Wyoming is known as the “Cowboy State,” and I’m sure we can all agree there are a lot of cowboys living amongst us. But not everyone can adhere to the proverbial country lifestyle; some people crave interests other than Toby Keith songs and warm PBR. Living in the southern end of Wyoming, those who don’t want to ride horses and wear Wrangler jeans have a good chance of becoming, uh, potheads, and… that kind of thing. The reason is because we live so close to Colorado; the smoke from all the legal weed wafts up this way and gets you hooked! The point I’m trying to make is the wave of electronic music sweeping the music scene across the nation has hit Cheyenne, Laramie and maybe even a little farther north to Casper. Electronica is exploding, but in all the wrong ways. What wrong ways? Primarily the bro steppers, for those of you who don’t know what that is, don’t worry I’ll fill you in. Regardless of your knowledge about bro steppers and electronica I feel compelled to share my opinion about them both.
As an obscure social outcast, my music interests lean a little to the left, or right, or middle. Anyway, it just leans, and I have been an avid fan of the electronica scene for many years now. People never take lightly to industrial garage sounds, mixed cohesively with high-pitched sirens and lyric samples taken from Ellie Goulding songs. Electronic music isn’t for everyone (obviously), but now I walk into work and half of my co-workers are talking about seeing Bassnectar and Skrillex. Hm, weird… Skrillex is not a great D.J. in my opinion, (people overdose and DIE at his shows.) But hey that’s cool; I then offer the story of my first Bassnectar show, which is not appropriate for print media. An then my social obscurity sets back in, because everyone knows taking mind-altering substances at shows is not fun and doesn’t make for any good stories. Now, I keep my stories to myself, as to not offend anyone who is just now enjoying heavy bass music. But now that every other person I know is talking about Rusko (… ugh) I have to say, dub step really grinds my gears.
Now, let me make a point to say there is a difference between dub step fans, and bro steppers. Bro steppers should be put to a stop, so maybe dub step will suck a little less. A bro stepper is a person, usually male, that doesn’t wear a shirt in a jam packed venue, but wears those shade-like sun glasses that Kanye rocks and, of course, advocates really bad ecstasy. If you see a bro stepper at the next show you attend, tell him to put a shirt on — you should never trust a guy with no shirt on — and kindly move closer to the stage so the sweaty bro stepper doesn’t touch you with his bare skin, which is how “hippie aids” spreads. If you have gone to one of these shows and feel really sick the next day you have a case of “hippie aids,” also known as, “wook flu.” It’s caused from being in a small room with little to no ventilation and touching people, so it’s only polite to keep your clothes on. The electronic music scene is being ravaged by bro steppers and giving it a bad reputation, probably because bro steppers are the ones that overdose and die at Skrillex shows, so electronic music gets this label as just a place to do drugs and the musical talent isn’t being acknowledged, but ignored. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind a little dub step here and there as it mixes up my minimal tech house playlists a little bit, but the bro steppers make me hate it. There’s nothing quite like live music to bring complete strangers together, creating a unified event that everyone can enjoy and talk about for months after, but there is a time and a place to take your shirt off and rage, and that place is not in a shoulder-to-shoulder packed room.
Like most people, I love live music. No matter what the genre, music is music and it makes us happy. So to all the fresh faces in the electronic scene, I say, “rock on, man,” but please, don’t become a bro stepper. And please, don’t go to a Skrillex show and die, which seems to happen a lot. But by all means, put on your rage face and get your dub step on. Beats are good for the soul, they just are.
