This Was the Year That Dudes Rocked

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To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.

The first Homo sapiens appeared on this earth circa 280,000 BCE. They first established civilizations between 4,000 and 3,000 BCE. And while sometime between then and now dudes showed some early signs of rocking, it wasn’t until 2023 CE that dudes truly rocked. Or, at least, it was the year in which we celebrated them the most for it.

2023 was the year a 20-year-old historical epic, Master and Commander, could gain a new life because we just wanted to see some guys hanging out on a boat. It was the year we saluted men for eating a secret, sloppy meal when their wives were out of town. It was the year a man who once tweeted “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy” began dating one of the most powerful women in the world—and we love that for both of them.

What does it even mean to be a dude who rocks, on a spiritual level? As writer William Goodman noted in GQ, where he has twice written about dudes-rock cinema, the phrase "originated in 2018 as a semi-ironic, self-aware way of embracing the boys-will-be-boys-mentality by celebrating stereotypically masculine behaviors like drinking a beer (or five) and gaming for hours at a time … with that came inevitable, often more satirical, variations, but at its core, the expression remains an indicator of harmless male activity.”

Therein lies the appeal: gentle, optimistic expressions of masculinity in a world where that still isn’t the norm. With that in mind, let’s review the most “dudes rock” moments of the year.

January

Twitter user @kenzianidiot revealed what happens during her dad’s weekly bar outings with his buddies, via a printed list of discussion topics. They include: “NFL playoffs,” “Bud VS Bud Light,” and “New Trolling motor and Locator.” Bonus: A printed list implicitly endorses dad habits like overplanning and owning a home printer. 17th century France had the salon; we’re lucky enough to have @kenzianidiot’s dad and his pals.

February

Star quarterback Patrick Mahomes came through Jimmy Kimmel Live! after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, opining on the Chainsmokers—all while sounding exactly like one of America’s great poet laureates, Kenny Powers. Music to our ears.

March

When Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was released in 2003, it was a moderate box office hit. 20 years later, the historical epic about life on a British Royal Navy ship during the height of the Napoleonic Wars is more popular than ever, thanks in no small part to ship’s captain Jack Aubrey, played by Russell Crowe. “He's very much a ‘dudes rock’ type of guy,” writer and Wrestlespania podcast host Rachel Millman told me. “It’s just the attitude of ‘That guy rocks, he does what he wants, he's great.’” The enormous ships and bro’ing down over candlelit string sessions don’t hurt either. In honor of this anniversary, plenty of dudes who rock came out of the woodwork to share their love for the ultimate dudes-rock film in GQ, thus creating an ouroboros of dudes rocking.

April

The sleeper hit Jury Duty—a hoax reality series about a fake trial and a fake jury—made a star out of Ronald Gladden, a tall, gentle, unsuspecting 30-something dude who was the only one not in on the show’s premise. A GQ interview at the time celebrated America’s new, unwitting sweetheart, and a dude who rocks so hard that he did so all the way to an overall deal with Amazon.

May

Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla has long claimed to watch the 2010 Ben Affleck movie The Town four times a week. Four times a week! That’s 430 hours a year exclusively spent viewing The Town. If that didn’t rock enough, by May 2023, he was showing up to press conferences wearing a “Whose Car Are We Taking?” sweatshirt.

Then-Celtics guard Malcolm Brogdon explained that Coach was applying the lessons from the movie to his team: “Basically just ride or die for your guys, the guys you’re on the court with, the guys you’re competing with. It’s having the mentality: it doesn’t matter what we’re going to get into, we’re going to do it together.”

Watching a bro’ed out movie four times a week? Dudes rock. Forcing everyone else to live out the tenuously-thought-out ideology of the bro’ed out movie you watch four times a week? We’re reaching incalculable dudes rock levels.

On the most wholesome end of the “dudes rock” spectrum in 2023 were the dads who braved heat, rain, and exorbitant Ticketmaster fees to support their children (overwhelmingly daughters) at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour this summer. My GQ colleagues Eileen Cartter and Bowen Fernie ventured to Philadelphia to meet them, and documented some great homemade merch.

Also: One man, one pull-up bar, one to 20 Twizzlers, and off-the-charts dude rocking.

June

In June, the Denver Nuggets won the 2023 NBA Finals, in part thanks to Serbian center Nikola Jokic—who refreshingly did not give a shit. As my colleague Matthew Roberson put it at the time:

As the confetti was still falling and he stood on the court in front of a rapturous Denver crowd, he delivered a business-like, “The job is done. We can go home now.” Except, it isn’t—at least, not quite. Here he is expressing true dismay when learning that he has to stick around until Thursday for the championship parade, rather than boarding a flight back to Sombor. (He later explained to an NBA TV panel that he wants to get back to Europe to see his horse race.) During the traditional locker room celebration, Jokic showed as much enthusiasm for spraying champagne as you or I would for sending an email.

July

As “Girl Dinner” swept through the discourse and left tiny, well-arranged snack plates in its wake, GQ posited that there was a culinary trend on the other end of the gender spectrum: The Husband Meal. It’s the extravagant, mildly gross dinner that men treat themselves to when their partners are out of town. Our colleagues at GQ rocked out with such options as “a grocery store rotisserie chicken over the sink” or “a gigantic wok full of Spam fried rice that I will eat for dinner one night, put the rest into the fridge, and then over the course of the next few days just grab out of the fridge and eat big spoonfuls of cold.” They rocked enough, but when the Husband Meal theory went out to the wider world, we didn’t know what hit us.

And: There are few things more “dudes rock” than supporting your local labor movement. But doing it with your guns out on the picket line? Now we’re really talkin’.

August

Taking the entire month of August off? Dudes, and several European nations, agree that it rocks.

September

In September, we got two deep dives into the interior lives of men. So what do they spend most of their time thinking about? A deep belief that they could personally land a passenger plane, and constant introspection about the Roman Empire.

They’re also thinking about hoagies:

Meanwhile, a photo of Kevin James during the King of Queens years inexplicably went viral, reminding us all that the show was in fact about a dude who rocked (and could afford a free-standing house in a New York City borough on a delivery driver’s salary).

October

When a local news station interviews someone on the street, there’s a high probability they’re about to say some wild shit. In late October, a reporter out of San Francisco looking for people caught in a 3.7 magnitude earthquake stumbled upon a young man with a mustache. He was fine, he was unscathed, and he was “just slamming some Dollaritas up at the Applebees.” And with that Dollaritas Steve, né Steve Mazzari, a dudes rock celebrity was born.

November

Back in September, rumors began flying that Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, was dating Taylor Swift, internationally famous and beloved pop star. By November, his old tweets began to make the rounds. While a digital footprint from a decade ago is usually a cause for concern, in Kelce’s case, his was filled with simple, earnest koans for the ages—and a deep, abiding love for the 2007 MGMT single “Electric Feel.”

Dudes aren’t the only ones who rock—lads do too. Specifically, this year’s Great British Baking Show champion Matty Edgell, a 28-year-old gym teacher with the bussin’ haircut and a passion for baking that started when his grandmother made him a teddy bear cake for his fourth birthday.

It really does seem like dudes start rocking earlier and earlier these days. Case in point: the 12-year-old in Ann Arbor who led police on an hour-long car chase … in a stolen construction forklift.

And while you may have heard of Girl Math, the waning days of November gave us Dude Science:

December

The year closes out with the release of The Iron Claw, in which Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson play brothers of the famed Von Erich wrestling family. Offscreen, they’ve been rocking the hardest. Specifically, Efron, who has emerged as the elder statesman of the group.

For instance, when Jeremy Allen White was on the cover of British GQ, Efron weighed in: “Jeremy is the fucking man,” Efron told writer Cam Wolf in an email. Just serenely imagine Zac Efron typing the words “Jeremy is the fucking man.” Works better than meditation.

They also could not stop wrestling:

If The Iron Claw, out December 13th teaches us anything, it’s this: Dudes rock—and it’s tragic when the constraints of stereotypical masculinity inflict great emotional and psychological pain upon them, thus preventing them from rocking even harder.

Originally Appeared on GQ