The Best 50 Powerpop Albums according to RYM

Joan Jett seems pretty power-poppy to me

Can powerpop be sung by women at all?

I guess Bangles are an obvious example, also Holly & The Italians. And, yes, I hear a lot of powerpop elements in The Go-Go's. Generally 80s girl groups who wrote their own material and didn't use a lot of synths have a lot of powerpop in them.

But more than 90s per cent of powerpop singers are males. Which may also have to do with the fact that 100 per cent of powerpop's most important influences had male singers.

sometimes I wonder if you're getting stupider but then I realize no, you were always this stupid

A woman friend of mine during college years, a real power pop aficionado who I think went on to become a music reporter, would disregard out-of-hand any pop band that had a woman in it. Joan Jett was the only exception.

xp So is some of the Donnas' poppier stuff, and Benatar's "Heartbreaker" and "Hig Me With Your Best Shot", and Scandal's "Goodbye To You" and "The Warrior". But for some reason nobody ever mentions people like that when discussing this stuff.

Some good (non-female) '00s indie-label bands I'd definitely consider powerpop, btw (especially if the Exploding Hearts are): FM Knives, Clorox Girls, Briefs, maybe the Hatepinks.

And in reference to nothing in particular, I can't believe nobody (including me) has mentioned the Romantics til now.

Also, fwiw, I think early '60s girl groups have definitely had an influence on some powerpop.

ooh Benatar yeah that's a good one. she could get a little arty/proggy sometimes but those pop singles have a lot of power behind them

xp "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," obviously.

Also powerpop: Tiffany's cover of "I Saw (Him) Standing There." (Though not her cover of "I Think We're Alone Now," probably, even though the Rubinoos also did it. Tommy James maybe a seminal influence in general.)

Disagree with Geir -- I think many power pop singers would have loved to sound like Ronnie Spector.

(wow -- i tried to post this but xhuxk got there first.)

xp And Josie Cotton, "Johnny Are You Queer?" (In fact probably both her LPs. And lots of other cutesy-poo early '80s L.A. girl new-wave stuff.)

Katrina. Marti Jones' 1st.

God I love FM Knives

A few months ago, I made a two-CD compilation of (more or less) power-pop for the husband of a co-worker. I included a number of songs with female voices: Ladybug's "Go," Love Positions' "Twenty-Five More," Fuzzy's "Flashlight," Scrawl's "See," the Primitives' "Stop Killing Me," She Mob's "Your Therapy," the Shop Assistants' "Safety Net," and Velocity Girl's "I Don't Care if You Go." I could just as easily have added Bikini Kill's "False Start," Bratmobile's "Richard," the Vivian Girls' "I Believe in Nothing," or a few others. I don't think any of them would be normally be considered power-pop; my female definition spills over into punk, and often features small, flat vocals. I have no idea what that says about me.

Band that I'm most surprised no one has yet mentioned: the power-pop meets art-rock Electric Light Orchestra. They were pretty great.

uhm ELO has been mentioned

And even if they may not sound the same, I bet virtually every male-fronted power-pop band from 1970 forward has had a fair amount of reverence for the Shangri-Las, the Spector girl-groups, and the Dionne Warwick/Jackie DeShannon (who wrote "Needles and Pins"...) wing of Bacharach/David pop...oops; I tried to search ELO, but maybe I didn't have the whole thread open.

Don't ditch the "here's a tasty coconut" handle--that's like my favourite ever!

listening to some rhino 3-cd cars comp right now that someone brought into the store and man people better never forget how much power they put into their pop. wotta band. reminds me of when i got that 3cd live tom petty thing this winter. that thing just gives and gives and gives for hours. so, i vote cars and tom petty. yes i know what power pop purists call power pop. i've got all those albums too but rilly for all the "in a perfect world jellyfish would have been HUGE" nerd debates all the best power pop bands on earth WERE HUGE a la cars petty abba badfinger elo cheap trick etc. not that i don't dig obscurantism. i am made of it.

Ha ha, I've coined a different word for Scrawl, the Primitives, She Mob, the Shop Assistants, Velocity Girl, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and the Vivian Girls -- I call it "indie rock." (Just kidding, sort of. I actually like some She Mob and Scrawl I've heard a lot -- even wrote about Scrawl for a forgotten bands of the past 20 years Spin issue last year -- and I love the Primitives' "Crash", which is powerpoppy for sure. Not a fan of small introverted vocals, in general, though, which usually tend to hit me as either inept or an infantile affectation -- and that goes equal for male and female ones, I think.)

(Haven't heard most of those other bands Clemenza named in that post.)

That's the thing: when females sing punk, it can sometimes end up sounding very sad and wistful in a way that it rarely (if ever) does when sung by males. Maybe it's a weird variation on the lonely 30-year-old guy trying to write the perfect pop song while being resigned to the fact it will never be heard; the 20-year-old girl trying to write a great punk song while being resigned to the fact that she'll never be taken seriously as a punk by a lot of very shortsighted guys. I'm not in any way saying that applies to all female punks; Poly Styrene, for example, didn't sound like she was worried about not being taken seriously. But I do hear something like that in some of the female songs I listed, and it ends up sounding sort of...power-poppy.

Thus Sang Freud: Infield Fly Rule's "Carolina"--nice! Much more on the jangly side, I'd say. Late '70s? Onto the permanent hard-drive it goes.

wow thanks, clemenza. The single came out in '86, but the project was an attempt to document the sound of my late 70s band that combusted before we could record anything. So...good guess!

Also, fwiw, I think early '60s girl groups have definitely had an influence on some powerpop.

Most pre-hippie age 60s pop (as opposed to obvious, blues influenced, rock) does.

Disagree with Geir -- I think many power pop singers would have loved to sound like Ronnie Spector.

Actually one of the most typical style features of powerpop is these really sugar sweet and clean voices that do vocals for even the hardest of powerpop acts. Which means Ronnie Spector's R&B style of singing really doesn't fit into the thing here. That doesn't mean they don't respect her, or a guy like Steve Marriott for that matter, but it's not powerpop's archetypical vocal style.
I know there are exceptions though, particularly from early powerpop history, when acts such as Badfinger, Raspberries and Blue Ash would often have somewhat "screaming" singers.

TSF, the Pop Flies is you? Very cool. I would have guessed a little later, like 1989 or 1990.

Alright! Now I know three rock stars: Thus Sang Freud, Metal Mike Saunders, and of course I regularly have sex with Beyonce.

you think that's good, my buddy brought me home a piece of cake from eric bloom's wedding.

yeah, that was my little vanity project. sent it out to some folks, sunk w/o a trace, but it got a kind of 2nd life on the cd. which sunk w/o a trace. power pop glory!

Te salut--I won't even try to top that...Not this coming Sunday, but the one after that I'll be doing my power-poppy college radio show in Toronto. If you tune in (online) around 8:00 a.m., I will definitely play "Carolina." After that, I've got two words for you: easy street.

i've got you on a yellow post-it. i can already hear my ship coming in!

Re: female-fronted power pop, Letters to Cleo might be worth a mention here.

The point about powerpoppers in the lineage of Shangri-Las and the 60s girl groups has direct relevance to the are-Miley-and-Selena-powerpop? question. The 60s girl groups were exact predecessors of these acts: people with talent in their own right, who had songs and productions given to them by men. It's a source of fascination that the manufactured nature of 60s girl groups is overlooked by the white male rock history camp, because the men who manufactured the 60s records are revered, but the people behind Hollywood Records are seen as claculting money makers. Like Shadow Morton wasn't.

It's a source of fascination that the manufactured nature of 60s girl groups is overlooked by the white male rock history camp, because the men who manufactured the 60s records are revered, but the people behind Hollywood Records are seen as claculting money makers. Like Shadow Morton wasn't.

can't see this as a source of fascination. "commercial" pop music has long been looked at askance in its era by certain critics, only to be rehabilitated later by others. this process is an industry in itself.

Rejecting 60s girl bands would also mean rejecting virtually all of pre-"What's Going On" black music history, with the exception of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and a few others. But there is a pre-Beatles and post-Beatles here, and other values count in the post-Beatles age than in the pre-Beatles age (for black music, that would be pre-"What's Going On" and post-"What's Going On")

Rejecting 60s girl bands would also mean rejecting virtually all of pre-"What's Going On" black music history...

ummm, no. not that you're inclined to view music in terms of race in the first place...

Wait, does that make sense though? If we say that the Ronettes influenced power pop, but were not themselves power pop, does that necessarily make their present-day equivalent power pop? I'm not saying yes or no, I have no real horse in that race. But the logic doesn't really follow. I mean, the Hollywood Records svengalis could be goffin/king-level geniuses for all I know but that wouldn't make their music power pop. Injecting loud guitars into the mix doesn't necessarily turn one genre into another. Modern country has loud guitars too. And yeah, emo.

I still think that Powerpop was first and foremost influenced by Beatles, Byrds and Beach Boys. But that doesn't make them powerpop either, even though some Beatles songs ("I Feel Fine", "And Your Bird Can Sing") were at least proto powerpop in a way. A genre is also defined by chronology, and powerpop is, by its very definition, a conservative - possibly even reactionary - genre. It was started as protest against the more experimental and freaked out hippie music of the late 60s and has later on been a protest any new style of music that has occured ever since.

And you know what else? I'll go out on a limb here and say that Hollywood Records is not the modern day equivalent of Brill Building girl group pop. Hollywood Records targets, you know, eight-year-olds. That affects the emotional parameters of their songs.

xp

I mean, power pop could get emotionally infantile too, but at least the dates we couldn't get were real dates, not play dates.

And you know what else? I'll go out on a limb here and say that Hollywood Records is not the modern day equivalent of Brill Building girl group pop. Hollywood Records targets, you know, eight-year-olds. That affects the emotional parameters of their songs.

They also target young teenage girls.

Yet, the difference is, girl groups and other mass produced late 50s/early 60s records also targeted teenage males, but it is completely unlikely today that teenage boys will ever fall for something as mass produced and manufactured. Even if it's actually good like those girl group records were.

But, anyway, regarding girl groups, I think it is obvious that girl groups influenced that wave of 80s girl bands who were also powerpop influenced. But that doesn't mean that girl groups are an influence on powerpop in general. The most "classic" powerpop was from the 70s, and all male.

No, not saying the Ronettes were powerpop. Just saying they and their ilk are allowed their own place in music, assessed as artists in their own right, which the Geir argument denies to the Hollywood Records lot.

I agree Hollywood is not the equivalent of Brill Building. But go to a gig by one of those acts. There are quite as many teens as there are little kids. 40 years ago it would have been all teens, cos little kids just weren't taken to shows in the same way.

The argument that girl groups count because boys like them is a load of crap. Because a) it presupposes that for a group to have validity they must have male fans. And b) because you can't prove the records were aimed at boys as well as girls. Are you really telling me Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? was aimed at both sexes? Cos I listen to the words and I hear a song that teenage girls are meant to empathise with. I think its retrospective critical appreciation that won these records male fanbases.

But Brill Building pop was what was around in the early 60s. There was nothing else, thus boys also went for Brill Building (except those of them who - before Beatles - went for R&B, but they were a very select few, other than among African American audiences. A lot of those white kids who did ended up going out and starting a band though)

Folk, blues, country

Folk, blues and country sold even less in 1962-63 than soul music did. You mean the majority of record buyers then - as opposed to now - were females?

You did say there was "nothing else", which is palpably untrue

Oh, and country artists didn't sell in 1962-63? Must be the only year since the early 50s till 2010 when country music didn't sell.

But Brill Building pop was what was around in the early 60s... thus boys also went for Brill Building (except those of them who - before Beatles - went for R&B,

The Beatles went for Brill and for R&B.

Some albums that hit #1 in the US, 1962-63:

Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country And Western Music
Peter Paul & Mary - Peter Paul & Mary
Allan Sherman - My Son The Folk Singer
Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd - Jazz Samba
Stevie Wonder - Little Stevie Wonder/The 12 Year Old Genius
Peter Paul & Mary - In The Wind
The Singing Nun - The Singing Nun

Some singles that hit #1 in the US, 1962-63

Chubby Checker - The Twist
Joey Dee & the Starlighters - Peppermint Twist
Gene Chandler - Duke Of Earl
Elvis Presley - Good Luck Charm
Ray Charles - I Can't Stop Loving You
4 Seasons - Sherry
Bobby 'Boris' Pickett - Monster Mash
4 Seasons - Big Girls Don't Cry
Tornadoes - Telstar
Rooftop Singers - Walk Right In
4 Seasons - Walk Like A Man
Jimmy Soul - If You Wanna Be Happy
Kyu Sakamoto - Sukiyaki
The Essex - Easier Said Than Done
Jan & Dean - Surf City
The Tymes - So Much In Love
Stevie Wonder - Fingertips, Pts 2
Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs - Sugar Shack
The Singing Nun - Dominique

So yeah, Geir's full of baloney, as usual.

Not saying all of those count as soul, folk, or country (no idea where you'd slot Kyu Sakomoto or the Singing Nun for instance), but most of them don't count as Brill Building/girl group. (A few girl group singles -- plus ladies like Connie Francis and Little Peggy March -- did hit #1 on the singles chart in those years, though the closest thing to a girl group album to go #1 was, uh, West Side Story I guess. And I'm guessing it was mostly teenage boys who gave the 4 Seasons all their #1, and even more so "Surf City" and "Monster Mash" and "Duke Of Earl." Bet lots of them bought "Peppermint Twist," too.)

Oh yeah, bet the boys went for "Telstar," too. Surf was total boy rock, even when it comes from England and blasts off like Russian satellite.

Heartless inhuman cyborgs went for "Telstar" too, it was Margaret Thatcher's favourite record of all time

xp And actually, Alan Sherman had three #1 albums in those two years -- all starting with the words My Son (none with My Daughter!); third one, My Son the Nut, #1 for eight weeks, had "Hello Mudduh Hello Faddah!," which sure seems like boy music to me.