BACK when nu-metal ruled the world you ruled with it, young and rebellious and your baseball cap backwards. Now you’re a dad and these bands are boring old dadrock:
Linkin Park
The unbathed look is cool again, like when you were burning CDs from Napster and mixing them at parties. Now you’re finding screamed vocals might suit teens with sweatbands and spiked hair, but today they sound too much like the nine-month-old you’ve only just got to sleep.
Blink-182
Dads boast about Tom rejoining even though it makes them even more shit, or Travis Barker’s hip-hop drumming as if he wasn’t just a minor player in the epic saga of the Kardashians. All the Small Things is played at weddings now because it’s PG, unlike F**k A Dog which you now realise only a puerile child would find funny. You were that child.
Muse
Nothing shouts dad rock like a guitar hero, which Muse’s Matt Bellamy was considered because he butchered a classical music scale and made noises on a little wanky touchpad. Still, he’s matured to sixth-form politics level by recording albums of political musings about sheeple and complaining about drones.
The Libertines
Pete Doherty’s adoration for ol’ Albion dressed as a pantomime villain was cool once, but only because you were both on drugs. These days it brings back Brexit and UKIP, Kate Moss has long since moved on and you’re only allowed to play them in the car because your wife finds the whole thing a racket that sets a bad example. And she has a point.
Slipknot
Boilersuits, metal and masks were terrifying at the turn of the century, so dads still think the Iowa band’s signature look calls for cool Halloween fancy dress. Except nobody normal listened to them so your leather mask with a long dildo nose is taken entirely seriously by fellow parents. Referring to yourself as a Maggot doesn’t help.
Arctic Monkeys
We’ve gone through a financial crisis and a pandemic since Alex Turner seemed like a laugh. Since then he’s embraced rockabilly, easy listening and demonstrated that Yorkshire and LA accents do not mix. At parties for seven-year-olds you and the other dads reminisce about when he chatted shit about pub scraps and shagging in bathrooms.
My Chemical Romance
Grandparents had their New Romantic phase, and MCR turned the next generation into marching band goths that stole their mum’s eyeliner and crushed their cods in tight trousers. Even parenthood can’t disabuse them of the delusion that this was cool. Your mates with two kids and a semi-detached call themselves ‘elder emos’, the dicks.
