The Two Types Of Bromance: An Investigation

noah | August 4, 2008 7:00 am
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Grrrl-rock standard-bearer Carrie Brownstein took to her blog to discuss a phenomena she witnessed at a Fleet Foxes show: the “strangely beautiful” phenomenon of bromance, “where mostly straight men show up to shows in small packs, high-fiving during songs, raising glasses at the band in a show of brotherly love, and shouting ‘I love you!’ toward the stage.” She asks the readers to comment with “bromantic” shows they’ve attended; while the Hold Steady seems to be the consensus pick as far as which band is inspires the most male-on-male admiration, most of the bands mentioned are linked by shared roots in ’70s rock. As a result, I’ve noticed at least two distinct types of “bromance”: for lack of a better nomenclature, I’ll call one folk/country bromance (exemplified, in Brownstein’s post, by the Fleet Foxes crowd) and the other bar-band bromance (seen among Hold Steady fans). This oft-overlooked distinction is important to understanding the phenomenon.

I don’t have much experience with the folk/country bromantics, as I confess I don’t really enjoy the bands’ music. (A notable exception is Midlake, whose live show didn’t thrill me all that much.) This probably follows from being somewhat uninterested in much of the 1970s folk and country (both of Southern and of Californian provenance) that influences them. But even I can’t deny that the hippie-ish mellowness presiding over folk/country bromantics is strong. The love that attendees share evokes the late-1960s naïve idealism of future boomers, and in this way it is not much separated from the naïve idealism of the upper-middle-class, millennial hipsters–if it is at all. (This can happen with many “freak-folk” artists, too, but that categorization is too slippery to be included in this discussion.)

In contrast, bar-band bromance is more working-class in its aesthetic. Its apotheosis came later in rock history, somewhere on the axis from Journey to Springsteen. This type of brotherly love is certainly more universal, but it can also be more problematic. For example, I have had a number of bromantic moments at Hold Steady shows (tailgating a show because the show was at a Masonic temple; watching drunks bum-rush the stage during any performance of “Stevie Nix”), but there’s a fine line between roleplaying a type of masculinity and embodying it, as friends’ bruise photos on Flickr can attest. And any misunderstood appropriation of “working-class values” can easily just become a front for misogyny. When female fans are made to feel unwelcome by the bromance, it’s time to rethink the way in which the love is expressed.

In both cases, what makes the bromance special is its rarity. I’m all for rock shows as a safe space for the expression of brotherly love, but not as a way of reifying the (homophobic?) rejection of brotherly love outside of concert venues. There’s also a level of perceived intrusion: when Brownstein asked in her post about the gender-converse of “bromantic” concerts, one respondant mentioned feeling excluded at a Le Tigre show (an experience I did not have when I saw Kathleen Hanna and co., for the record) and another mentioned thinking he walked into the wrong building when he attended a Sleater-Kinney show. Why the discomfort? Maybe if bromantics didn’t need homosocial sanctuaries, more of them would show up at Tegan & Sara shows. But maybe it’s just that it’s the only time male concertgoers face the experience that many female concertgoers deal with at places like, well, Hold Steady shows.

Bromantic [Monitor Mix] [Photo via brandi666]