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Dude! Sweet! Photo by Vickie Chang

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More About

• Smash Mouth
• Dave Matthews
• Ben Folds
• San Clemente
• Tattooing and Body Modification

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Hey, kids, say hello to the prototype of the first generation of everybody's favorite OC subculture: the bro.

These are the guys who, when they were 18 or 19, got pissed off that Smash Mouth sold out to Interscope, angrily went out, got tribal tats on their calves and promptly replaced the Smash Mouth sticker on their Jeep's rear window with a Sublime one. (Note: the more sensitive ones prefer Dave Matthews or Ben Folds.)

Whereas these days we associate bros of the new millennium with nautical star tats, lifted trucks (complete with Volcom insignia tilted to the correct 45-degree angle), Gotti brother hair, and a wardrobe of Famous Stars and Straps Tees and Dickies shorts (hello, Brea!), the tattoo is probably a good indication of how to distinguish the new wave bros from their founding fathers.

Take this dude, for example. Other than looking a bit like Nondescript Unremarkable Sugar Ray Douchebag No. 3, the clothing really isn't all that bad. Kinda digging the worn-in straw hobo hat. And with the white tank with red piping and the plaid shorts topped off with Rainbow sandals—the ever-popular San Clemente-based, $46 leather flip-flops—it's all really . . . uh, Huntington Beach. Cute.

But the tattoos are worth noting. Look, guys: girls really do dig the ink. But generally it's nice to have somekind of significance behind your body art. Between the tribal squiggles on his calf and the bar code and empty puzzle piece outlines splashed over his elbow, it seems like our guy went to the local tattoo parlor, closed his eyes, spun around three times and chose three designs off the wall at random. Good thing he missed the circle-jerking dragons and inaccurate Asian (it all looks the same anyway, right?) character doodles. It also didn't help that the guy was kowtowing and screaming "Koniichiwa!" at me at every turn.

I'm Chinese-American, asshat. (Nice bike, though.)