Power pop
[3][4] It typically incorporates melodic hooks, vocal harmonies, an energetic performance, and cheerful-sounding music underpinned by a sense of yearning, longing, despair, or self-empowerment.
Many of these young musicians wished to retain the "teenage innocence" of pop and rebelled against newer forms of rock music that were thought to be pretentious and inaccessible.
Power pop reached its commercial peak during the rise of punk and new wave in the late 1970s, with Cheap Trick, the Knack, the Romantics, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, and Dwight Twilley among those enjoying the most success.
After a popular and critical backlash to the genre's biggest hit, "My Sharona" (the Knack, 1979), record companies generally stopped signing power pop groups, and most of the 1970s bands broke up in the early 1980s.
[5] AllMusic describes the style as "a cross between the crunching hard rock of the Who and the sweet melodicism of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, with the ringing guitars of the Byrds thrown in for good measure".
[3] Virtually every artist of the genre has been a rock band consisting of white male musicians who engaged with the song forms, vocal arrangements, chord progressions, rhythm patterns, instrumentation, or overall sound associated with groups of the mid-1960s British Invasion era.
[6] An essential feature of power pop is that its cheerful sounding arrangements are supported by a sense of "yearning", "longing", or "despair" similar to formative works such as "Wouldn't It Be Nice" (the Beach Boys, 1966) and "Pictures of Lily" (the Who, 1967).
"[14] Music journalist John M. Borack also stated in his 2007 book Shake Some Action – The Ultimate Guide to Power Pop that the label is often applied to varied groups and artists with "blissful indifference", noting its use in connection with Britney Spears, Green Day, the Bay City Rollers and Def Leppard.
[21] Greg Shaw credited the Who as the starting point for power pop, whereas Carl Caferelli (writing in Borack's book) said that "the story really begins circa 1964, with the commercial ascension of the Beatles in America.
When Pete Townshend coined the term, he suggested that songs like "I Can't Explain" (1965) and "Substitute" (1966) were more accessible than the changing, more experimental directions other groups such as the Beatles were taking.
Club's Noel Murray said that "once the sound became more viable and widely imitated, it was easier to trace the roots of the genre back to rockabilly, doo-wop, girl groups, and the early records of the Beatles, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Kinks, and the Who.
"[4] Robert Hilburn traced the genre "chiefly from the way the Beatles and the Beach Boys mixed rock character and pure Top 40 instincts in such records as the latter's 'California Girls'.
"[26] Townshend himself was heavily influenced by the guitar work of Beach Boy Carl Wilson,[27] while the Who's debut single "I Can't Explain" was indebted to the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" (1964).
[21] Roy Shuker identified the leading American power pop acts of the time as the Byrds, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Paul Revere and the Raiders.
[7] Lester added that it was "essentially an American response to the British Invasion, made by Anglophiles a couple of years too young to have been in bands the first time round.
[30] Conversely, AllMusic states that while Badfinger were among the groups that established the genre's sound, the Raspberries were the only power pop band of the era to have hit singles.
Developments from that year included the emergence of Big Star and the Raspberries, the release of Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?, and the recording of the Flamin' Groovies' "Shake Some Action"; additionally, many garage bands had stopped emulating the Rolling Stones.
[10] Murray recognized the Raspberries as the most representative power pop band and described their 1972 US top 10 "Go All the Way" as "practically a template for everything the genre could be, from the heavy arena-rock hook to the cooing, teenybopper-friendly verses and chorus.
"[3] Most bands rejected the irreverence, cynicism, and irony that characterized new wave, believing that pop music was an art that reached its apex in the mid-1960s, sometimes referred to as the "poptopia".
[3] Writing for Time in 1978, Jay Cocks cited Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds as "the most accomplished purveyors of power pop", which he described as "the well-groomed stepbrother of punk rock".
Karen Glauber, editor of Hits magazine, said that "The popular conception is that these bands are 'retro,' or not post-modern enough because they're not grunge and because the Posies are from Seattle and don't sound like Mudhoney.
"[43] Velvet Crush's Ric Menck credited Nirvana with ultimately making it "possible for people like Matthew [Sweet] and the Posies and Material Issue and, to some extent, us to get college radio play.
Chicago label The Numero Group issued a compilation album called Yellow Pills: Prefill, featuring overlooked pop tracks from 1979–1982.
For the rest of decade, AllMusic writes, "this group of independent, grass-roots power-pop bands gained a small but dedicated cult following in the United States.
"[3] With the rise of bands like the Apples In Stereo, power pop became a major component of the Elephant 6 music collective's identity often mixing with psychedelic and Slacker rock.
[19] In 1994, Green Day and Weezer popularized pop-punk, an alternative rock variant genre that fuses power pop harmonies with uptempo punk moods.
