Decoding the enduring appeal of the Power Ballad 22 December 2020 You can mock the hair. You can laugh at the overblown videos, the ludicrously self-indulgent guitar solos, the throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-it production and the shoulder pads. But when you look down the karaoke list for a song to sing, or you’ve had a tense argument near a wind tunnel, there’s only one genre of song that you want to hear, and that’s the power ballad. Reaching peak ‘power’ during the Eighties, there was a brief period in music when artists couldn’t look rock bands in the eye until they too had an anthem of heartbreak, complete with a face-melting guitar solo, end-of-the-world drum fills and a key change or two. Sure, the late Nineties saw them fall out of fashion, pushing them to the realms of guilty pleasures, footnotes in a pop culture guidebook, but they never truly went away. Below the surface they bubbled and they postured, like great, wild-haired titans.