The Foo Fighters’ New EP is Dad Rock — and That’s Okay

There’s a scene in Back and Forth, the Foo Fighters’ 2011 documentary, where Dave Grohl makes a case for sticking with familiar rock tropes: “People really resented me for starting this band and making music they thought ‘sounded just like Nirvana.’ What? You mean loud rock guitars? Melodies? Cymbals crashing? Big-ass drums? Well, that’s what I do.”

Sure enough, that’s exactly what the Foo Fighters do on Saint Cecilia, the surprise EP they dropped this week. These five songs — dedicated to the victims of the Paris attacks — see the world’s most ubiquitous band return to what they do best: making palatable, arena-ready, workmanlike rock that doesn’t really colour outside the lines. Music critics will likely pan it for being what they’d call “dad rock.” And, fine, maybe it is dad rock. But the thing is, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Meat-and-potatoes rock music is a tough sell these days. It’s shunned by both the hipster blogosphere and the mainstream media outlets that once nurtured it. Of course, Grohl himself — universally adored by the Internet for his broken leg determination — is an exception, but his band’s output has been unanimously scorned by critics over the past decade (see: “Stadium sludge”; “MOR stodge”) for adhering to the FM radio rock template. Sure, some of the vitriol is justified — the Foos are the beige of grunge, after all — but much of it stems from a general rejection of classic rock staples.

The term dad rock has become the put-down du jour. Big riffs and razor-throated yowls are now deemed terminally unhip, relegated to the realm of ugly loafers and terrible jokes. Part of the resentment stems from the bad taste the likes of Nickelback and Creed — who bastardized a sound Nirvana and Pearl Jam made famous in the ’90s — have left in people’s mouths. Some of it is just a rejection of rock’s patriarchal template — white male auteurs, heroism and phallic guitars don’t necessarily jive with today’s younger, multicultural, progressive worldviews.

Grohl, to his credit, has been self-aware enough to attempt breaking through that predictable colour and shape. Sonic Highways, the Foos’ previous album and its accompanying HBO documentary, saw the band visit legends in each of America’s musical meccas — from Chicago blues icon Buddy Guy to New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band — hoping their mojo might rub off onto the new recordings. It was Grohl’s way of showing he’s more than a stodgy, closed-minded dad; that you can trust someone over 30. But the album came off as laborious and overreaching, lacking the impactful immediacy found on Saint Cecilia. New bangers like “Sean” and “Savior Breath” remind us of the Foos’ uncanny ability to wring something memorable out of a few chords, good melodies and some catharsis — in a way most bands can’t.

The irony here is that the blogerati’s latest critical darlings all share similar qualities to the Foos’ latest EP: loud rock guitars, melodies, cymbals crashing and big-ass drums. New bands like Beach Slang, Title Fight, and You Blew It! have all recently been lauded by Pitchfork for making shouty, earnest guitar music. Turns out the formula still works. So what do critics call this, if not dad rock? (Son rock?)

Herein lies the real problem: nobody quite knows what dad rock means. Over the years, Pitchfork has used the term to describe acts as disparate as Wilco, Conor Oberst, Sun Kil Moon and The War on Drugs. In an interview last year, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy had a revelation about this: “When people say dad rock, they actually just mean rock.” Anything derived from a continuation of the rock ethos (i.e. a shit ton of music) now gets labeled as dad rock. It’s an arbitrary slight, then, that shuts out honest examination — you don’t have to explain why you don’t like the new Foos record, because, well, dad rock.

So this is a call to all our friends in the blogosphere: stop using dad rock as a pejorative term. After all, dads are pretty cool. And, last time we checked, so is rock.