The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.
When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.
In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Stratis debuts with a stirring collection focused on the music that inspired her to embrace her trans identity. Born in a remote area of northern Canada, the author grew up seeking refuge from her community's rigid gender norms in her dad's record collection. Searching for "some secret path to understanding myself," she found solace in the brooding yet hopeful "grocery store rock" of the Wallflowers; Radiohead's commentaries on "the falseness of the world"; and the Replacements' ahead-of-their-times portrayal of queerness as a "portent of possibility." Ultimately, so called "dad rock" saved her, serving as a framework through which to examine her emotions, feel less alone, and eventually come out to family and friends. While some instances of excessive sentimentality distract, they're mostly made up for by the author's appealing blend of emotional honesty and self-aware humor. The result is a poignant ode to music's power to change lives.
