There’s a stack of records in the living room that’s mostly mine. Globe of Frogs by Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians is currently spinning on the turntable. Before that it was New Day Rising by Husker Du, Under the Bushes, Under the Stars by Guided by Voices, and The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us by Beach Slang.

There’s a smaller stack of records in my teenage daughter’s bedroom that mostly belong to her. The portable turntable in there sometimes sees more action than the one in the living room these days. …

Spend some time exploring power pop fan pages on Facebook and three things become quickly apparent:

1. This is a passionate and opinionated community of music-lovers.

2. There are a lot of super obscure bands you’ve likely never heard.

3. Almost nobody can agree on the definition of “power pop.”

This third point, the lack of fundamental clarity about what defines the genre, underscores a lot of discussions these days; delivering endless joy and bottomless frustration to fans who will happily spend hours extolling and debating bands like Shoes, 20/20, the Producers, the Shivvers, the Nerves, Phil Seymour and other…

It all started with 32 of our favorite power pop songs.

Even getting that original list together seemed like an impossible task when John Borack, Paul Myers, and I first came up with the idea for a Power Pop Bracket Contest. We easily could have started with 64 songs…or even 128.

But we wanted to keep the contest tight, just like our favorite power pop songs. In the end—after five rounds of incredibly close voting—it came down to one song: Badfinger’s “No Matter What.”

Here are the songs “No Matter What” had to beat:

• Round 1: “Zero Hour” by the Plimsouls
• Round 2: “Girl of my Dreams” by Bram…

Power pop is one of the most debated music genres ever. That’s probably because nobody can agree on a definition of power pop.

The term was actually coined by Who guitarist, Pete Townshend, in 1967:

“Power pop is what we play — what the Small Faces used to play, and the kind of pop the Beach Boys played in the days of ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ which I preferred.”

Seems clear enough, but die-hard fans and music critics have pretty much been arguing about the genre ever since. …

Annie Zaleski is a Cleveland, Ohio-based author, editor and journalist. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications including The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, and Cleveland Plain Dealer. She was featured in the 2005 movie Punk’s Not Dead and in a 2014 Ovation TV special on the band Blondie.

Her 33 1/3 book on Duran Duran’s 1982 album Rio was published on May 6.

Interview

As a lifelong music fan and journalist, you must have had a million 33 1/3 book ideas. How did you land on Duran Duran’s Rio?

Believe it or not, Rio has pretty much always been my…

The Power of Live Music

In 2019, Paul Myers and I co-edited an essay collection called “Go All The Way: A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop” with Rare Bird Books. In early 2020, we started planning a second volume called “Go Further.”

Then the world came to a grinding halt. (But you already knew that…)

Thankfully, we were still able to work with our incredible list of contributors during various stages of lockdown and quarantine. We’re thrilled that the second collection will be published this June, but Paul and I knew we’d miss doing the usual bookstore and record store events to celebrate the release.

…

Great cover of a song from the early Minneapolis punk scene

My high school friends and I went all in on the Minneapolis band Soul Asylum in the mid-80s. We saw them live whenever they came through Southern California (always face-meltingly great), and quickly snapped up every new release as it arrived in indie record stores.

That included two excellent Twin/Tone albums from 1986, Made to Be Broken and While You Were Out, and the two A&M Records releases, Hang Time (1988) and And the Horse They Rode In On (1990). It also meant tracking down Say What You Will……

When it comes to a successful life in music, Will Birch has pretty much done it all. He was the drummer/lyricist for pub rock outfit The Kursaal Flyers and power pop heroes The Records (he wrote the lyrics for one of their best-known songs, “Starry Eyes”). He later produced albums by a variety of acts including Yachts, Dr. Feelgood, and The Long Ryders.

He then had a successful career in music journalism before publishing several successful books including No Sleep Till Canvey Island, Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography and Cruel To Be Kind: The Life & Music of Nick Lowe…