Into The Music
Power pop is the genre that never sounds like what its name implies. The “power” part suggests something heavier than it usually is, and the “pop” part suggests something lighter than it almost always is. The genre lives in the tension between those two words: melodically sophisticated but not soft, energetic but not aggressive, smart but not inaccessible. It is the musical equivalent of a song that sounds simple on first listen and reveals itself over dozens of plays.
The lineage runs from the British Invasion through Big Star, from Big Star through the Raspberries and Badfinger, and then outward in all directions through the late 1970s and 1980s into bands like Cheap Trick, the Knack, the Records, and Dwight Twilley. Each of those acts would probably have rejected the label at the time, because power pop has always been a critic’s category more than a scene’s identity. The artists who made the best records in this mode were usually just trying to write great songs; the categorization came later.
What makes power pop distinct from regular pop is the guitar work. The genre demands a particular kind of chiming, melodic lead playing that serves the song rather than showcasing the player. Think of the riff in “Go All the Way” by the Raspberries, or the opening of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me.” These are not complicated guitar parts, but they are compositionally essential in a way that a generic rock riff is not. Remove the guitar from a power pop song and the song does not work. The guitar is not decoration; it is architecture.
The genre went quiet in the early 1990s when grunge rewired the definition of what guitar-based rock was supposed to sound like. Melody became suspect. Clean tones became unfashionable. The kind of craft that power pop demanded started to seem beside the point when bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden were building on pure emotional weight. The shift made sense, but it left a generation of melodically gifted songwriters without a clear home.
What has happened since is gradual and scattered but real. Bands like Fountains of Wayne, Teenage Fanclub, and Sloan kept the tradition alive through the 1990s and 2000s without ever calling it that. Indie pop absorbed a lot of the genre’s harmonic sensibility without the crunch. And more recently, acts like Rocketship, whose debut record A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness just received a proper reissue this week, have been getting a second look from listeners who were too young to encounter them the first time.
That reissue matters as a cultural signal. When a record from the mid-1990s gets a careful reissue with critical attention three decades later, it means something in the listening environment has shifted. People are looking for craft. They are looking for melody as a form of emotional intelligence rather than commercial concession. Power pop, which always believed that a great hook is not a compromise but an achievement, is exactly the right genre for that moment.
The genre will probably never be dominant. It has never been dominant. It exists in the margins, which is where the most interesting music tends to live, and it produces records that outlast the cycles they ignored. That is not a bad deal.
What I find compelling about power pop is that it’s always been a queer-adjacent space without ever fully claiming it. The emphasis on melody over muscle, the careful attention to craft and presentation, the refusal of rock’s more belligerent postures , all of that maps onto something. Cheap Trick, Squeeze, Big Star. These are not macho bands. The genre’s outsider relationship to rock’s mainstream feels worth unpacking more than it usually gets.
The piece is correct that the name misleads, but I’d argue that’s also why the genre never got its due. Big Star’s #1 Record , the original 1972 pressing on Ardent , sounds like nothing that needed a marketing category anyway. Alex Chilton understood something about the relationship between a perfectly constructed verse and the feeling of longing that the heavier bands of that era were too loud to notice. Power pop at its best is essentially the Brill Building ethos run through a Marshall stack. It doesn’t need to be loud. It needs to be right.
I spent many years trying to teach students the difference between a song that is merely loud and a song that is genuinely powerful, and power pop is one of the most useful examples I found. The genre insists that emotion and precision are not opposites. A chorus can be both inevitable and surprising. I think about Badfinger, about the Raspberries , musicians who understood that craftsmanship is its own form of sincerity. That lesson has never gone out of style, even when the genre itself was out of fashion.