It’s Father’s Day.

While you all prepare for your afternoon barbeque’s, ball games and brewery tours, I am sitting in anticipation of the flog of blogs today with titles like, “Top 10 Dad Rock Bands”.

I’m going to be really transparent about this – I hate the term “dad rock”. I hate the term “dad joke”. I hate dad-anything, really, except my own dad, who is a lovely fellow most of the time except when he’s in his “Angry Dad” mode, disgruntled due to being disturbed while he’s trying to enjoy a nice cigar and read the morning funnies, an image I’ve painted I’m sure not unlike all your own dads.

The term “dad rock” is certainly not new but it has grown in popularity at an alarming rate if you ask me and I know what you’re probably thinking as you open up this blog today: “Seriously? She’s got a gripe with the term dad rock and dad joke? It’s just a silly term it’s not that big of a deal,” and that’s exactly what I expect at least 98% of people who decide to read this post.

But you’d be wrong and the term is much more sinister than you would ever have believed it to be.

On this, Father’s Day, I’m going to try to explain to you why you absolutely need to stop using this term in your daily repertoire.

To understand the problem with the term “dad rock” we need to first examine what it means and where it came from. Lately it doesn’t seem to mean anything other than an older group of guys who play rock music.

When I was younger we didn’t even have “dad rock”. We had classic rock which was sometimes substituted with “music your dad might have listened to when he was younger” but it never had this same air of exclusivity as presented by “dad rock” today. It was just a way of separating modern-rock radio with classic rock radio which actually used to mean something back then. For example here in Toronto you could put on Q107 to hear AC/DC and The Rolling Stones or Kim Mitchell but if you wanted the latest Green Day, Offspring, Audioslave or Foo Fighters, you’d turn your dial over to 102.1. You’d rarely if ever hear those bands on each other’s stations and that was great in the pre-streaming days because it made it easy to find what you were looking for.

Let me back up – air of exclusivity?

One of the things about the term “dad rock” is it not only pigeon-holds the artists plagued by its filthy title but it pigeon-holes the people who are deemed worthy of listening to it, or rather, its intended audience.

If you go with the earlier definition where “dad rock” means “stuff your dad might have listened to growing up” it means you’re just listening to classic rock (and even that seems a stupid distinction, doesn’t it? After all, my mom listened to all the same artists as my dad did, but anyways) but today “dad rock” is all encompassing of seemingly all rock, from light fluffy rock to hard hitting heavy metal.

Sure, Phil Collins could probably be considered “dad rock” because of a combination of when he was first popularized, his age and his easy-breezy contemporary style that’s easy to listen to on a Sunday afternoon while you pour yourself a manly Bourbon, but so is Motley Crue because of how aggressively their lyrics focus on women and that manly-urge to possess them.

More recently I’ve seen bands like Death Cab for Cutie bare the “Dad Rock” title by online publications.

Are you kidding me? How does that make any goddamn sense?

So now apparently if you’re a band with guys in your 40’s or over, you’re a dad rock band now and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You don’t even need to have kids yourself to be a dad-rock artist – another defining factor of dad rock bands who have long let go of their partying days and settled down to start families.

And this is seriously problematic guys because again, now I find myself, a young woman without a husband who may or may not be or become a dad, confused as to where I as a listener fit in to this infectious genre that is consuming all of my favourite artists.

When I go to Sonic Boom Records, I am befuddled. “Where is the dad rock section?” I ask the clerk, who looks at me mildly perplexed before saying, “The Who? Pop/Rock”.

“No, like, outlaw dad rock?” I try again. “Waylon Jennings?” he suggests. “Country”.

“And what about like, arena dad rock?” I ask. “Ah, the new Foo Fighters? That’s in our new releases section”.

“And dad punk?”. “Sum 41? They’re still in the punk section”.

Here’s the thing guys, the term “dad rock” is sinister as hell because it highlights one of the gravest injustices to the music industry and that is the exclusion of women and the exclusion of LGBTQ+ and POC – because let’s face it no one is calling The Roots dad-rock, it’s a term almost entirely defined by being an older white guy in a band of any genre ever. It’s a term that serves only to re-highlight who “belongs” in rock music – or music, period, and for that reason it absolutely needs to go.

Let’s back up a hot second and talk about how “dad jokes” encompass the same problem.

“Dad jokes” as we know them today became popular a ways back, at least a decade or so before they really hit the mainstream cycle.

Blink 182 in a lot of ways pioneered the way we think about “dad rock” and they started it with really decrepit “dad jokes” that weren’t the same as what “dad jokes” are now.

If you want an example of that, watch their earlier concert and internet footage or listen to some of their early albums which are riddled with the type of crude humour I’m referring to, but today I’ll focus on what “dad jokes” are now.

Today, “dad jokes” are any goofy, silly one liner phrase that really isn’t funny at all. They’re punchlines you’re not expecting because they don’t really make you laugh – there is no wit or intelligence behind them, they’re mostly stupid, like your dad as he stuffs Ruffles into his face while watching the football game.

Which is to say “dad jokes” have always existed, silly nonsensical jokes that just about anyone can make up, but now the term is so unbelievably popular that you’d be hard pressed to go a week without hearing someone groan as they say, “ugh, that is such a terrible dad joke.”

Let’s be real for a second, most of your dads are not funny. But neither are your moms, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews, so why the distinction and why the popularity of it?

To understand “dad joke” popularity and thus “dad rock” popularity we must step back even further and take a moment with “mom-something” culture.

Well before dad jokes and well before dad rock, there was a gaping hole in modern society.

I’m talking about the 90’s right now which some of you might remember as this mystical time in between the rapid advancement of modern technology and the golden olden days of bicycle rides and local libraries.

See, at some point there was a massive shift in western culture.

Women were working! Like a lot, too. They were getting real careers, making big bucks, some of them were even the “breadwinners” of their household. Suddenly women were not so heavily reliant on a man’s paycheck or a man’s credit card and a newfound freedom was created that had never quite existed before. This drastically changed the landscape of home life and drastically changed the role women ought to play in any given family.

For how does one also become the bearer of the children and work 40 hours+ in nursing, accounting, banking, dental, etc?

Of course there was a divide here, where some men who noticing this new power imbalance encouraged women not to work, to stay home and just care for the kids as women ought to, but there were also the men who said, “hey, if we’re both working then we’ll have more money for me to bet on sports” and actively encouraged women to do both because of their biological urge to have a smaller, replica version of themselves running around the world that they may or may not assist in raising.

And so we slowly began the shift into the modern society we all know today where women are not only expected to work, but it’s demanded of them due to the incredible high costs of living. What was once choice is now necessity and that shift is difficult for anyone to deal with. Couple this with the ongoing expectation of childbirth and family-raising that has been so ingrained in the generations before us that it causes remarkable stress just to talk about and you have the boom of “mom-culture”.

Mom-culture, not unlike dad-whatever, has multiple meanings.

There is the mom-culture defined by those who have the fortunate circumstances of not having to work and so they live out their days going to the gym, doing pilates and yoga at sunset, cooking dinner for their husbands or simply ordering out, getting mani-pedi’s with the girls and taking little Lucas to soccer practice. These women are often spoken about with contempt, looked down upon by the others because, “it must be nice not to have to work,” and “I wonder who’s dick she had to suck to get that summer house” because God forbid a woman be able to enjoy the life she has made for herself without it being owed to some sort of demeaning practice or lucky-break.

And then there’s the mom-culture defined by “the mom who can have it all but probably shouldn’t because holy shit is is a lot to deal with and are you guys even surviving out here because I am barely alive”. These are the mom’s that wake up at 4AM to make Kendra and Monica their school lunches before they power over to the gym for their hour workout (because you have GOT to stay in shape and I still don’t look right after that C-section!) before they go into work, work for less money (yes, still) than their male-counterparts and do more work to boot, before they leave the office, sit in traffic thinking about what to make for dinner and hope to God that the broccoli is on sale at Whole Foods today because they just got hit with another rent increase at their apartment complex and they’re having trouble seeing how they’ll afford to keep their soy-latte subscription running this month, and then after they finish that meal they’re going to clean it all up while Bill kicks up his feet in front of the TV because he works a physical labour job that’s “so demanding” and our champion mom is going to stick a straw in her wine bottle and suckle it back until she passes out so that she can refreshed and recharged to do it all again tomorrow.

There are no mom-jokes.

There are mom-other things, though.

There are mom-things like, “wow, you’re really nagging at me about doing that vacuuming, you totally sound like my mom,”

There are mom-things like, “wow, you’re really overdoing it on those cocktails – it must be girls night away from the kids!”

And there are mom-things like, “you can’t wear THAT – you are a MOM, it doesn’t matter if you’re 22! You have to set an example for your kids!”

Which is to say all mom-culture things seem hell-bent on continuing to put down women, tell them what to do, how to do it, how to say it, probably because people are still reeling about that crazy shift in power that started to occur when society gave women the privilege of making their own money.

So what’s the difference between mom-whatever and dad-whatever?

Well, where most mom-related things seem to focus predominantly on all the stresses caused by being a woman today, dad-stuff is all about the easy-going, fun-loving nature brought on by being a modern day dude.

Dad-jokes, again, are those silly little phrases that are harmless and fun and goofy because they have no real meaning of value or wit or thought behind them. They celebrate mundane and idiocy. They are the joke-personification of loveable animated characters like Homer Simpson. They don’t have to be actually funny or meaningful because they’re not supposed to be – like most guys – they’re allowed, nay, encouraged, to get away with the bare minimum.

It’s like the old joke about the difference between when a man and a woman have a common cold. The woman loads up on cough medicine and carries about her entire day as normal – that busy one I presented above – because she has shit to do, people to see, work to finish, kids to feed.

The man is holed up on a couch for 3 days with a mild fever and can’t lift a finger because “you don’t understand how bad I feel right now” as he sneezes for the first time in 7 years.

So how does this all circle back to dad-rock and it’s lack of inclusivity to women?

Whereas mom-culture was popularized as a way to provide comfort to women struggling with the high demands of woman-hood, dad-culture was popularized as a way to even the playing field. A playing field that they’ve already held since the dawn of time and largely continue to still dominate.

Dad-rock and dad-jokes come from the incestuous minds of men like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro who believe there is some sort of incredulous attack going on today against men. “The women are taking our jobs! The lesbian women are fucking our wives! The women are playing guitar!”

Just like we don’t need a “Not-All-Men” argument whenever things like rape allegations are brought to light, and just like we don’t need an “All-Lives-Matter” when we’re trying to highlight systemic racism and the injustices that follow it, we sure as fuck don’t need “dad-jokes” in the world of comedy, dominated by men, or “dad-rock” in the music industry – dominated by men.

It’s great to be proud of your dad and to want to celebrate your dad on Father’s Day – do something nice and spend some quality time with them if you’re able to, but for the love of God stop with the “dad-rock”, “dad-jokes”, “dad-shoes” – you have no idea how unbelievably stupid you all look when you use these terms today in a world where women, LGBTQ+ and POC are still fighting for basic human rights.

Disagree with me? Fight about it in the comments.