when it comes to music this great.
That power pop bracket tournament was by no means definitive, but it’s interesting that I got a similar informal result 5 years later—at least when it came to the finalists.
Revisiting the 32 songs/artists we chose in 2021, I decided it was a pretty solid introduction. So, I created a new playlist called “Power Pop 101.”
The Spotify version’s above. Click on the image below for theYouTube version.
Happy listening!
What’s Your Favorite Power Pop Song Of All Time?
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 week or two in January and February. Full series here.
Here's a "No Matter What" debate topic that a friend raised just the other day: Does the recording have a) Not enough handclaps, b) Just the right amount of handclaps, or c) Too many handclaps?
I'm sure there'll be some snickering over this:
I consider "Squeeze Box" by The Who to be a definitive power pop song.