Something about I, Musical Genius that is interesting to me is that I'm able to interact with past versions of myself by looking at what I was writing on the internet. In addition to the many awful posts that exist in the archive, there's also a pile of drafts that sit in the platform and haven't materialized into anything. As much as there's many swings and misses from when I was trying to process breakups online, most of these drafts didn't even make that cut.
One of the things that comes up a bunch in the drafts, that I may have mentioned on IMU in the past, was a series called Under the Radar in which I would talk about bands I thought were underappreciated. How did I not name that name was corny and hackneyed as fuck?! The drafts are all from September 2013, so my only excuse is that I was wired on coffee in my office at Guelph and trying to come up with ideas to write about to get my chops back up as I entered academia again. Folks, it was a moment of weakness and I will never use a title that bad ever again, promise!
Pretty much all of the bands that I chose for the project were ska bands where I was the only listener I knew of among my friends.* I guess some people would say "Wow, glad you dodged that bullet!", but TBH, I still like all of the bands I chose, even if I don't listen and relate to some of them as much as I used to. Anyways, one of the bands was The Impossibles, and all of this was the intro for the following.
*Turns out I ended up finishing one, on The Stereo, in October 2013. Funny that the only one I did was on the only non-ska band, right?!
The Impossibles are now more of a signpost for true power pop heads to me than anything else. There will be times when the discography still appeals to me, but for the most part I find that I don't turn to ska-punk music from the late-90s as readily. I still love all of it, but it's so nostalgic for me and the more I age, the less I want to indulge nostalgic feelings. They can be a bit of a trap that keeps you living in the past and not moving on from things. There's proper ways to go about it, of course, but having all your main interests be nostalgic is a little poisonous, is what I'm saying.
That all being said, whenever I hear someone from a band mention that they love The Impossibles (and loving The Stereo often goes along with that), my ears perk up and I become way more interested. In fact, what kind of inspired me to come back to this post was Barry Johnson from Joyce Manor mentioning in an interview that he loves the Impossibles and that was why he got Rory Phillips to produce Million Dollars to Kill Me.* They never ascended to the top of the genre in the way that a Mighty Mighty BossTones or Reel Big Fish did, so they occupy this interesting space for me, as an invested ska fan in 2019, of having been around and put out lots of material and having toured, but not being a band that most punks know, in my experience.
*Bud, there's a huge fucking Rory stink (especially Three Hundred by the Stereo) all over that album. I love it.
I guess, what I'm interested in is why does the discography hold weight with people nearly 20 years later? Why does this album still kick around and allow the band to do reunion shows, while pretty much all of their contemporaries from the late-90s don't get the same treatment? People aren't exactly knocking down the door to demand Animal Chin and Hippos reunions.
My theory is that it's because the Impossibles' music (and especially the contributions from Rory Phillips, who went on do similar work in the Stereo) is indebted to a certain tradition of pop-rock songwriting that gives their music more staying power than some others. Most of the verses on Anthology are fairly standard fast ska-punk, but they build around that with huge chorus hooks and distorted intros that elevate the songs from being just "genre". There's nuance in the way the songs' parts flow into each other that for me recalls power-pop of the early 80's or album-oriented rock. Knowingly copping the tricks of hook-centric rock bands is an easy way to beef up your music, and the Impossibles were smart to do it in a genre where most other bands didn't focus on song-writing. This was further emphasized on their farewell album Return, which was entirely power-pop with no ska.
I think one of the first bands to really pastiche that late-70s and early-80s style of writing rock songs was Weezer, who did it perfectly on Blue and also managed to work the idea of bringing back that music into their lyrics (especially "Buddy Holly" and "In the Garage"). So much so, that now a band trying to put big overdriven riffs, catchy chorus melodies and guitar solos in their songs is now just referred to as "Weezer influence". That type of thing has gotten fairly common today, but I think that the Impossibles were one of the first to start doing it and the fact that they did so in a genre with pretty narrow sonic parameters, ska, is commendable.
As a musician, it's hard to stretch ska out and make it work in a variety of ways. A band like Reel Big Fish, who for better or for worse are a mainstay of the genre, hasn't changed its sound at all since its formation. The same can even be said of better ska bands, like the Slackers, who stick to a 1st-wave/reggae formula because it works and they can live in the subtleties and nuance.
When ska-punk bands are more song-writing focused than, for lack of a better term, "playing ska-focused", they inevitably move towards albums that downplay upstokes and dance-y parts in favour of better songs as a whole. Less Than Jake did this on Borders and Boundaries and Bomb the Music Industry! did this on Get Warmer. It's a jump that you need to make if you are part of the weird niche of loving ska, but also loving song songs. I guess that I just wish more people respected the Impossibles for making that jump.
Showing posts with label power pop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power pop. Show all posts
Monday, May 20, 2019
Monday, August 29, 2016
Don't Give Yourself Away
At some point around 2002, the internet, for me, became mainly a vehicle for consuming music. When my brother showed me how Napster worked, I was astounded and immediately started looking into to getting some stuff on there. That's not to say that file-sharing programs were an illuminating, game-changing resource I was waiting for to listen to music, because I never stopped going to the record store, but it did profoundly change the way that I thought about the internet and its use to me (that being songs and boobies).
I feel that this was common for many other people as it was for me, as now the proliferation of music on the internet is higher than it's ever been and it's just kind of always there. Another interesting thing that happened with this was the democratisation of genres. Musical genres were no longer decided by critics or writers, but instead by whoever was filling in the genre tag on Napster. As a result, genre became way more fluid and a lot of pretty different things were called the same thing. Also, a lot of bad punk covers were labelled as NOFX songs. Maybe this all spoke to parallels that artists already shared, or maybe that was forced by listeners. I'm not sure about that.
Now there's a lot of genres of music that a very amorphous. While "Black Metal" might mean one specific thing, "Hardcore" means a million things. Damaged by Black Flag, Suicide Season by Bring Me the Horizon, and I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone by Crime in Stereo all sound completely different, but are, for better or for worse, all described mainly as hardcore.
An instance of this that makes me smile is the genre "Power Pop", because I love almost all iterations of the genre and because it seems to be as many-sided as "Hardcore". It seems to mean rock/pop music played with guitars, which is an apt descriptor for all of the bands I'm about to go through, but can also mean a lot of different things
My introduction to power-pop was through poppy rock bands from the late 70's and early 80's. They were playing pop music in the then-general understanding of the word, just with more distortion, bigger amps, and fancier guitar solos. Whenever I think of the genre power-pop, I always think of one band first: Cheap Trick
Though Cheap Trick are my personal favourites in this genre, I feel like my placing of them at the top of the heap is by no means a popular opinion (people love to hate Cheap Trick, I've found!). So allow me to flex my critical knowledge and give you two other examples of what I feel is classic 70's power-pop:
I think it's really a shame that this band is only known for "My Sharona", because I think the rest of their album is way better than that song:
God, that is a fucking great song.
A big reason why I love this type of music is that I attach it to a very distinct aesthetic. I believe I have spoken about this before on IMU, but to me these are the songs of rebellion for a specific generation in the 70's and 80's. In teen sex comedies set in the 70's and 80's, the guys who are the wacky or "cool" minor characters listen to these bands. These bands are the soundtrack to Steven Hyde, Styles, and Kevin Pickford. Because the nostalgia of these characters and stories is so attractive to me, the music that is attached to them is equally attractive.
I'm going to pull back the curtain on my brain for a second and let you in on the fact that I try to evoke these types of characters in my "persona". They influences the way I dress and the way I act. I'm still "me", but part of "me" is that these characters dramatically influence my outer shell.
The tie between this music and that character type was solidified when "Gonna Raise Hell" by Cheap Trick, from Dream Police, played during an episode of Freaks and Geeks.
I fell face-first into this type of music and started to try and get as much as I could afterwards. One of the first things I wondered about was where "power-pop" went into the 80's and beyond.
My first answer was The Outfield. Despite having way, way less edge, the still presented the same idea. It was still very poppy guitar-based music, just with way shinier production and corny reverb on everything:
The Cars are interesting because they really count as an example of the stuff I was previously talking about, and their excellent Self-Titled came out in 1978, but they certainly morphed into something much poppier and "more studio" (please know what I mean by that) into the 80's. This is still a wonderful pop song, but not nearly as "rock" as the music on their first album.
I just came across a description of The Cars by the music critic Robert Palmer and it sums up the band better than I ever could:
"they have taken some important disparate contemporary trends- punk minimalism, the labyrinthine synthesizer and guitar textures of art rock, the 50's rockabilly revival and the melodious terseness of power pop- and mixed them into a personal and appealing blend."
That is why he is a professional music writer and I am writing for free on blogspot. It touches on everything I'm trying to say.
Another band who I came across while trying to find the direction of this rock music after 1982 was Fountains of Wayne, who to me are a cross between The Cars and Cheap Trick, just with their songs tied down to a different period, the late 90's and early 2000's, because of its production. Everyone is familiar with Fountains of Wayne because of the massive hit "Stacy's Mom", but most don't realize that the rest of that album is perfect power pop:
I guess relevant to me is also where this type of music crosses with my first love, punk music. This one was easy, because I was already way deep into ALL before getting anywhere near Cheap Trick. ALL is a weird band who wear a lot of different faces, but to not associate a song like this with power pop would be silly:
I'm not sure if everyone thinks of None More Black as a power pop (in the sense I have described)/punk band, but I do:
I find that now, when most people think of power pop, they think of a mostly-Ramones knock-off band and that seems weird to me because it is so far from my own personal definition of the genre. That's exactly what I was talking about at the start of this post though, that now the same word means a hell of a lot of different things in regards to music. I don't think I have a point beyond just saying "Look at all the different power pop things!", but I guess that's okay too.
I feel that this was common for many other people as it was for me, as now the proliferation of music on the internet is higher than it's ever been and it's just kind of always there. Another interesting thing that happened with this was the democratisation of genres. Musical genres were no longer decided by critics or writers, but instead by whoever was filling in the genre tag on Napster. As a result, genre became way more fluid and a lot of pretty different things were called the same thing. Also, a lot of bad punk covers were labelled as NOFX songs. Maybe this all spoke to parallels that artists already shared, or maybe that was forced by listeners. I'm not sure about that.
Now there's a lot of genres of music that a very amorphous. While "Black Metal" might mean one specific thing, "Hardcore" means a million things. Damaged by Black Flag, Suicide Season by Bring Me the Horizon, and I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone by Crime in Stereo all sound completely different, but are, for better or for worse, all described mainly as hardcore.
An instance of this that makes me smile is the genre "Power Pop", because I love almost all iterations of the genre and because it seems to be as many-sided as "Hardcore". It seems to mean rock/pop music played with guitars, which is an apt descriptor for all of the bands I'm about to go through, but can also mean a lot of different things
My introduction to power-pop was through poppy rock bands from the late 70's and early 80's. They were playing pop music in the then-general understanding of the word, just with more distortion, bigger amps, and fancier guitar solos. Whenever I think of the genre power-pop, I always think of one band first: Cheap Trick
Though Cheap Trick are my personal favourites in this genre, I feel like my placing of them at the top of the heap is by no means a popular opinion (people love to hate Cheap Trick, I've found!). So allow me to flex my critical knowledge and give you two other examples of what I feel is classic 70's power-pop:
I think it's really a shame that this band is only known for "My Sharona", because I think the rest of their album is way better than that song:
God, that is a fucking great song.
A big reason why I love this type of music is that I attach it to a very distinct aesthetic. I believe I have spoken about this before on IMU, but to me these are the songs of rebellion for a specific generation in the 70's and 80's. In teen sex comedies set in the 70's and 80's, the guys who are the wacky or "cool" minor characters listen to these bands. These bands are the soundtrack to Steven Hyde, Styles, and Kevin Pickford. Because the nostalgia of these characters and stories is so attractive to me, the music that is attached to them is equally attractive.
I'm going to pull back the curtain on my brain for a second and let you in on the fact that I try to evoke these types of characters in my "persona". They influences the way I dress and the way I act. I'm still "me", but part of "me" is that these characters dramatically influence my outer shell.
The tie between this music and that character type was solidified when "Gonna Raise Hell" by Cheap Trick, from Dream Police, played during an episode of Freaks and Geeks.
I fell face-first into this type of music and started to try and get as much as I could afterwards. One of the first things I wondered about was where "power-pop" went into the 80's and beyond.
My first answer was The Outfield. Despite having way, way less edge, the still presented the same idea. It was still very poppy guitar-based music, just with way shinier production and corny reverb on everything:
The Cars are interesting because they really count as an example of the stuff I was previously talking about, and their excellent Self-Titled came out in 1978, but they certainly morphed into something much poppier and "more studio" (please know what I mean by that) into the 80's. This is still a wonderful pop song, but not nearly as "rock" as the music on their first album.
I just came across a description of The Cars by the music critic Robert Palmer and it sums up the band better than I ever could:
"they have taken some important disparate contemporary trends- punk minimalism, the labyrinthine synthesizer and guitar textures of art rock, the 50's rockabilly revival and the melodious terseness of power pop- and mixed them into a personal and appealing blend."
That is why he is a professional music writer and I am writing for free on blogspot. It touches on everything I'm trying to say.
Another band who I came across while trying to find the direction of this rock music after 1982 was Fountains of Wayne, who to me are a cross between The Cars and Cheap Trick, just with their songs tied down to a different period, the late 90's and early 2000's, because of its production. Everyone is familiar with Fountains of Wayne because of the massive hit "Stacy's Mom", but most don't realize that the rest of that album is perfect power pop:
I guess relevant to me is also where this type of music crosses with my first love, punk music. This one was easy, because I was already way deep into ALL before getting anywhere near Cheap Trick. ALL is a weird band who wear a lot of different faces, but to not associate a song like this with power pop would be silly:
I'm not sure if everyone thinks of None More Black as a power pop (in the sense I have described)/punk band, but I do:
I find that now, when most people think of power pop, they think of a mostly-Ramones knock-off band and that seems weird to me because it is so far from my own personal definition of the genre. That's exactly what I was talking about at the start of this post though, that now the same word means a hell of a lot of different things in regards to music. I don't think I have a point beyond just saying "Look at all the different power pop things!", but I guess that's okay too.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
I'm Groovin' On
There are quite few bands who the general populous has filed in their mind as "one-hit wonders", but I love dearly as a niche hidden gem that everyone missed out on. Whenever one of these bands is given a little bit of a rub, it makes me feel good to know that I'm not alone in realizing that there's more to a band than one song.
The AV Club writes a lot better than I do, so I'll direct you to a nice, short summation of what makes one of my favourite Fountains of Wayne songs so good:
Fountains of Wayne's power-pop gem "Radiation Vibe" found the silver lining in adversity
The AV Club writes a lot better than I do, so I'll direct you to a nice, short summation of what makes one of my favourite Fountains of Wayne songs so good:
Fountains of Wayne's power-pop gem "Radiation Vibe" found the silver lining in adversity
Saturday, March 19, 2016
The Man is Just Playin' Hits
Last night I went to Long Winter TO, a monthly concert/art series that runs through the winter months in Toronto and is curated by Fucked Up. It was a wonderful time and I would encourage anyone reading this to go to it next year. I have three (3) takeaways from the event:
1. Drew Fairservice is a wonderful pretty princess who says only great things about baseball. He was part of a panel discussion about the Blue Jays with a few other people. WHAT A NEAT GUY.
2. There was guy who did a DJ set in the main room that had a cyberpunk gimmick that was one of the most entertaining things I've seen. He had a shimmering effect on his voice and wore a pair of goggles that had huge flashlights for eyes that shone into the crowd while tons of smoke shot up around him. He also had a guy in a shiny skull mask and a cloak who just hung out on the back of the stage. It felt like I was in a nightclub in Ghost in the Shell. It was très cool.
3. Marvelous Mark also played a set yesterday. The band played SO LOUD. He used to be in the Marvelous Darlings. I was really into the set. After listening to their full-length today, I can say that this is the first release of 2016 that I am really into. It's just wonderful.
1. Drew Fairservice is a wonderful pretty princess who says only great things about baseball. He was part of a panel discussion about the Blue Jays with a few other people. WHAT A NEAT GUY.
2. There was guy who did a DJ set in the main room that had a cyberpunk gimmick that was one of the most entertaining things I've seen. He had a shimmering effect on his voice and wore a pair of goggles that had huge flashlights for eyes that shone into the crowd while tons of smoke shot up around him. He also had a guy in a shiny skull mask and a cloak who just hung out on the back of the stage. It felt like I was in a nightclub in Ghost in the Shell. It was très cool.
3. Marvelous Mark also played a set yesterday. The band played SO LOUD. He used to be in the Marvelous Darlings. I was really into the set. After listening to their full-length today, I can say that this is the first release of 2016 that I am really into. It's just wonderful.
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