Do you work out? Do you wear tank tops and short shorts? Maybe you should come to a music festival and ruin it for everyone!
Yesterday we awoke to yet another video of out-of-control bros trying to knock each other out on a dancefloor. This week's incident came courtesy of a bunch of creatine-consuming Canadians at Calgary's Chasing Summer Music Festival. In the video we see a group of five or six #jacked lads flailing their arms and legs at each other until enough of them have fallen down for everyone to get bored and stop filming.
Unfortunately the Chasing Summer fight is indicative of an angry bro culture that has infiltrated dance music and become all too common a sight at festivals and clubs around the world. I don't want to get all 'back in my day' about this, but I really don't know where all these gurning gorillas came from.
When I first started going out in the neon-tinged glory days of electro house (that's 2007 to be specific) standard club lad uniform was a deathly skinny frame, head-to-toe black, and miscellaneous lightening bolts on everything. Now all the lads look like inflated babies wearing tiny shorts, knee-length white socks and a vague look of confusion.
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To make matters even more confusing, rather than spending all their time getting lost in the award-winning combo of drugs, girls and music, today's lads seem more interested in standing around eyeballing each other until that magic thirty second window when everyone decides it's acceptable for them to swing a few half-hearted punches and overly ambitious kicks.
It's like their only motivation for even going out at all is to audition for a job on the security team. It's safe to say that wherever this new club lad culture came from, I don't get it. But since it's increasingly causing mass brawls at the kinds of places that I like to go and have fun at, I think it's time to have a look at these incidents, figure out the components required for one of these bumbling battle royals to break out, eliminate them and put an end to festival bro brawls forever.
Too Many Dicks On The Dancefloor
An obvious one to start with, but there's no avoiding it, every festival bro brawl begins with a mass meeting of meatheads. Maybe we could bring in a rule that says every group can have no more than one festival bro. Each friendship group will have to present their bro at the entrance, his details will be taken down and each additional member of the group will be weighed, have their biceps measured and asked to recite at least five artists that are playing at that event. If the results of any of these tests lead security to suspect there is more than one bro lurking in this group, the whole lot will be denied entry - just to be on the safe side.
Terrible Dress Sense
If you get enough people who have convinced themselves that dressing like Hulk Hogan on holiday is mandatory, in the same place, then tempers are obviously going to flair. As the dawning realisation that they're dressed like everyone else slowly takes hold, it's all your average bro can do to grit his teeth, clench his fist and timidly nod his head along to Kygo's sun-kissed synths. Luckily this is easily solved. If Diplo can ban kandi and Glastonbury can ban Nos, then why not a blanket ban on shirt-lessness, deep vests, gym shorts and sports socks. I know this might infringe on some human rights, and it'll probably affect some non-bros, but isn't not being able to go tops off at Troxler a small price to pay for the eradication of impromptu festival fight clubs?
Profuse Pent Up Aggression
Everyone knows that that the toxic combination of steroid use, not getting laid and listening to bro step leads to a lot of pent up aggression. But how do we stop this from entering our festivals? Well, rather than implementing a professional sport style drug test (lol), an easier solution would be to place each bro in their very own zorbing ball. That way, when the urge takes them, they can punch, kick and headbutt to their heart's content without causing any harm to anyone else. But won't all these rolling bros cause mayhem and distract from the music? Well, no, because they'll have to be stationary. More zorbing cubes, than zorbing balls... And if that fails, maybe we can set up a kandi-punch bag jungle right at the back, where all the bros can stand around punching neon sacks in time with Avicii.
So, there you have it, those are the three primary causes of bro brawls and how to combat them. If we work together and follow these three steps, we can move on as a species and usher in a new age of brawl free festivals.
What a brave new world that would be.
