PicoBlog

I did it arse-backwards: before I heard Mo Troper’s music, I’d read him. It was an essay of his, published obscurely online, and which described his ambivalence about his own passion – and considerable gift – for power pop. Troper’s enthusiasm for his own genre was obvious in his encyclopaedic knowledge of it, but it was his ambivalence that interested me. “My relationship to power pop is characterized by [an] ouroboros of sympathy and revulsion,” he wrote. “I admire it and detest it. I am consistently moved by it and also horribly embarrassed to have anything to do with it. To me, power pop is so much more than chiming guitars, heavy drums, and aching vocal harmonies – and simultaneously so much less.”

Now, perhaps you’re asking: Who the fuck is Mo Troper? And, also: what’s “power pop”? Good questions, for which there’s an easier answer to the first. He’s a young singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon, who’s both earnest and clever, and writing some of the best 90 second shards of glimmering guitar pop around. I came late: Mo Troper was one of my favourite musical discoveries last year.

As for the second question, I’ll borrow Troper’s own definition:

Power pop is, at its core, an act; it’s glorified Beatles cosplay, the playground Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles themselves are only power pop ex post facto – power pop implies a degree of self-reflexivity. When you describe a piece of music as power pop, whether it’s your own or someone else’s, you are not merely describing chiming guitars, heavy drums, and aching vocal harmonies. Journey songs feature all of those things, but no purist would ever consider them power pop. That is because “power pop” mainly communicates an aesthetic, a winking distortion or caricaturization of boomer guitar pop conventions. 

There’s a lot of early Robert Pollard to Troper’s music, but at times I’ll also hear Matthew Sweet, The Cars, and Fountains of Wayne. Since 2016, he’s released five albums, most recently MTV (that is, “Mo Troper Five”). Like me, The Beatles occupy a significant part of his imagination, and in 2021 he recorded a faithful, track-by-track cover of Revolver in which he played all of the instruments. He says his love for the band survived their demystification.

“When I was doing Revolver, and this might sound totally insane, but I felt like I got to the point where I knew what it was like to inhabit each members’ sensibilities,” Troper says. “After a while, it was like: This is a Paul thing. Or, these are the types of harmonies that George and John would sing. Or, while figuring out a George guitar part on a John song, there’s a particular approach that I thought he’d take. Some of George’s leads are really weird, and I was figuring out which position he was playing them in. I learnt a lot.

“It was cool to deconstruct and reconstruct it, and it was like: ‘Oh, this is just a rock record’. And like, you know, they had some more limitations, because they didn’t have like an infinite number of tracks. But it’s just like a rock record, you know? When [Peter Jackson’s] Get Back came out, people were like ‘Oh, it’s so humanising to watch people make mistakes’. Maybe that was really cool for people who hadn’t played music before to witness. But for me, it was like: No fucking shit. They’re just human beings, not Gods.”

*

Mo Troper had a dream recently. In it, he played a friend a new song he’d written – and his friend thought it sucked. “Well, I didn’t mean it,” dream Troper said defensively. “And that’s the problem,” his dream friend replied. “You never mean anything.”

For our cerebral, gifted and painfully self-aware rocker – a man who wrote “The Only Living Goy in New York” for his latest album – the dream stung. Here was a dream whose meaning was not bafflingly cryptic, but severely explicit: In his waking life, did he pre-empt failure with a schtick of ironic detachment? Did he use irony to camouflage his deep, earnest love of pop music? Was he too dependent upon irony generally?

There are greater problems than an artist’s relationship with their own art but, believe me, Mo Troper knows this. That’s part of the problem. To love something that you fear might be frivolous, is to create neurotically complicated structures of denial – which then, in turn, seem indulgent to express. These recursive thoughts can spiral inwards infinitely, until you reach a point of Nothing – or, as Troper wrote, the snake eating its own tail.  

But then you hear the opening chords of “September Gurls” again, and are reminded of the joy that requires no rationalisation, the pleasure that just is, and it keeps you wanting to achieve the same damn thing. “I think I’m just drawn to a style of music that feels kind of like anachronistic,” Troper says. “And sometimes I think I wish that I was not so drawn to it, I guess, or that there was something else that really appealed to me as strongly as Beatles-y guitar music does.

“I was listening to that band Pilot recently. I’ve been on a huge Pilot kick. They have a song called ‘Magic’ which was their biggest international hit. They had quite a few hits in the UK. Their first few records were produced by Alan Parsons, and then they actually went on to be Kate Bush’s first backing band, which is pretty weird. But they’re like, just a super-ornate, Raspberries-esque early ‘70s power-pop band. And it just gives me chills, which is insane,” – Troper laughs – “because… well, it’s musically very beautiful, but [my enjoyment] is also sort of happening in private. I’m in my car alone, the windows are rolled up. I definitely don’t want to be feeling that way around other people. So, I think there’s a little embarrassment around hearing that stuff and being like, ‘Oh, my God, this is like, affecting me so deeply’. I don’t understand why or sometimes I wish it wouldn’t.”

Before I spoke with Troper, I made him a playlist of Australian power-pop – or at least, that was the intention. I ended up straying from the genre. But one thing became obviously clear: it was a dude-heavy kind of music, something which adds to Troper’s ambivalence. “There’s an extreme imbalance there,” Troper says. “So much of the classic power pop are adult men acting like teenage boys, and really indulging that part of them. I think The Muffs are one of the greatest power pop bands ever, and that Kim Shattuck had like one of the greatest voices ever. The Shivers, you know, and more recently Charly Bliss – especially that first record. There are instances of really great power pop bands fronted by women. But I think that typically, it’s dominated by dudes.”

Troper thinks that power pop fandom can also be incongruously humourless, characterised by a zealous policing of the door – who qualifies, who doesn’t. He’d love to be above all this, but, well. “Power pop diehards cramp up when they see a band mis-labeled as ‘power pop,’” Troper wrote in his essay. “This happens a lot these days; the power pop aesthetic isn’t exactly taking the indie world by storm, but the term is. It is frequently used to describe bona fide pop-punk bands who have more in common with Cartel than Cheap Trick. 

“I don’t really give a shit – at least that’s what I tell myself. I think genre definitions should be dictated by young artists… [But] why are so many of its fans – including me, at times – so reactionary?”

The stakes seem low, until you consider how intensely we guard our identities, our self-conceptions. Me? I truly don’t give a shit. But I’ve cared very much about Troper’s music.

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