Handmade Playlist of the Day: “Power Pop 4: Crypto-Power Pop"

Not that kind of crypto.

1.

Over at Remember the Lightning, leading power-pop epistemologist S.W. Lauden has taken a pair of apophatic shears to one of power pop fandom’s shaggiest questions, which got me thinking about how, after you have deeply immersed yourself in a musical subgenre and developed a feel for its traits and boundaries, a song by an artist not generally associated with that subgenre, even one you’ve heard a thousand times before, will suddenly, clearly, belong.

I don’t mean (though naturally I take an interest in) precursors, forerunners, and proto-instances, like the Stooges’ 1973 “Search and Destroy" (punk), or Pigmeat Markham’s 1968 “Here Comes the Judge” (hip-hop), or—so an old friend used to argue—the Supremes’ 1966 “Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart” (disco).

I also don’t mean (to carry on with S.W. Lauden’s eliminative method of definition) those tracks where a band or artist ventured into an unaccustomed but then-current subgenre in an attempt to refresh or sustain their cred (as with Blondie’s 1980 “Rapture”), to cash in (Rod Stewart’s 1978 “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” and every other disco track cut by white rock artists of the day, from the Rolling Stones to KISS), or simply to pay conscious tribute to a formative influence, like Billy Joel’s 1984 “The Longest Time” (doo wop), or the Clash’s 1980 “Bankrobber” (dub).

I’m talking about that moment when your musical mind (often shorthanded as your “ear”), attuned deeply to a particular subgenre frame, abruptly reframes a song from another subgenre, and thereby uncovers it, revealing its secret musical nature. You hear influences hitherto hidden or unsuspected—influences that may or may not have been conscious, that may indeed be coincidental, or even imaginary.¹ Unexpectedly forging this kind of cross-genre connection can unjade your ear, renew your interest in a song that you long since stopped really hearing, or lost interest in, or never even actually liked.

Here are two examples of what I do mean. Both are tracks that I’d listened to countless times over the years without troubling too much about their respective subgenres. But then came Lockdown, a period I spent listening obsessively to vintage 1970s progressive rock, and suddenly both tracks, which had seemed until now to have little or nothing in common, presented themselves to my ear the next time I heard them as obviously, if secretly, prog:

“Terrapin Station” — The Grateful Dead

“Paranoid Android” — Radiohead

2.

All this is by way of setting the table for today’s Handmade Playlist, fourth in my set of (to date) six power pop compilations, featuring gems of true power pop (at least to my ear), issued by artists not generally regarded (particularly by themselves) as power-pop practitioners.

“Power Pop 4: Crypto-Power Pop”

Selected Notes

“Cry Tough” and “Talk Dirty to Me” - Poison

I love that Lauden kicks off his consideration of hair metal as power pop with this almost excessively glorious 1986 track, because it was the experience of hearing “Cry Tough” on the car radio, for the first time in thirty-odd years, while driving along a summertime Maine backroad with the windows rolled down, that pushed me to begin assembling this playlist, whose candidate tracks I had been juggling in my head for years.

As for “Talk Dirty to Me,” listen to it, and don’t think about hair. Built around (I believe) a I-IV-V major chord progression, more bouncy than pounding in tempo, lyrically drenched in frustrated youthful desire expressed in cliched “teenager” terms (the drive-in, the old man’s Ford) given an ironic, slightly rancid Knack-like twist: this is 100% power pop, right down to the crucial guitar solo. It’s at their solos, piled high, as they tend to be, with pinch harmonics, dive bombs, Van Halen-style tapping, legato, wah, and other sonic equivalents of tonsorial loft, that candidate hair metal tracks tend to falter as power pop; but C.C. DeVille’s solo here is deft, bright, tidy, and typically offered in service to the needs of the song itself.

“Your Love” - The Outfield

One might load this playlist with great power pop singles by one-hit wonders, like this 1985 track, or “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone , or 1981’s “Jessie’s Girl” by soap opera hunk Rick Springfield, that are “crypto-power pop” not because the artists who recorded them had planted their flag in in some other subgenre, such as hair metal or heartland rock, but because they didn’t stick around long enough, or generate enough of a cult following, to plant any flag at all.

“Down On My Knees” - Bread

I hesitated about this one because, while technically the subgenre eventually known as power pop was already flourishing by 1972 in the hands of Badfinger and the Raspberries, “Down On My Knees” was apparently written in a London hotel room during the band’s first tour of the UK, and I’m not sure that this very early-Beatlesque track doesn’t properly belong in the “fond tribute” category with something like “For the Longest Time.” But it’s such a departure from Bread’s signature soft-as-Qiana , Pet Sounds on Quaaludes sound (which, by the way, I adore) that I could not leave it off.

Yes, I do have a Bread t-shirt.

“Voice on the Radio” - Andre Cymone

First bassist to tour with Prince (see below, twice) and a musical prodigy in his own right, Cymone emerged from a warp nacelle of the vast seething Minneapolis mothership with a pretty great record called Living in the New Wave, on which he Princeastically played almost all of the instruments. Much of the album was hyper-drive synth funk of the sort that enlivens Dirty Mind and Controversy, but this track—in hindsight—was pure power pop, from its jangly guitars to its omnipresent but intangible, unobtainable, possibly nonexistent dream girl.

“The Ties That Bind” & “Whitetown” - Bruce Springsteen

I have two Springsteen tracks on here (and one might consider “Bobby Jean,” my favorite track on Born in the USA, suggesting that perhaps Bruce is not quite as crypto- as all that). Only a sax solo (rare in power pop) and the doom-shadowed, Rust Belt Old Testament lyrics (which make sense for a song originally intended as the title track to an uncompleted successor to Darkness on the Edge of Town) separate this sparkling slab of Spectorian Byrds-y splendor from power pop perfection. And “Whitetown”, an unused track from the same aborted sessions, is just plain gorgeous, rolling on great glittering surges of guitar like the ocean in which Big Star’s Chris Bell tried to drown himself on “I Am the Cosmos.”

“Stone In Love” - Journey

And Boston, too! Friends, I call them like I hear them. To any lovers of both prog and power pop, like me, who has ever wondered what it would sound like if the subgenres had a baby, one which they both immediately disowned and exposed on a hillside to be eaten by wolves, one possible answer is: Journey. “Stone In Love” is one of two Journey tracks I would intervene to spare from cosmic oblivion; I will keep the other to myself, for now.

“Mannequin” - Wire

In a way, the most crypto- track on here. Wire offered a sharp, angular critique of all the forces powering the production and marketing machinery that sold pop music and controlled the minds and bodies of those who consumed it, but something deep, irresistible, and obdurate in the heart of this band adored the stuff, and this one goes on the playlist.

“Echos Myron” - Guided By Voices

I hesitated over this one, too. These guys actually have a bunch of songs that asymptotically approach power pop, and at least one, “Glad Girls,” that is power pop out-and-out (if lyrically modest, for Pollard). And yet what unlikely contestant on Music Nerd Family Feud, when asked what the Survey had to say on the subject of power pop bands, would ever waste a guess on Guided By Voices?

“Ready Steady Go” - Generation X

The often-hazy sonic boundary, a zone of chiming guitar attack and catchy hooks, that separated first-gen UK punk from power pop, was completely effaced by a later generation of pop-punk bands like Blink 182, bands who copped four-fifths of their sound from the sorely underrated Generation X (and the other fifth from the even more sorely underrated Only Ones). It’s hard, therefore, to characterize a lot of early British punk as genuinely “crypto-” when its pop heart is so often worn on its sleeve, right alongside the power. But this song, with its unexpected (for a punk band), almost wistful evocation of a vanished musical moment in the unrecoverable past, belongs. Also, look how fucking adorable Billy Idol was in 1978!

“Tomorrow” - KISS & “Wouldn’t You Like To Know Me” - Paul Stanley

In an essay found in Go All The Way, that key text of power pop scholarship co-edited by Lauden and 9th-level muso grandmaster, my friend

Paul Myers

), Ken Sharp proved conclusively that over the years Paul Stanley routinely smuggled his love for seminal power-pop founding band the Raspberries, and for the sub-genre generally, into the jump-scary haunted house carnival ride of KISS, snuggled between his glitter corset and his dark chest pelt like a beloved plush transitional object, and I have nothing to add to Sharp’s sharp observation

“Fly High Michelle”- Enuff Z’Nuff

Cited also by Lauden. I heard this song on the radio only in pieces, only a few tantalizing times in 1990, when it was released, and until I finally saw the video on MTV, with the hair, and the hairbands, and the style and palette out of a Muppets bondage flick, I assumed the band were working the same heavy-but-gorgeous power-pop vein as their contemporaries, the Posies. So much of what constitutes our judgment of musical subgenre turns out to be visual, not auditory.

“I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” & “When You Were Mine” - Prince

If I told you that Prince had recorded a song that was a fine example of pretty much any pop sub-genre—outlaw country, emo, reggaeton—would there be any basis, in the range and quality of his known recorded output, for disbelief? It might be argued that with its synthy shimmer, “When You Were Mine” is more properly heard as New Wave than as power pop; its release date (1980) and the fact that it was covered by Late Rococo New Wave diva Cyndi Lauper lend weight to the argument. But the borderland of New Wave and power pop is as debatable as the one between the latter and punk². And while the lyrical conceit of “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” runs counter to the general power-pop ethos of only wanting someone who is, for any number of reasons, unavailable, this flaw is counterbalanced by the presence of handclaps, as good an indicator of power pop as a dirigible is of steampunk.

“Only In Your Heart” - America

Piano-driven tracks are uncommon in power pop—some might argue, plausibly, that the word “power,” in the context, is shorthand for “guitar power.” On the other hand, key tracks by Emmit Rhodes, an undisputed pioneer of power pop, are built around strong piano riffs: “With My Face On The Floor,” “Fresh As A Daisy,” et al. But perhaps those particular Rhodes tracks are less power pop than they are simply “Beatlesque?” Listening to “Only In Your Heart,” a scholar can sit for a full two minutes and ten seconds in a state of acute diairetic paralysis, encouraged by the presence of carefully layered three-part vocal harmonies and a named female addressee in the lyrics, but discouraged that the name is plain old “Mary” and not something more power-poppy like “Jill,” or “Lisa Anne” or, of course, “Sharona”; and then, around the 02:13 mark, after a prefatory silence broken only by a couple of passing synth squiggles, comes Gerry Beckley’s remarkable backwards-masked, “Rain”-y guitar solo—like anything properly crypto-, it always comes as a surprise—powered by some truly massive Hal Blaine drumming, and onto the playlist it goes.

“Hang Down Your Head” - Tom Waits

I know, I know. The vocal, though just about as sweet and plangent as Waits ever gets, is still too gravelly. The rhythm, though the time signature (to my untrained ear) is a solid 4/4, is too syncopated, with a slinky echo of New Orleans. The lyrics, co-written by Waits’s wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, address a named female (Marie) in good power pop style, but they are too poetic, too antiquarian, just too damn mournful. And, fundamentally: Tom Waits, power pop? Come on, Chabon. But then, as with “Only In Your Heart” (but even more), you come to the guitar solo—Marc Ribot’s lilting, lyrical, rich, and meaty solo, a solo that as far as I know is unlike any that this gifted but decidedly avant-gardish stylist ever played, before or since, a solo tossed off, without any preparation, on a knockoff Telecaster: and “Hang Down Your Head” flashes forth a bright, bittersweet power-pop beam.

“Blood Red Summer” - Coheed and Cambria

Are all Coheed and Cambria fans as lonely in their fandom as me? I mean, yes, “we” are all over the internet, and presumably turn out in great numbers for live shows (and I’ve had to miss out on a couple of opportunities to see them over the years). But I am the only person I know personally who even likes them at all (let alone fucking flat-out loves them). I have failed in all my attempts to recruit people whose taste in music (a liking for Rush, say; or for the late, lamented Sword) or in comics (C and C’s music is deeply entwined with an elaborate, multi-part space-opera epic graphic novel series written by band founder Claudio Sanchez) suggests they might join me in my flat-out fucking love; but alas.

Maybe my approach has been misguided up till now. The surprising but fundamental truth about Sanchez is that he is a pop genius who thinks, musically, in hooks; the tastiest, catchiest, hookiest hooks imaginable, in apparently limitless supply. Even when voyaging deep into the distortions of metalspace the band’s sound tends to remain bright, clean, and tight, un-sludgy, even oddly chipper, and most of their albums feature tracks or passages that, lifted from the Greek-tragic spacewar context and nebular afflatus of doom, verge quite clearly on power pop: of the quirky, musically complex variety. When the band had an unexpected top 40 hit in 2003 with “A Favor House Atlantic,” a lot of people remarked on a resemblance between Sanchez’s vocals and Geddy Lee’s and, sure, I can hear it. But when I listen to the intricate hook-rich textured pop of “Blood Red Summer” and try as hard as I can—the way proper crypto-hunting demands—to forget all context, and just listen to the song, I hear a kinship to another reedy voice: the voice of lost power-pop genius Scott Miller, like Sanchez a craftsman and a careful student of Led Zeppelin, and suddenly Coheed and Cambria seems to occupy a space somewhere between “Erica’s Word” and “Regenesraen.”

Streaming Links

Spotify

Apple Music

1. Such influences do need, however, to be possible. The proposed crypto-subgenre needs to have actually existed (though not necessarily to have been named) when the track was recorded. This is what rules out precursor tracks; crypto- is not proto-.

2. Apart from the Cars, who like some vast glossy geographical survey pylon stand squarely athwart it.