Oh, the bro, what is he really besides an empty shell of a man acting manly to the point of self-parody?
Well, I feel we should explore the concept of the ‘bro’ and what makes a ‘bro’ a ‘bro’. There are a lot of misconceptions about what constitutes it. People think that any old douchebag can be a ‘bro’. Bros are something beyond mere d-bags; they are an entire system, a particular genus of humans whose habits need to be carefully observed. Knowing more about their habitats can help you avoid this large, loud, drunken people.
At the beginning of time itself, God did a pretty excellent job of balancing everything out. Black had its white, day had its night, and hipsters had their bros. Much like good can only exist with the inclusion of evil, otherwise being good would be meaningful; a hipster can exist only as a reaction against the bro-scape. Or the bros could act as a reaction to the hipsters, un-ironically being assholes and bro-ing it up.
Bros come to age earlier than hipsters. Hipsters usually don’t come about until late high school/early college when they first discover The Pixies or film photography. As High School first begins, Bros hit the ground running. You might have known them before as the kid who tried too hard to fit in back in Middle School. Now, with the additional of raging hormones and a taste for douching it up, they go on to bully and pester every kid they can, anyone who looks different or may be considered ‘alternative’ or ‘hip’.
Hip can exist only with extreme lameness. Lame is the bro Nirvana. Everything they do in life is lame. Bros don’t have any cool interests, all their interests suck. Sure, each person has guilty pleasures in life, but Bros express only the utmost joy in making every weak, pathetic interest one of their passions. That means taking pride in a sad-looking car they embarrass further by adding pointless shit to the back. Meaningless tattoos celebrating their passion for drinking or ’69-ing’ are left on their back for all to see. I wish I could say I didn’t see a 69 tattoo, but that would be a lie. Also, they keep tabs on stuff people wouldn’t even consider full-blown hobbies, like becoming specialists on the cheapest beer you can get in Kegs, or what DJ Tiesto set is the best. Truly the most inane, pointless information becomes the Bros bread and butter.
Let’s start with their taste in TV. Every bro must have their TV tuned to Spike TV, MTV 2 for the Jersey Shore and other trashy programming, and the DVD box set of “The Man Show” a holy grail of a show for the bro. Other shows are intended to show off the bro’s attempt at being hip, like a box set of Adult Swim’s “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” which they pretend to understand but don’t at all. Usually this is a fig leaf they offer to anyone cool who might bother to visit them.
Music is even worse. All of their music tastes were formed in High School, since college time was spent getting loaded off alcohol and drugs of varying degrees of hardness. Generally speaking, the bro never explores any psychedelic drugs which might make them discover who they are. Staples of the bro music diet might include such bands as:
Dave Matthews Band
Sublime
Some Ibiza Dance set from the recent past
Led Zepplin
80s Hair Metal
Truth be told, the worst part of their diet is the fact some of their favorite bands are the favorites of non-bros (though Dave Matthews should never be consumed by a non-bro, not even ironically). But thankfully this is not the only way to distinguish them from the general population. We also have their appearance.
Skin-tight shirts tend to be a big thing with them. Hipsters wear tight clothing, but generally stick with skin-tight pants since they can fit into them. Due to the bro diet, which consists of Taco Bell at 3am, huge amounts of beer, huge amounts of mixed drinks, huge amounts of straight alcohol and occasional food they grab at random from a local 7/11, they have a less than appealing physique. Generally speaking bros are in terrible shape, though some do actually attempt to take care of themselves. This attempt fails most of the time. Clothing then never gets upgraded as they increase in size, they figure they’ll lose weight by working out, something they really do, yet always talk about.
Of course, you’ll never get ambushed by them. Silence for them is highly unusual. What tends to happen is they make loud, annoying noises which counts as language for them. Oral traditions are extremely important for the bro, as it constant variations on a theme. If this sounds kind of like Bach, it is, if Bach decided to talk about that time Jake got really wasted in 18 different ways instead of creating works of art. Wasted stories are beloved by the bro, as it shows he is ‘living it up’ without having any time at all to think about what a massive failure he might be. Most of the bro stories end up with them sleeping face-first in a puddle of their own urine. Then, as they are brought to the shower to clean off, they attempt to order Chinese food. Or so I’ve heard.
All bros are employed, a strange event considering their utter lack of a work ethic. Usually they get fired for being a bro. Discrimination against the bro is somewhat understandable, as they are fired for coming to work late, surfing the internet during most of their day, or coming in hung-over 50% or more of the time. Either that, or distasteful jokes about a colleague get them ‘removed’ from an otherwise normal work environment. Going onto the next job, they act exactly the same way and get fired in the same way, and the process repeats itself.
What’s worrisome about the bro is a complete lack of filter. This means they are way more emotionally unstable and vulnerable than your average human; forget the apathy of the hipster. Bros cry to each other and say how they ‘feel you’ in a near-sympathetic way. Generally speaking, don’t let them near any expensive audio equipment or automobiles during this period of vulnerability, which lasts for anywhere between 3 months and two decades. A lack of filters reveals something far worse, besides the bro bragging about how much action he gets or how drunk he got: it shows genuine intelligence that they willingly try to suppress.
For example, as you try to make your office’s extremely sub-par coffee, the two of you will inevitably get involved in some lame conversation about some sports team you thought no one followed anymore. As you speak, he suddenly drops a reference to Rothko’s work. Staring at him, you feel uncomfortable, not realizing he possessed knowledge outside of the necessary party skills and bodily functions (usually). Best to avoid following that train of thought, the more you do, the more you realize at some point he had been a normal person before he morphed into the bro-dom.
But after all this, there are attempts at forging bonds between bros and hipsters, despite their aesthetic differences. Panda Bear dedicated a whole song “Bros” on his classic album Person Pitch. Bros reciprocated by retreating into their sports bars and promising never again to ever set foot in Brooklyn. So far, the peace has been held for now.
Someday, a long day away from now, we’ll all be friends and these hurtful words will melt away. We’ll embrace each other as friends, rather than people with poor taste in music/culture. Our differences won’t be important, as all major and minor problems will be solved. Those days is a long time away, but let’s hope we continue moving towards that beautiful sunset.