Reply #24: Truth be told, there's not much difference.

[RandomKoolzip]

I'd say, howvwer, that pop-punk's roots don't go as deep as power-pop's. Before power-pop was codified, there were bands and artists about who were making the sounds that would coalesce circa 1978 as a legitimate genre.

I'd say that power pop's roots go all the way back to Buddy Holly. "Anyday" and "Well....Allright" sound, to my ears, like power pop without the volume. In any case, it's obvious that the stuff we've come to know as power-pop has roots in Lubbock, Texas and the C+W diaspora thereof. What we're talking about is melodic rock, played in a basic small-rock-band format, with a strong sense of song-structure and a overt tendency to push the vocal hooks forward (as opposed to the riffs, or the textures, or the instrumental abilities of the players, or the rythyms, as is the case with most rock/small band pop formats).

Power pop reaches adolescence with the British Invasion. The fuse on the bomb Buddy Holly and the Beach Boys lit exploded in the UK, and its aftershocks shifted the US's tectonic plates. The Beatles expressly defined and made flesh the small-band-format-as-ideal that the teen idols and individual artists of the 50's and early 60's occsionally hinted at (most small bands before the Beatles were surf instrumental combos or vocal groups). In their wake came a gurootxabajillion bands exploring the same territory; from this wave came a splitting of the road where either bands would crib notes from the Stones and play the (mutant) blues, or drive their lorry down a blind neck of Tin Pan Alley. The Hollies, the Zombies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Who, and The Small Faces were the purveyors of that strain (The Kinks initially straddled the fence, then took a ass-first tumble into the pop pasture that also would go a long way towards inventing power pop).

What we have in this development is, in terms of harmonic climate, structure, hooks, and instrumental approach, the skeleton of power pop. What was missing was the "power" that would make the creature walk. For this they would have to wait for Hendrix to come along and invent "guitar holocaust."

I would say that the very first power pop (as opposed to power pop influencing-) song was The Who's "Substitute." Bright, major key melody, sweet harmonies, gusts of guitar distortion, candy-colored hooks hiding serrated incisors and machine-gun drumming. Implicit was also the adherence to the three-minute pop single form (In concert, The Who would abandon such conceits and improvise....a lot.)

Then came the Kinks' "Village Green/Arthur" period (maturation), Badfinger, The Raspberries, Big Star (loss of virginity), the glam years (Slade, Mott ("Honaloochie Boogie!!!!!!" Man, what a fuckin' song!), Gary Glitter), a short fallow period, then adulthood: The Pistols, The Jam, The Chords, The Records (asthmaticeog: they're the dudes who did "Starry Eyes, i.e. "the greatest fucking song in the history of the universe") the 'zzcocks, etc. Out of this collection, the Buzzcocks probably did most to codify the gere qua genre. What punk did was speed up the tempos a bit, streamline the hooks and structure, beef up the guitars (and, possibly unintentionally, enfeeble the rythym section.....but that's another story and deserves a chapter of its own), and bring back the kind of harmonic climate that used to be apparent on the old British Invasion records (obvious separation of verse and chorus, more than three chords (but nothing over-complicated....it ain't prog), more use of major keys and harmonies).

There was also, in LA and elsewhere, a stateside counter-movement to punk that called itself "power pop." Most of the bands who operated in this particular zone were total shit: Earthquake, The Runaways, 20/20, etc. Occasionally a worthwhile tune would escape, but the empahasis here, unfortunately, was in defanging "punk" as they knew it and getting signed while a trend was cresting. It was in the wake of this wave that surf/garage-influenced bands like The Last were spat forth into the world, who in turn influenced the Descendents, who single-handedly invented pop-punk. Thus we see that pop-punk's roots can be traced back to about 1977 or so, while power pop's conception goes deeper, into the 50's (maybe) and the blues/country initial grudgefuck.

How I'd differentiate the two is this: the all-important use of traditional song structures and Tin Pan Alley-derived mellodic tropes in power pop, while in a "hard rock" context, gives the genre a straight foothold in pre-punk songwriting-as-art that came from the Brill Building and such entities, as well as in the blues and R+B borrowings of the Beatles and their ilk, whilst pop-punk self-conciously uses such moves as "moves," as irony or derision-disguised-as-tribute. Pop-punk is self-concious and uncomfortable power pop, emphasizing the cultural (Sociological? Political? Attitude-as-way-of-life?) baggage that punk brought to the table, unlike power pop, which tries to forge a world in which all emotion is displyed without poker faces. In pop-punk, all tongues are in quotes.

Which is not to say that pop-punk hasn't given us some great music. It's just that the tunes which are summoned forth don't have the retroactive resonances in deeper soil that power-pop has....witness the melodies in which Blink-182 or Good Charlotte traffic: they sound like playground taunts sung through a nose full of snot. There is no audible grounding in blues forms or country (I-IV-V progressions are nowhere to be seen, unlike power pop, although the major keys and emphasis on vocals obtain) nor is there any honest affinity with the pre-punk rock approach.

Sometimes the two genres overlap, and sometimes it's almost impossible to tell there is a difference.