The beginning is too banal to recall vividly: A familiar melody stuck in my head one morning last summer, leading to a streaming-service search, then a long afternoon lost listening to the entire record and its ambitious follow-up. From there, things snowballed. By the end of that week I had to accept it: I was going through a Steely Dan phase.
Like a lot of people, many of my earliest musical memories involve being a captive back-seat listener in my parents’ car during long road trips. It was there, on the upholstered bench seat of a Ford Taurus, that I first declared that the blandest, dullest, most excruciatingly monotonous music I’d ever heard in my nearly decade-long life was Steely Dan.
As a kid, the noodly, pristine sounds of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen signified nothing so much as my dad exerting oppressive control over the car stereo. Just infinite shades of sonic gray and songs that would never freaking end. Do it … again?! What else have you been doing for the last five and a half minutes of this song?
And then, all of a sudden, I was 32 and listening to “Pretzel Logic” intently in my best headphones, declaring myself an honorary resident of Barrytown. What had happened to me?
Like anyone seeking rational advice, I looked to Twitter. “Some personal news,” I posted last August, announcing my new infatuation. I was dumbfounded by the response: nearly 1,000 likes and a lively discussion among friends and followers reassuring me that I was not alone. “We’ll all meet you for dinner at Denny’s at 4:30,” my friend Rob wrote, which I assumed was a reference to an obscure Steely Dan lyric I didn’t yet recognize, but I now see was just his way of saying that we are both old. I am at once honored and chilled to my bones to tell you that, from the beyond, the Walter Becker Estate replied, “We’ve been expecting you.”
As I sighed and once again dropped the needle on my parents’ old copy of “Gaucho,” I started to see that my Steely Dan phase was not an aberration, but an inevitable if long-resisted final frontier of my musical taste.
One of my beloved car requests was Billy Joel’s “Storm Front.” As an annoyingly precocious and not even remotely popular preteen, I got very into Wilco circa its 1996 double-album, “Being There.” I am still not over the death of Tom Petty and cannot imagine a time when the opening chords of “Free Fallin’” playing unassumingly over a drugstore’s speakers will not bring me to public tears.
If anything, my recent embrace of Steely Dan has helped me settle into a newfound level of self-acceptance. I am a discerning, feminist-minded millennial woman. I also love dad rock.
At least in print, the phrase “dad rock” was coined in 2007 by the music critic Rob Mitchum — to his later regret. He used it in an unfavorable Pitchfork review of Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky,” an album “of unapologetic straightforwardness,” he wrote, that “nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.”
The term stuck, not just to Wilco but to their more canonical and constitutionally laid-back classic rock influences. Several years later, in the introduction to a list of “20 Dad-Rock Albums You Should Learn to Love” (“The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Astral Weeks,” “The River,” etc.), the website Flavorwire defined the common usage of the term as “music made by old white dudes that somehow always ends up on the car stereo and/or being played on the hi-fi at various school friends’ houses.”
I was struck by this definition’s similarities with my own more personal recollections: dad rock’s numbing ubiquity and the childlike feeling that it is being chosen, absurdly, from on high by some unchecked authority figure behind the wheel of life. As I got older and started writing about music, though, I found that dad rock’s dominance was not just confined to the plush interior of a Taurus: What is “rockism” if not the larger cultural equivalent of the dad who just won’t relinquish control of the car stereo?
Last year, in Esquire, Mitchum wrote a mea culpa for originating what he believed to be a grievous insult. He was particularly apologetic that the phrase had become so closely associated with the Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who found the description “unflattering and hurtful” — even if that was something Tweedy said while promoting an album he’d made featuring his own son on drums. (“It almost feels like we’re trolling those people now,” he added.)
But in the past decade or so, Mitchum realized, the “dad rock” tag has become much less derisive than it was when he first used it. Its ethos of “middle-age contentment” and just liking what you like was now “something to aspire to.” “Calling a band dad-rock in 2019,” he concluded, “is just as likely to be a defiant re-appropriation of a hipster insult.”
How, in the span of a decade, did dad rock go from an insult to becoming … kind of a compliment? One important thing that happened in the 2010s was that rock music (especially the kind made by white, dad-aged men) drifted to the edges of mainstream popular culture. And though this shift has not yet made up for decades of erasure of more diverse voices, streaming has widened the array of easily accessible artists and perspectives.
by Lindsay Zoladz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
[ed. Good music is always good music. See also: Steely Dan (Duck Soup).]
Like a lot of people, many of my earliest musical memories involve being a captive back-seat listener in my parents’ car during long road trips. It was there, on the upholstered bench seat of a Ford Taurus, that I first declared that the blandest, dullest, most excruciatingly monotonous music I’d ever heard in my nearly decade-long life was Steely Dan.
As a kid, the noodly, pristine sounds of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen signified nothing so much as my dad exerting oppressive control over the car stereo. Just infinite shades of sonic gray and songs that would never freaking end. Do it … again?! What else have you been doing for the last five and a half minutes of this song?
And then, all of a sudden, I was 32 and listening to “Pretzel Logic” intently in my best headphones, declaring myself an honorary resident of Barrytown. What had happened to me?Like anyone seeking rational advice, I looked to Twitter. “Some personal news,” I posted last August, announcing my new infatuation. I was dumbfounded by the response: nearly 1,000 likes and a lively discussion among friends and followers reassuring me that I was not alone. “We’ll all meet you for dinner at Denny’s at 4:30,” my friend Rob wrote, which I assumed was a reference to an obscure Steely Dan lyric I didn’t yet recognize, but I now see was just his way of saying that we are both old. I am at once honored and chilled to my bones to tell you that, from the beyond, the Walter Becker Estate replied, “We’ve been expecting you.”
As I sighed and once again dropped the needle on my parents’ old copy of “Gaucho,” I started to see that my Steely Dan phase was not an aberration, but an inevitable if long-resisted final frontier of my musical taste.
One of my beloved car requests was Billy Joel’s “Storm Front.” As an annoyingly precocious and not even remotely popular preteen, I got very into Wilco circa its 1996 double-album, “Being There.” I am still not over the death of Tom Petty and cannot imagine a time when the opening chords of “Free Fallin’” playing unassumingly over a drugstore’s speakers will not bring me to public tears.
If anything, my recent embrace of Steely Dan has helped me settle into a newfound level of self-acceptance. I am a discerning, feminist-minded millennial woman. I also love dad rock.
At least in print, the phrase “dad rock” was coined in 2007 by the music critic Rob Mitchum — to his later regret. He used it in an unfavorable Pitchfork review of Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky,” an album “of unapologetic straightforwardness,” he wrote, that “nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.”
The term stuck, not just to Wilco but to their more canonical and constitutionally laid-back classic rock influences. Several years later, in the introduction to a list of “20 Dad-Rock Albums You Should Learn to Love” (“The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Astral Weeks,” “The River,” etc.), the website Flavorwire defined the common usage of the term as “music made by old white dudes that somehow always ends up on the car stereo and/or being played on the hi-fi at various school friends’ houses.”
I was struck by this definition’s similarities with my own more personal recollections: dad rock’s numbing ubiquity and the childlike feeling that it is being chosen, absurdly, from on high by some unchecked authority figure behind the wheel of life. As I got older and started writing about music, though, I found that dad rock’s dominance was not just confined to the plush interior of a Taurus: What is “rockism” if not the larger cultural equivalent of the dad who just won’t relinquish control of the car stereo?
Last year, in Esquire, Mitchum wrote a mea culpa for originating what he believed to be a grievous insult. He was particularly apologetic that the phrase had become so closely associated with the Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who found the description “unflattering and hurtful” — even if that was something Tweedy said while promoting an album he’d made featuring his own son on drums. (“It almost feels like we’re trolling those people now,” he added.)
But in the past decade or so, Mitchum realized, the “dad rock” tag has become much less derisive than it was when he first used it. Its ethos of “middle-age contentment” and just liking what you like was now “something to aspire to.” “Calling a band dad-rock in 2019,” he concluded, “is just as likely to be a defiant re-appropriation of a hipster insult.”
How, in the span of a decade, did dad rock go from an insult to becoming … kind of a compliment? One important thing that happened in the 2010s was that rock music (especially the kind made by white, dad-aged men) drifted to the edges of mainstream popular culture. And though this shift has not yet made up for decades of erasure of more diverse voices, streaming has widened the array of easily accessible artists and perspectives.
by Lindsay Zoladz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
[ed. Good music is always good music. See also: Steely Dan (Duck Soup).]
