Unknown Legends

'You have to hear this!' is the exclamation of a certain kind of music obsessive. For better and worse, I am one of those guys.

Somewhere in the Netherlands, a man closes his laptop, packs his bag, and leaves his desk. I imagine that before getting on his bike, he puts on headphones and pops a cassette into his Walkman.

The notional cassette is only perhaps an anachronism.

It’s April, spring is in the air, and summer is around the next bend. As he pedals home, the pounding drums and catchy guitar hooks of an unknown power trio ring in his ears. If it were 2024, he would probably be thinking about what to say, or, rather, write, about the music when he gets home.

But it’s 2025, those days have passed, and he cruises over the song’s bridge carrying a bag that is one laptop lighter.

I’m in love with that song.

—

“You have to hear this!” A perennial exclamation from a certain kind of music obsessive everywhere.

If it’s in the 60s or 70s, he — and, statistically, it is likely a he — is pressing a seven-inch vinyl single into your hands. It’s a cassette in the 80s and a disc in the mid-90s and the turn of the century. These latter decades gave rise to mix tape and CD burner, media that, like the printing press, revolutionized evangelism.

Today, he texts you links accompanied by those same zealous words or, in a more self-serious mode, curates and shares online playlists. Many people know someone like that.

For better and worse, I was and am one of those guys.

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I want to add that music evangelization is a complicated thing. At its best, one is bringing something beautiful to someone with ears to hear. Joy that overflows, demands sharing as if by its own force; keeping it to yourself is like letting something beautiful run down a storm drain.

Sometimes, though, one can simply be a bore, or even worse. Often the sharer is much happier to have you hear what he has to play. He, at best, tolerates listening to songs you share in return, counting down the seconds till it’s his turn to unveil another banger. And he doesn’t pause for a moment to wonder if you feel the same way.

As with all good things, it can be twisted to bad ends, where the joy of being a conduit for something beautiful curls inward to become pride in being the bearer of good new songs. One unduly prefers preaching to listening, broadcasting to receiving. Sweet music can curdle with selfishness and you are again listening to music together alone.

Living like a middle reliever / innings eater on a losing team.

—

We’re halfway to summer, which makes me think of one of my favorite music genres: power pop. For many, those two words mean nothing; for others they connote a kind of bubblegum simplicity and sentimentality best kept away from your world-weary ears. I just think it’s fun, beautiful, and at times quite compelling.

Like all musical genres, it is hard to define. The genre rose in the 70s in the wake of the Beatles. Think of it as what the Fab Four would have sounded like if they got into pub rock rather than Ravi Shankar.

Or what the Beach Boys would have sounded like if Brian Wilson listened to more Rolling Stones instead of rolling around alone in his bed.

As time has passed, it incorporated notes of other genres: picking up some punch from punk, sometimes melding the Byrds’ jangle with the Smiths’ riffs and melancholy, and building in some wall-of-sound distortion from the early 90s. This is a rough cut at description, but trying to be more definitive is boring. I am sure there are Reddit threads that hash out the classifications with greater precision and vitriol.

Power pop has occasionally poked through to popular consciousness, as with The Knack’s “My Sharona” or Fountains of Wayne’s nearly novelty track “Stacy’s Mom,” which for many will forever define the band, even if it is not even their tenth best song.

Cheap Trick has done well for itself, and Teenage Fanclub has had a good run that probably supports at least a middle-class lifestyle. Big Star’s “In the Street” (played by Cheap Trick) became the theme song for “That Seventies Show” and the guys from The Rembrandts will be forever famous for “I’ll Be There for You” at the start of “Friends.”

But for the most part, power pop remained a genre of neglected songs that were so catchy you wondered why they were not, in fact, big on the radio.