my power pop addiction, no. 59 (131)

#1 Record is the only Big Star album I like anymore. By the time you get to Radio City and especially Sister Lovers, things sound way too gloomy and weighed down by life. Some of their songs just make me feel so sleepy, exhausted and drugged. It's not a bad vibe to latch onto once in awhile, but nor is it music I feel like hearing very often these days. A friend of mine once made the astute observation that Big Star is a band for young people who take themselves very seriously. I can confirm this because I used to be one of them. But now that I'm no longer so young and self-important, the band doesn't speak to me the way it once did. I was introduced to the their music when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University in the mid-late 1980s. By the time I was a graduate student in England, studying to be a wannabe radical intellectual, Big Star became the soundtrack to my life. Their music works very well in an English context, where the weather is unrelentingly grey and damp and depressing. In sunny Los Angeles, the music doesn't have quite the same impact, at least not for me. Still the poppiest numbers on the first album still pack a nice punch and can even bring a smile to my face when they come up on iPod Shuffle. Chris Bell takes the lead vocals in tonight's song, which is one of the earliest instances of revivalist power pop and provided a template for many bands to follow thereafter...