Power Ballads - Why?

Yeah, but Jennifer Rush's "The Power Of Love" is only the second worst/best POL (and the Frankie one has as much in common with Celine as Jen's does).

TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART = GRATEST SONG EVER WRITTEN.
(Umm, I said this abt something else equally naff/marvy very very recently...)

*sings* "It must've been love, but it's over now..."

take it back, way back to Te Amo by what's her fame name, irene Cara?

Heavy metal monster power ballads are the best songs ever recorded, for the record.

i thought the term "power ballad" referred to metal ballads. i didn't think celine dion performed power ballads.

i'm glad ally and i agree on something other than joy division. then, i always thought "new dawn fades" made a great metal power ballad so it might be the same thing after all.

That Roxette one *is* good. Made me cry when I was 9.

I thought power ballads were just metal too, but judging by other people here, I guess we were wrong.

New Dawn Fades is kind of a power ballad but really it's not about love or women or shit like that so it isn't.

Still, my favorite will always be Here I Go Again by Whitesnake. That song was da bomb and still is.

A power ballad is defined in my mind as a ballad, but with rock-style production, whether that is metal, or gated-reverb style "huge" drums, and usually with an overblown solo somewhere. More often than not a female singer too. Think Celion Dion, Corrs or Shania Twain. All that "Mutt" Lange crap.

The thing is, any power ballad could technically have been a gorgeous song if produced and arranged in a decent way, and maybe with the odd solo lopped off here and there, but obviously in the mid-eighties this was not the thing to do.

But there you go... Every Rose Has It's Thorn.

The Mutt Lange connection's significant, I think, in that the general feel of the "power ballad"---a term previously used only when a macho rock band tried to play a slow song but still sound macho---has pretty well infiltrated pop radio to the point where most "diva"-type female singers are essentially singing songs that could be by the Scorpions or White Lion. (I mean, can't you just imagine Foreigner doing "My Heart Will Go On?") You can blame this on pretty much every female-fronted pop-drama smash starting in the early 80s: the initial bubbling of women singing Journey-style rock (Pat Benetar) to the ridiculously sublime "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and so on and so on. Tina Turner's theme from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome seems appropriate to such a discussion as well.

It's a weird and oft-overlooked connection: in the mid-eighties, *everything* big was hair-metal. At least in the sense that both sides of things---the guys in Poison and the women belting out the pop hits---were both spawned by the same late-70s rock juggernauts: the sounds of Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Kiss, Meat Loaf . . .

But hey, some great songs came out of it. This stuff was like Wagner- --its sole purpose was always to be bigger, grander, and more dramatic than you'd imagined possible. Mostly it blew, but when it achieved that goal, look out. "Total Eclipse of the Heart"---it's like opera. For a few years, it's as if every American pop artist was looking to be Queen.

[Apologies for the generalizations---obviously I'm aware that other stuff was going on in the early-to-mid-80s. But I'm only speaking about the particular power-ballad-pop continuum. . .]

i've been working on an all-encompassing theory of everything by which everything i like in music (and in life?) can be explained in terms of metal. so joy division is ok but not altered images, the pixies but not yo la tengo. i'm afraid it might fall apart at points like the smiths or the trammps or steve reich or indian classical music but i'll try. maybe if i have two poles with cinderella at one and ll cool j at the other.

btw, i do not agree that celine dion songs sound anything like the scorpions or white lion. and i certainly can't see her singing songs like "here i go again" or "every rose has its thorn" or "sweet child o'mine" or "don't fear the reaper." these songs seem much more obviously rock in every aspect to me, from the usually masculinist rock mythology in their lyrics to the vocal styles to the beat, instrumentation, emphasis on a full band dynamic as opposed to the singer with accompaniment aesthetic, etc. i sure don't think the arrangements of her songs sound especially rock either. (what arrangements and production for power ballads would you prefer, matt? does rock production matter so much to you that you won't listen to an otherwise gorgeous song because of it?) i think there is a major distinction between what i thought of as the power ballad (the metal ballad) and the pop-diva ballad.

i also do not completely agree with this statement:

At least in the sense that both sides of things---the guys in Poison and the women belting out the pop hits---were both spawned by the same late-70s rock juggernauts: the sounds of Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Kiss, Meat Loaf . . .

poison were quite clearly influenced by glam-rock (as in bowie, t. rex) and pop-punk, probably more than they were by meat loaf. other hard rock bands of the time, such as guns 'n' roses or cinderella, were clearly more influenced by stuff like aerosmith or ac/dc. surely the pop divas had other influences than styx et al? (tina turner? soul divas?)

what about the modern rock ballad, e.g. "with or without you," "pictures of you," "everybody hurts?" where does it fit in? i can see at least as much connection between "everybody hurts" and celine dion as between "sweet child o'mine" and celine dion.

Sundar,

I wasn't necessarily trying to draw actual lines of influence bewteen those styles---at the time, obviously, Poison and Bonnie Tyler were perceived to be coming from opposite sides of the spectrum, and a look at the details makes it clear. I just meant that if you back up a few steps and take a top-down sort of view of things, there does seem to be a particular *quality* that defines the big rock and pop hits of the era. The grandiosity of that period---all of the big guitars and crescendos and smoothed-out multi-tracked vocals, the way every song started with the drama already at 10 and just cranked it up from there, the squinched-face *emoting* of the whole thing--- seems directly attributable to the grandiosity of late-70s pop and rock, whether it be the UK's glaminess (Bowie, T Rex, or even the Bay City Rollers) or the US's arena-rock (Speedwagon or Styx or Meat Loaf).

I suppose, though, that you could trace the squinched-face emoting of the late-70s all the way back to the squinched-face emoting of Joplin or Hendrix in the sixties. Come to think of it, I liked music a whole lot better before the squinched-face emoting came along.