Dad Rock Is Our Daddy Now

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In Niko Stratis’s debut memoir The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman, the writer and music journalist draws a connection between her own journey of self-discovery as a trans woman and the undefinable genre of music that helped her get there.

Challenging the gendered origins and definitions of dad rock, Stratis opens up the genre to new interpretations. “Dad rock is a genre of loose origin and even looser definition, a box with blurred lines and fuzzy edges letting all things bleed in and out of it at will,” Stratis writes, purposefully refusing to define the kind of music that is usually associated with white, straight dads, and calling readers and critics to expand their understanding of both the scope of the genre itself and the identities of its fans.

Stigmatized by its alleged uncoolness due to its connection to fatherhood, dad rock is rarely framed in mainstream media narratives as a genre that is consumed by trans people or queer people in general. I became obsessed with The Beatles at the age of 15, roughly 35 years after the band broke up officially, and Stratis’s book confirms a suspicion I have held for those two decades since: dad rock can be and often is thoroughly enjoyed by queer people–queer women in particular. Dad rock has been an instructive balm in my own life as a queer woman, and Stratis’s book invites further exploration of the connection between queer and specifically trans people and a genre that is canonically understood by the general public as an area of cisheteronormative art.

In fact, some queer people walked this path before Stratis. In doing research for this piece, I found a playlist of dad rock for lesbians, a Reddit thread asking why gay men in particular don’t like old rock music (in opposition to queer women’s love for it), and a few TikTok videos of lesbians transforming dad rock songs into lesbian indie folk music.

Stratis’s journey reminded me of my own passion for dad rock as a queer woman. The dissonance between my usual aversion to men talking to me at all and my practice of listening to white men’s music has always felt very contradictory to me. While my experiences with men in real life mostly suck because of misogyny and homophobia, I often turn to dad rock for solace and guidance.

When I was a teenager, I went to see The Police with my dad, as well as Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, and more recently I went to see Paul McCartney with my wife. Sometimes, it feels like a genre I’m not quite meant to enjoy because my experiences as a queer woman are so different from, say, Bruce Springsteen’s storytelling in Born to Run. But music is about being human, and while many people would love to deny queer people’s humanity, that’s what we are: people, with human experiences that connect us to other people.

In an interview over video call, where I could see musical keyboards and vintage music apparel hanging off the wall behind her, Stratis told me she purposefully did not define dad rock in her book so that readers would question what they thought of as dad rock. “I really wanted to divorce it from genre and from gender, and look at it outside of that,” Stratis said.

Stratis draws a connection between her own journey of self-discovery as a trans woman and the undefinable genre of music that helped her get there. Challenging the gendered origins and definitions of dad rock, she opens up the genre to new interpretations.

While doing research for the book, Stratis noticed that there’s a resistance to including women-lead bands or acts in the genre of dad rock, despite them very much belonging there. There aren’t many dads who don’t listen to Fleetwood Mac, but some commentators believe that dad rock bands are exclusively fronted by men. Stratis cites Sade’s “Smooth Operator” as a classic dad rock song—an inclusion I vehemently agree with—but says generally, people are resistant to that idea. The same can be said about the aforementioned Fleetwood Mac, a band fronted by the greatest witch of all, Stevie Nicks, and presumably heard by millions of dads (and their daughters, cis or trans) across the world.

But the whole being a woman thing? That seems to be a barrier to inclusion for many commentators, both for women-led bands and for women who like the genre.

Once, when playing the Replacements’ “I Will Dare” in the presence of a coworker in the glass shop she worked in before transitioning, Stratis was told to “turn that fag shit off.” Trapped in a job with a homophobic man, Stratis felt unsafe and scrambled to assert her heterosexuality to protect herself. As she tells it, it was something about the earnestness of the song that elicited that threatening response, hinting at a gendered gatekeeping that permeates music and culture more generally.

While Fleetwood Mac faces challenges to be included in the genre of dad rock because it’s a woman-led band, others might perceive the genre itself as too soft and feminine. This shows how relative gender boundaries can be, how much the goalposts seem to move no matter what we do to fit in. While men love to ask me to name five Beatles songs to prove I belong in the fandom, Stratis wasn’t allowed to listen to the genre pre-transition because the genre itself was “too feminine” for the way she presented.

This oscillation between gender boundaries—perhaps an early and small taste of transgressing gender—might be part of what attracts queer and trans folks to the genre. Queer people’s obsessive relationship to music more generally—and dad rock in particular—might stem from having questions about our identities that could not be answered when we are too young to understand the complexity of the world and the complexity of how we will (or won’t) fit into it. We want to find answers, but we don’t have the maturity to unpack them yet.

“I think some of it is about searching for answers and searching for language,” Stratis said. “[In the book] I am looking at myself in my younger years, and even into my 20s. So much of that time period, at least for me, was about looking for words and looking for ideas that felt like home. And it’s easy to do that with music, because you can build these expansive little worlds where you can hide, and once you’re there, you really start to build with the bones of the ideas that you find there.”

There is something slightly defiant about a genre historically associated with teenage rebellion that allows listeners to question their suburban realities from a place of relative safety. Back in 2022, I wrote about The Beatles’ “She's Leaving Home,” a song about a girl who runs away from her family home in the early hours of the morning because of the lyrics: “Something inside, that was always denied / For so many years… / She’s leaving home.” Based on a real story Paul McCartney read in a newspaper in the 60s, the song nudged me to question who I would be outside my family home.

It was relatable because I didn’t know what I was missing until I stepped outside my family home myself.

Dad Rock Is Your Dad Now

While Stratis’s definition of dad rock remains amorphous on purpose, trans woman and music critic Sadie Sartini Garner frames the genre around the concept of how cool a band is currently and how cool it used to be. “It's always seemed to me that dad rock is critically acclaimed male artists who are no longer cool,” Garner told me. “Most of these artists are bands who have that critical credibility, but they've seen their kind of coolness and their hipness disappear, and they're still making solid records.”

Stratis mentions this coolness shift in her book, citing a Pitchfork review of Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky that derogatorily classifies the band’s new sound as dad rock. “This was a band breathing freely after holding in air for so long, anxiously waiting for an implosion,” Stratis writes. “Now they could relax. They could be soft.”

Garner’s definition makes me think of acts like Elton John and Freddie Mercury, two men who shocked the world with their overt queerness, but whose music is now considered dad rock. John famously struggled with addiction, as did Wilco’s Tweedy. I guess healing from your wounds might make you uncool, but for many queer people, it’s a desirable state for our often unsettled hearts.

When we are living with a secret that risks changing all of our relationships if we speak it out loud, perhaps dad rock is the dad we wish we had.

Garner also links dad rock to a safe white suburban domesticity where the genre is usually heard. “This is music that feels really good to listen to when you're barbecuing on your back porch or in the car with the windows rolled down,” Garner said, clarifying that she doesn’t mean this as a negative definition of the genre. “Everybody should have music that feels right to them, and that's what that music feels like to me.”

Oh, to be able to relax. To be able to be soft. Isn’t that what we all want? The implicit connection between dad rock and straight whiteness indicates who feels safe in a white cisheteronormative patriarchal society. But we all deserve safety. We should all belong at that backyard barbeque, listening to tunes that make us feel like we are home, no matter who we are.

Perhaps in our family lives, where we don’t feel safe enough to come out just yet, dad rock gives us a temporary sense of safety, one that we can go back to whenever we want. When we are living with a secret that risks changing all of our relationships if we speak it out loud, perhaps dad rock is the dad we wish we had. A dad who will accept us and teach us how to live our lives regardless of our gender or sexuality, a dad who recognizes that no matter who we are, we are all humans and there will always be experiences in common between us. A dad who knows how hard life is, but is willing to be there for us as we navigate it in the ways that we choose.

After coming out as bisexual, I had an obsessive Freddie Mercury phase. I had always loved Queen because I grew up with my dad playing their records, but there were songs that I understood differently now that I was on the other side. While I’d known all the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody” since I was 15, the song took on a new meaning after I told my parents about my sexuality and risked losing my family to live my truth. “Mama, just killed a man / put my gun against his head / pulled the trigger, now he’s dead.” It felt like I had killed someone too: the straight version of me, the good daughter my parents loved. She was dead; her life was over. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” once a song that made me sad for indiscernible reasons, now sounded like Mercury’s internal turmoil about his own sexuality.

For Stratis, writing a book about her relationship with dad rock would have been impossible before she came out. “When I was in my 20s and even in my 30s, there was a lot of stuff that was really impactful for me that would cause me to feel a lot of things and I couldn't fully understand why,” she said. At the end of the book, Stratis writes about her changing relationship with the band The National. “They were a band that I really liked before I transitioned, and then afterwards I did start to process it differently because I was picking up on things that I was either purposely ignoring, or it didn't feel so poignant. And the beauty in getting older is being able to look back and to express a little bit of kindness to my younger self.”

Becoming an adult requires that we also become cognizant of who we are. In some ways, we become our own parents when we grow up, figuring ourselves out through trial and error, just like our parents did with us. I still struggle to be kind to my younger self while navigating the hellscape of adulthood; I still struggle to accept myself in a world that is not quite made for anyone who isn’t a straight cis white man. As I heal, I listen to music that made me come alive in my 20s, catching snippets of lyrics that make a lot more sense in the present.

Maybe dad rock isn’t really related to whether dads listen to a certain band or artist—maybe dad rock is the music that helped raise you into who you are today.

There’s Something Camp In There

A few weeks ago, my dad said something morbid, but relevant to this essay. “I want to see Ney Matogrosso perform before he dies, or before I die,” he declared. Matogrosso is considered one of the greatest Brazilian singers, and when he was at the height of his fame, my dad was a young man looking for his place in the world. I immediately started looking for concerts near us, but we were too late. Matogrosso had just finished a tour across Brazil.

Back in the day, Matogrosso shocked the public with his androgynous appearance and sexualized performances on stage. In the 70s and 80s, during a time when a conservative dictatorship ruled the country, Matogrosso’s campiness and countertenor voice captivated young adults and provoked the military regime. In my eyes, because I first heard Matogrosso’s music blaring from my dad’s sound system, Matogrosso is dad rock. It was transgressive in a campy, over-the-top way, but it was still music I could safely enjoy with my dad.

“The concept of transgression is relative,” Garner said. “I think we're drawn to a sense of transgression or to a sense of disidentification with our context.”

Matogrosso’s androgyny wasn’t something I knew I craved for myself. That desire was hidden behind my love for his voice. “I looked to a lot of music [to be outwardly earnest] because I couldn't really express that,” Stratis said. At the time, she lived and worked in very masculine environments where sincere displays of emotion were not welcome. Music helped her process those forbidden parts of herself covertly.

After transitioning, Stratis still struggles to be publicly earnest, maybe in a similar way to how I still (only sometimes) struggle to own up to my own androgyny without feeling a pang of shame in my chest. “How do you do it in a way that isn't cringe?” Stratis asked during our interview. “A lot of it, I think, is weirdly rooted in fear—what happens when the masks aren't there anymore?”

The answer, frankly, is to stop caring about being cringe, like all dads do when their kids find them embarrassing. “I'm cringe and I am free,” Stratis said.

This piece was edited by Chrissy Stroop and copyedited by Katelyn Burns.