Pop Punk

Primary Stylistic Influences (70s Punk):

Punk Rock, Power Pop, Pop, Alternative Rock

Secondary Stylistic Influences (70s Punk):

Hardcore Punk, Post-Hardcore, occasional Rockabilly, Surf Music, Glam Rock, Grunge and New Wave Music influences

Pop Punk is Punk Rock at its most accessible.

Perhaps the first ever Pop Punk band were The Ramones, who melded the simplicity of rock'n'roll with breakneck speed, but maintained enough pop sensibilities to achieve great acclaim and cult status.

Other bands, namely the Descendents, played a significant part in the influence of bands in Southern California who made up the 90s Punk Revival - Bad Religion, Pennywise, NOFX, The Offspring, Rancid. Many of these bands were also part of a subgenre called Skate Punk, which combined pop punk elements with Thrash Metal riffs, and as the name suggest were associated with skateboarding subculture.

Bands like this played a large part in influencing Green Day, who premiered at 924 Gilman Street, Oakland, a renowned all ages venue. Before long, the radio was full of bands like blink-182 and Sum 41. After the mainstream success of Pop Punk, certain parts of the punk subculture started applying a "Pop Punk, not Punk" mentality to the genre, claiming that putting the style of music for sale was an anti-punk action and therefore not "true" punk.

During the mid-2000s, Pop Punk largely supplanted the late '90s-to-early '00s Boy Band craze. Young female listeners flocked to pop punk bands for largely the same reasons why they were into boy bands. They weren't without detractors, but since they were formed organically, not by a label, and actually wrote their own songs and played their own instruments, they had much more artistic credibility than boy bands ever did, and were much more appealing to males.^note

In the 2010's, Pop Punk had passed its peak in terms of commercial success, though was still fairly active in the underground. Pop punk acts such as Man Overboard are insistent that pop punk is required to be defended at all times, mainly from jerky hipsters and elitist hardcore punkers, as part of a larger scene termed Defend Pop Punk, incorporating elements of melodic hardcore and emo. "Easycore" is another development that fuses the genre with melodic hardcore and metalcore; the genre was largely created by A Day to Remember and Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!, and while the former has since grown into a major act, the easycore genre itself largely fizzled out by the mid-2010s, with only I Prevail finding anywhere close to the success of A Day to Remember. In The New '20s, however, a significant revival movement cropped up through social media platforms such as TikTok, and artists such as Machine Gun Kelly and Olivia Rodrigo started incorporating pop punk into their music.

In order to dodge the classification, many Pop Punk bands claim to be "Power Pop" instead. Don't believe them. There is also some overlap with the Emo genre which combines elements of this with post-hardcore and emotional relationship oriented lyrics. Although many bands are resistant to the label due to the internet giving it negative connotations. Form your own opinions on whether a band is emo or not, it really doesn't matter in the long run.

The Sundae has divided pop-punk into seven ages: The Blueprint (0-1993 - melodic punk like The Ramones, Buzzcocks); The Big Bang (1994-1999 - formative music like Weezer, Green Day); Y2K (2000-2003 - TRL-bait commercial punk like blink-182, Sum 41); the Emo era (2004-2008 - post-American Idiot conceptual fare like Panic! at the Disco, My Chemical Romance); the New Administration/Retreat (2009-2012 - a last hurrah for the style, Paramore, The Wonder Years); "Pop Punk Is Over" (2013-2018 - existing bands diversify from the style) and the Pop-Punk Revival (2019-present - Millennial/Zoomer pastiche of the genre, Olivia Rodrigo, Machine Gun Kelly).