Pure Pop For Now People

I've been listening to a ton of new music recently, for the first time in a while. It's been cool to be able to get back into new stuff, and to be able to find and hear just about anything that I read about or that a friend mentions. I haven't been absorbing new music at this rate since college, and honestly I don't know how much longer I can do it, for a number of reasons.

But, while it lasts, it's great. I've discovered bands that I can't believe I hadn't heard, rediscovered old favorites, and sought out obscure stuff that has blown me away. Through it all I re-affirmed something that I've known for a long time: I love power pop. Sure, it's a simple structure: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, fade -- but so is a haiku. When it's done right, there's nothing better.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here is my Rob Gordon Top Five Power Pop Albums of the last few decades (listed alphabetically):

1970s:

Big Star, #1 Record The
Boomtown Rats, The Fine Art of Surfacing
Elvis Costello & the Attractions, This Year's Model
Paul McCartney & Wings, Band on the Run
Graham Parker, Squeezing Out Sparks

1980s:

Aztec Camera, High Land Hard Rain
Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime
Michael Penn, March
The Replacements, Pleased to Meet Me
Rockpile, Seconds of Pleasure

To my ear, the 90s were the zenith of power pop. Now, I might think that because I was in my 20s in the 90s, and studies have shown that you tend to lionize the music you hear in your early 20s. Whatever the reason, when I go through my collection, the vast majority of great pop albums come from that decade. So the 90s get a Top Ten:

Cake, Fashion Nugget
Fastball, All the Pain Money Can Buy
Green Day, Nimrod
Guided By Voices, Bee Thousand
Kleenex Girl Wonder, Ponyoak
The Loud Family, Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things
Owsley, Owsley
The Posies, Amazing Disgrace
Matthew Sweet, Girlfriend
Sloan, Navy Blues

The current decade (Actually the first seven years, because it's too soon to put any '07 releases on this list) gets a top ten as well:

Mike Doughty, Haughty Melodic
Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers
The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
The New Pornographers, Electric Version
Old 97's, Satellite Rides
The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
Spoon, Gimme Fiction
Weezer, Weezer (The Green Album)
The White Stripes, White Blood Cells
XTC, Wasp Star

Careful readers (and just about everyone else) will notice that I have a pretty wide definition of pop. There's punk-pop in there (Minutemen, Green Day), and some alt-country-tinged stuff (New Pornographers, Old 97's), and straightforward rock (The Hold Steady, White Stripes), among other genres.

I don't care. And I'm not that interested in a discussion of what is, or isn't, "pop." My pop music is a big tent; for the most part I subscribe to my friend Scraps' definition of pop, as least as it compares to rock:

Pop:
* Jangly guitar, played in discrete notes
* Clean sound
* Emphasis on harmony in vocal
* Heart of song is the hook, a catchy extended musical phrase repeated two to six or so times in a song, usually the chorus
* Structures usually emphasize the relationship of the parts of the song to each other

Rock:
* Howling guitar, played in extended notes
* Noisy sound
* Emphasis on emoting in vocal
* Heart of song is the riff, a punchy short phrase repeated dozens of times in a song, often one in the verse and a different one in the chorus
* Structures usually emphasise complications within the parts themselves

Pop takes place closer to the surface; emotions involved are usually small happinesses and sadnesses. Upside is bouncy excitement, downside is melancholy.

Rock is deeper, more primal; upside is intense shaking excitement, downside is despair in the face of the void.

I think all 30 of the albums I listed fit this definition; so do literally hundreds of songs from erstwhile rock, punk, blues, country, hip-hop, and even jazz artists, which is why I think of pop less as a genre and more as a style -- "Feel Good, Inc." by Gorillaz, or Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why" (to name two off the top of my head) are pop songs, just as surely as "Can't Hardly Wait" or "Stacey's Mom" are.

This post was supposed to be about the best music I've heard in the first six months of 2007; I guess that will have to wait for next week. For now, I'd love to hear your thoughts on The Pop. I've also created an iTunes mix called Pure Pop For Now People
which contains one iSong off of each of the 30 iAlbums listed (except the ones which weren't iVailable, and avoiding the songs included on their Power Pop Essentials collection, which is pretty good) -- open the windows, crank it up, and enjoy the first weekend of summer with the music that summer was made for.