Dave Grohl's Little Secret and the Perils of Parasocial Relationships
I hope you are all seated and have your monocles fastened tightly because what I am about to tell you will otherwise make you faint in shock and drop your monocle in surprise.
A famous rock star cheated on his wife in an extramarital affair that resulted in a child. That’s what rock stars do and have always done. They travel around the world performing music and sleep with women who are not their wives.
We expect that kind of misbehavior from superstar musicians. We even encourage it by treating it as a core component of rock stardom.
But we don’t necessarily expect it from Dave Grohl. That’s why it was surprising and jarring when he went public with the news that he had cheated on his wife in an affair that resulted in a baby that he vowed to love and take care of and not abandon if it displeases him,, Elon Musk-style.
He went on to say that he was working diligently on earning back his wife and children’s trust.
This guy!
For a man who likes to keep his private life private acknowledging that his infidelity hurt both his wife and his children felt like a disconcertingly intimate confession. We didn’t need to know that Grohl’s wife and children aren’t happy about his extramarital affair. That can be inferred.
I’ve written before about the intense, precarious nature of parasocial relationships that make us think that we know famous people, that we have one-sided friendships with the artists we adore.
This is particularly true of celebrities who have opened up their lives to scrutiny, like Jonah Hill did by making a documentary about the emotional growth he experienced as patient of an eccentric but very succesful psychiatrist.
We similarly felt like we knew John Mulaney through his stand-up and his honesty regarding his struggles with addiction.
We feel like we know Grohl because he has been hugely famous for nearly three and a half decades. In that time Grohl has cultivated a persona as the nicest man in rock and roll.
Grohl feeds the homeless with food he himself prepared, and whenever someone asks him to be in a documentary, he happily accepts because, in addition to being an artist, he’s also a fan. Of everyone!
The drummer-turned-frontman has such an ingrained positive image that I remember reading an article in Rolling Stone about the last months of his bandmate Taylor Hawkins and being surprised at how stressful and competitive his life and career were, particularly at the end.
I shouldn’t have been. It’s stupid, if understandable, to think that you know somebody through their art and their public persona. Of COURSE, being the drummer in an internationally famous band fronted by one of the greatest drummers in rock history will be stressful and competitive. Grohl might be a nice guy but he’s not a saint so it would be delusional to expect life in his band to be one hundred percent fun.
Grohl has an image as a nice guy and a funny guy (by rock and roll standards, he’s fucking hilarious!) and an open guy happy to lend his name and time to worthy endeavors.
The Foo Fighters frontman’s parasocial relationship with his fans is particularly intense because he’s intimately connected to two of rock’s great tragedies: Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Taylor Hawkins's overdose.
We know the nature of Grohl’s pain, but we cannot understand it. It’s too personal.
Grohl’s private life is his private life, and it could certainly be argued that he’s dealing with this in a forthright and honest manner, not unlike how David Letterman got ahead of a story about him sleeping with his employees before a blackmailer could expose him.
I'm guessing there are some tales in there that he does not tell. About, you know, the love child and infidelity and all.
It could also be argued that Grohl went public with this news because it would be a much bigger scandal if the tabloid press instead informed the world of his tricky situation.
Some people will be disappointed that Grohl behaved privately in a manner that did not fit his public image, but many folks are very healthily concluding that this doesn’t really affect them, so there’s no point gossiping about it.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this has a permanent, long-term effect on the way he’s seen or whether he’ll be known as the good guy who cheated on his wife and fathered a child out of wedlock.
The fact of the matter is that we do not know Dave Grohl. We probably don’t even really know the people who are actually in our lives so it’s probably for the best that we start treating celebrities like famous strangers rather than good friends we happen to have never met or interacted with.
Nathan had life-changing but extremely expensive dental implants that he cannot afford, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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