Power Pop: The Genre That Refuses To Go Away
And it shouldn’t
We’re in the age of simplifying things. So how do you explain power pop, a music genre that has ‘simple’ as its middle name? After all, it is supposed to have relatively brief songs with a ‘bright’ catchy melody, a lot of harmony vocals, and ‘crunchy’ guitar riffs? Well, you give it a simple explanation to boot — “Power pop is The Beatles meets The Who. That’s literally all there is to it.”
And people seem to ‘simply’ adhere to this explanation, partly due to the explanation The Who leader Pete Townsend gave himself back in 1967, “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 preferred.” Of course, Townsend himself simplified things a bit omitting The Beatles and saying their “Paperback Writer” (or most of their pre-“Rubber Soul” catalog for that matter), or The Kinks and their iconic “You Really Got Me” (and quite a few others), or The Byrds’ jangly guitars, or yet again, the great harmony changes of The Zombies…
