So, rather than being The Nicest Man In Ever, Dave Grohl turns out to be The Actual Worst. The Rock Dad. Can there be anything worse? His 8-year-old kid wants an Imagine Dragons record (not, as the headline claims, Lana del Rey). He comes out with AC/DC because PROPER MUSIC.
Other scenes from Chez Grohl:
“Happy birthday, sweetheart. I know you wanted pizza for tea, but here’s some liver and onions. It’s better.”
“Here’s twenty quid, love. Get yourself a toy.”
“Oooh, how about that?”
“No, not that, get the Meccano. I loved Meccano when I was your age, plus it’s educational.”
Let’s have some more from the School of Be-My-Avatar Parenting!
At least he did buy the Imagine Dragons record she requested as well.
But I’m guessing the This Is Forty clip that has been posted at least twice recently would’ve been replayed at home when she put it on.
This is a bit unfair Bob. As Gatz points out, the story is, Dave’s daughter asks for an Imagine Dragons CD for her birthday, so Dave goes and buys it and also buys Highway to Hell for her. That’s fair enough isn’t it? It’s not like he’s barging in on her with her friends and putting Station to Station on the CD player and saying “Let me educate you with some real music”, which is what I suspect happens at a few Afterword households if I’m honest.
He should have gone with Let There Be Rock, though.
Oh cmon, it’s absolutely got the sniff of “educating” about it!
Disneyworld? No chance honey. We are rough camping in Yosemite for two weeks. Go buy some Deet. It’s character forming. Atta girl!
The heartless bastard has also forced the poor lass to play drums onstage with the Foo Fighters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLN1BdQUZn4
Grohl’s first vinyl gift to his daughters—who are ages 11, 8 and 3—was a Beatles box set. He says he got it for them to “make sure they had some sort of musical foundation before they went straight to f***ing Iggy Azalea.”
🤢
What’s the worst Rock Dad (or Mum) behaviour that Afterworders have witnessed? Mine would be the guy I recently mentioned on another thread who denied his daughter a Katy Perry CD in a charity shop, on grounds of taste.
Also, who among us has ever committed a Rock Dad crime?
Lenny Law formerly of this parish cheerfully admits to having his kid write about Rush for a school project. We shall be having WORDS.
Re: Rush, the recent Afterword symposium on whether Michael Jackson was talented in spite of all the dancing reminded me of this slice of genius….
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090704135142AAD8oDt
Chrrrrrrrist.
With Social Services hopefully 😃
His mum’s nice.
It’s a tricky one, this.
I’ve subjected my kids to an awful lot of my music already. I’ve also listened to more Little Mix and One Direction than I’d like.
There have probably been some Rock Dad moments along the way: my daughter headed in to nursery shouting “hey ho, let’s go”, and went off to school with a cry of “no recess!”. We’ve spent years playing sock war (literally: empty dad’s sock drawer and throw them at each other for half an hour – highly recommend it) to a soundtrack of Andrew WK. I’ve also kept them both well away from MTV (which is more a values thing than a music thing), and harrumphed at the seemingly universal desire to play sexually suggestive pop songs at birthday parties for three year olds.
By and large, the message I’ve tried to get across is “this is my stuff, now you go find yours”. I wouldn’t stop them listening to anything (within reason), and the last thing I want is a pair of mini mes, or for them to think (excuse me while I laugh bitterly) that I’m some sort of arbiter of taste. Funnily enough, I’ve actually had the opposite issue to Grohl – my three year old adores AC/DC, and I’ve never cared for them at all. Every time he sticks on Back in Black I feel like I’m in an 80s strip club.
So I guess I have a bit of sympathy here. If what he’s doing is saying “if you like imagine dragons you might also like this”, then fair dos. The trouble only starts if the message morphs into “you’re not listening to that/I won’t have your rock education (bleccch) thrown off course”.
My initial reaction, to be fair, was to the approving and none-more-Consequence Of Sound “quite right too” tone of “buys her AC/DC rather than stupid GURL music”.
My kids have heard a lot of my music too, but always in a “hey, I like this, you like that, maybe you’ll like this other thing” way. Or just because we’re in the car and it’s my turn, rather than theirs, to control the phone. If they don’t like “my” music – which they usually don’t and quite right too – I don’t press the issue.
I’m just having a bit of a poke at Rock Dads, not Dave Grohl really. I like him a lot, and even though his band have been pony since 1997 they’re great fun live and I don’t bear him any ill will.
I do genuinely believe that a) saying “what’s this shit, how about some proper music” (which it’s clear DG didn’t do) is a serious Parenting Crime and offenders should be strung up and made to listen to Aqua on a loop; and b) that said Parenting Crime is far from imaginary or rare.
Further, c) I’m betting that 99% of offenders (possibly including me) would splutteringly deny doing any such thing.
I suspect kids are precision calibrated to eventually find the weak spot in our carefully crafted understanding Dadhood.
It’s probably only a matter of time before they start bringing home the novels of Dan Brown and declaring their love for Eli Roth movies, while I stand there head nodding my approval with a rictus grin and a bubbling cauldron of internalised rage and shame.
Ha! My kids are prepared to watch the shittest TV you ever did see. I bite my tongue to RIBBONS, I tell you.
It’s ‘DC gone mad.
The music of Status Koala is machine tooled and purpose built for developing teenage ears. Their big riffs and songs about “big balls” are specifically designed for awkward adolescents to play really loud causing their parents to shout “turn that shit down!” up the stairs.
All around the world, Bill and Buttheads pass through the ritual of responding to that familiar Ner-Ner-Ner-Ner with a hearty “Angus!”, then – like in Toy Story 3 – they’re supposed to move on – by either further investigating the music that inspired the young Youngs, or turning their backs on their teenage riffage, embracing the new sounds as they pop from their speakers.
Of course, they will retain a fondness for the sounds that rocked their adolescence – we all do, I hope.
My son wanted to buy the Smurfs Play Pop at an early age.
I suggested not to, as in a year’s time he’d wondered why he’d bought it.
A year later ‘ You were right Dad’
He was 27 at the time. Weird phase, that one.
And he’s only 28 now.
Rock Dad sounds like a rather close relative to the Fast Show’s appalling Competitive Dad.
But with Steely Dan, Van Morrison, the Dead and Demis Roussos instead of a fishing rod.
Incidentally, is there no such thing as Rock Mum?
I googled Rock Mum and all I got was a bloke in a pyramid and Stacy’s parent.
As a bona fide Rock Dad (I’ve got the award framed in my office) I once gave a lengthy extrapolatory speech to camera regarding the Rock Dad. The interviewer turned to our singer, Helen, and asked if there were such a thing as a ‘Rock Mum’. She gestured at me with her thumb and said economically “It’s like that, but with stretch marks”.
Very droll. Thank you Skirky and Helen for sorting that one out.
If I ever have children they will be forced to plug their music playing equipment into a dedicated power socket, connected to a big button on the arm of my chair looking just like THIS:
Ha, if anyone’s entitled to be “Rock Dad” it’s Dave Grohl. On a wider point it’s scary enough being a Dad without knowing that the whole worlds watching for the headlines when they go off the rails.
Young Ms Grohl will still end up listening to what she wants in the end as they all do.
Not that different from my “Classical Dad”: preaching about the superiority of classical music/making us go to concerts, but paying for the rock and pop albums we asked for.
Or my mum always taking me along to see musicals like My Fair Lady but giving me the Beatles Vinyl Box I really wanted for my birthday.
Ah, I also had the Classical Dad. “This is very boring,” was his usual reaction to any rocknpop I tentatively played him.
(See also, “He’ll strain his vocal cords something chronic singing like that”/”Why is this so repetitive?”/”I used to be in a skiffle group, you know”.)
Never mind rock dad, I was subjected to dance daughter who once, memorably, as I was wooing a prospective stepmum, shouted down the stairs: turn off that bloody dirge, you’ll get nowhere playing that shite! (I believe it was every woman’s favourite, John Tams.)
Daughter was wrong saying Tams = shite, but probably correct to say you’d get nowhere playing him to aid your wooing endeavours.
My daughter’s best friend (14) has apparently decided that I am “cool” because I have a British accent and I like Billie Eilish …