The Real Power Pop

[koganbot]

If we think of disco and Italodisco as being to the '70s and '80s what rock 'n' roll was to the '50s and early '60s, and if we think of techno and acid house and some of the other visionary stuff in the broad electronic dance area as being to the '80s and '90s and onward what rock was to the '60s and early '70s, then let's say there's the tendency

Comments

[koganbot]

You might ask what this post has to do with my previous post about power pop, the one where I'm calling power pop "pop melodies with loud guitars and sometimes power chords" and then saying that some music that meets that definition (the Dolls, Nirvana) is something other than power pop. And here I'm saying that some music that doesn't meet that definition is not only power pop, it's the real new power pop.

Well, power pop wasn't and isn't a genre designation I've ever cared about deeply, so maybe that's why I'm willing to play with it. "Punk," for example, is a vastly more interesting word, though I doubt that any current music that calls itself punk is actually punk. But when I say that Psy is being something of a punk on "Gentleman" I still have in mind a potential disruption, disturbance, insurgency that matters, even if only in someone's mind. Whereas the words "power" and "pop" actually seem to weaken each other in the phrase "power pop" (so of course I'd want to call the Dolls and Nirvana something else). But I like the idea of a collision between the extreme and the mainstream, the austere and the catchy, the committed and the casual, the stuff that's way out and the stuff that's everyday and opportunistic, each turning into the other and hopping over an established "oppositional" niche. Of course, it can all mulch into nothing.

I like my old pipedream of " extreme pop," like the term "extreme pop" way more than "power pop," though extreme pop is probably something else, something going extreme rather than something meeting the extreme. As for whether some electronic dance music is comparable to "power pop" and other is comparable to "the loud pretties," I'll take either, and at times neither, and my basic intent is to decouple the word "power" from specific sonic moves, rock or avant garde, where once it's linked-in the power tends to die.

[skyecaptain]

I think "power pop" is too entrenched as genre to be uprooted from that. (How 'bout "pipedream pop"?)

Semi-related, I've been thinking a bit about something that I've been calling A-Pop, that is American pop whose influence from K-, J-, Euro- etc. pop equalizes its outward force to those places. Or, put less nationally and more intuitively, A-Pop is the American version of what you're calling power pop here, electronic-based "extreme/scene"/disco-promise of bringing the dance to the whole world (and taking the dance from the whole world).

So maybe one middle ground would be to sidestep the power-qua-actual power (since, like, zero genres that incorporate the word "power" are actually about power, right?) and use ALPHA-pop, the pop that promises new beginning and dance dance liberation and all that stuff? (I don't like the leadership/aggressive connotations of alpha, except that in all of your examples the acceptance into the "power" part of "power pop" also suggests a kind of aggressive leadership. Also don't like the extraversion connotations, since introverted alpha-pop would be like the coolest, though I'm not sure who's making it.)

Who makes A-pop? LMFAO. will.i.am (sometimes). Pitbull (sometimes). Fergie did, Rihanna often does, Gwen Stefani tried but only did occasionally, Katy Perry tries so very hard. Nicki sometimes, Beyonce now more than before (but not really), Madonna made A-pop when there wasn't "A-pop" but doesn't now that there is.

Alpha-pop lets the rest of the world in, the Saxobeats and Crayons and Scooters.

[koganbot]

"Power pop" is entrenched as an adjective but I don't know if it's ever functioned as a genre, e.g., there being power pop stations and power pop magazines and power pop bands, or "Let's go out and hear some power pop." Maybe there are, or were, and I just didn't know about it. I could say "The Bangles are power pop" and "The Go-Gos are power pop" or "The Knack are power pop" but that's not really how those bands got classified generically. Rather they were "pop punk" or "new wave," even though it made sense to call them power pop, too.

[skyecaptain]

Not sure about that -- there seems to be a whole community that self-identifies around power-pop-as-genre. My friend and former professor just wrote a book on Shoes, for instance, and the discussion of it has fairly well-established boundaries:

http://blog.musoscribe.com/?p=4394

Maybe this is just within rockcrit, where when you ask someone to name power-pop bands they will likely gravitate to the 70s-80s stuff and then on to Matthew Sweet and Adam Schlesinger/Fountains of Wayne. (Jonathan Bradley persuasively argued that One Direction are, musically, post FoW power-pop.)

[koganbot]

Actually, I'll bet there are way more people using the term "power pop" than were using the terms "punk rock" and "garage rock" prior to 1976. So if enough people think it's a genre then I guess it is. I mean, rock critics count as people. Still, it seems to have always lived its life in the territory of punk/new wave/postpunk/indie. And I'm not so fond of the term (or fond of it at all) as to need to steal it or liberate it, anyway; though I wouldn't mind if at some time there were enough of an attack on (conventionally defined) power pop's claim to power to hurt the people who are enamored of the genre.

Does your friend Mary have an opinion of Kix? Has she heard Kix?

And what do you suppose she'd think of Crayon Pop's "Bar Bar Bar"?

[koganbot]

I'll bet there are way more people using the term "power pop" than were using the terms "punk rock" and "garage rock" prior to 1976
I mean, way more people currently using the term power pop now, though whether they're really using it as a genre rather than as an adjective isn't necessarily gauged by the number of people who use the term. For that matter, "punk rock" was used as an adjective as well as a genre term from '71 to '75. (Not that "adjective" and "genre" can't overlap one another.)