City Lights:

There are three basic truths about rock music lists: They’re pointless and subjective, they’re often conceived as a pathetic attempt to sell magazines, and they’re wild, addictive fun. Granted, saying a song is the best of all time or the 12th or 47th means nothing at all. But if you’re a U2 lover and you spot a magazine ranking their top 25 songs, can you really resist checking what’s No. 1?

Well, I can’t. And neither can John M. Borack, a Fountain Valley resident who published the book “Shake Some Action: The Ultimate Power Pop Guide” two years ago.

Borack, a longtime contributor to the rock magazine Goldmine, took on the arduous task of ranking his 200 favorite power pop albums in order, and his book contains top 10 lists by a number of musicians as well.

If you’re wondering what power pop is, allow Wikipedia: “Power pop is a popular musical genre that draws its inspiration from 1960s British and American pop and rock music. It typically incorporates a combination of musical devices such as strong melodies, crisp vocal harmonies, economical arrangements and prominent guitar riffs. Instrumental solos are usually kept to a minimum, and blues elements are largely downplayed.”

In other words, think of the Beatles, The Who, Blondie, Cheap Trick, the Knack — basically, anything too short to be Chicago, too chipper to be Nirvana and too melodic to be Jimi Hendrix.

I met Borack on Friday to hear his insights about power pop. The author showed up in a Beatles Christmas T-shirt and spent the better part of an hour describing the genre’s heady appeal.

“Power pop, to me, is kind of timeless music,” Borack told me. “You can listen to a lot of these songs and not know if they were recorded in 1975 or 2005.”

So what holds the No. 1 slot in his list of the top 200 power pop albums? That would be “Starting Over” by the Raspberries, which came out in 1974 and peaked at No. 143 in Billboard. Borack’s list consists almost entirely of indie or lesser-known acts, so albums by Nick Lowe, the Searchers, Marshall Crenshaw and E fill the slots where you might expect to see the Beach Boys or the Cars.

Likewise, Borack’s favorite power pop song is a Raspberries tune, “I Wanna Be With You,” one of the band’s few hit singles.

The song didn’t ring a bell when Borack mentioned it to me, but part of the point of “Shake Some Action” — or any best-of book — is to encourage the readers to make discoveries.

Of course, picking the best of anything (or the 31st or 32nd best) requires a lot of second-guessing. Borack told me it took him three years to decide on an order for his top 200 albums, but if he had to rank them all today, he might come up with a totally different sequence. He and his publisher decided on the list format, he said, for a simple reason.

“People love lists,” he said. “The top 10 of anything.”

I was reminded of the movie “High Fidelity,” in which the hero constantly makes “top five” lists for every aspect of his life, from favorite death songs to most memorable romantic breakups.

So I say we make our own list of the best power pop songs of all time. I’ll nominate an offbeat choice: “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies. Download it and groove! If you have a favorite tune that clocks in at less than four minutes or so and sports winning harmonies, a catchy melody and a solid beat, e-mail me at the address below and I’ll post your responses on my blog.

Trust me, it’ll be one of the top five blogs of all time.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected] .