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.

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