But I do think that Frank Black has a sort of playful softness to him. I think when Kim Deal was still in the band and actively writing songs, I think that those two energies played really well together in order to conjure a lot of those questions. And I think it is harder to think about it now because my relationship to the Pixies has been so broad over the years, but it is interesting to think about that first time I heard them and being like, how is this the music that inspired so much aggressive music? Because it’s soft and weird and playful, and it’s always sort of questioning itself, and it’s a little bit terrifying, but in a kind of beautiful way.
I think my favorite line in the book is in the Pearl Jam chapter when you’re talking about having grown up as a Nirvana fan and absorbing the way that Kurt Cobain presented himself in the world and in the press. And there’s a part where you say, “I learned how to pretend to be critical.” I just felt that so deeply, because I feel like I absorbed the exact same thing from Nirvana—disliking Pearl Jam performatively as a fifth-grade boy or whatever. I had no reason to dislike Pearl Jam other than because Kurt Cobain said so.
It’s a loyalty oath that he never asked you to sign. I thought about this all the time, all the things I did because I read it in Spin magazine that I stole from the drugstore. And then I would be like, well, I need to do this because Kurt’s doing it. He doesn’t fucking care about me. But in my head I’m like, if I do this, maybe I can sort of achieve whatever it is that he’s holding.
As a critic, do you feel like you’ve resolved this for yourself at this point? Do you feel like you’re no longer pretending to be a critic?
No. I mean, I’m pretending I’m a writer and I wrote a whole book. When I’m presenting critique, a lot of times in my head I’m like, well, why me, though? What right do I have? And even in finishing the book and in doing interviews and stuff about it, I feel always conflicted. Where’s the weight behind my opinions, because who should care? And that is the thing I’m always asking myself. But I’m also an opinionated person and I try to be as objective and look at all sides of a thing as possible.
I feel more like I trust my ability as a critic now. I’ve only been doing this job for a few years, really, a little under a decade, and I’m still trying to be very careful about not trying to take up too much space that I don’t feel like I always deserve, which I get is a thing I should talk to a therapist about more than anything.
I was talking to another writer this morning, and she was asking me how I’m feeling about the book. I was like, oh, I’m really high and really low, and I’m often worried that people won’t buy it or that people won’t care about what I have to say. And she’s like, it’s an interesting thing that women often do: When they’ve done a thing, they immediately worry about why anybody should care. And she was like, you’ll notice that men tend never to do this, which is an interesting thing to examine in myself after writing a whole book about dad rock.
Yeah. I was disassociating a lot too, and when I was out of myself, I was always sort of aware of the environment. I was always logging everything and telling stories about myself to myself in my head. And I think that definitely helped me when I decided to become a writer in my mid-30s—a great time to enter the literary industry when you have no education to speak of. I think because I’m a very self-conscious person, I’m always aware of the absurdity of the backdrop of whatever it is I’m doing. It helps me disarm it if I can tell it to myself as a joke later.
There are so many unanswerable questions that come with being trans, and for me, one of the things that I fixate on is wondering if I had grown up as a girl, how my relationship to music would be different, and what it would’ve been like to have that teenage-girl music experience. Do you think it would have been different for you?
I don’t know if it would’ve been, to be honest. I kind of hope it wouldn’t be. This is a thing I’ve learned to make peace with over time. And I think it’s just a benefit of life and transition—and this is just for myself, obviously—but I’ve learned to make peace with a lot of that stuff over the years. I’m very grateful that I had the teen years and the young adult years listening to the music that I did and the music that was so informative to me. I mean, a lot of the stuff I liked was fairly universal, but it also gave me a language that allows me to understand myself better. And I think wanting that to be different would do a disservice to where I am right now.
When you transitioned, did you notice your taste change at all?
A little bit, just because I was starting to allow myself to not be so guarded. I was a really emotionally walled-off person, and those walls were hard for me to break. It took a few years, but I definitely did. It’s why I put Haim in the book, because they were a band I really liked and I could never tell anyone that I did, because knowing that I liked something like that was a code that I was putting out into the world. So just allowing myself to listen to more pop music or to listen to more soft stuff, or to be a little bit more expansive in my taste and not have this idea of taste being reflective of the body. I started being less obsessed with that idea and more comfortable liking things that I wanted to like. And I was amazed, when I stopped building the wall, how much stuff I’d held onto.