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Why “reality hits you hard, bro” became the Gregory Brothers’ latest hit

A wacky post-car-crash interview spawns a catchphrase and becomes instant YouTube fodder.

 

Fruzsina Eördögh

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Posted on Sep 28, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 2:32 am CDT

The bar for Internet fame keeps rising, bro. Once, it might have been enough for a visual gag to hit the homepage of Reddit or a hashtag to become a trending topic on Twitter.

Now, though, you’re no one unless the Gregory Brothers turns your catchphrase into a song—as happened to George Lindell after he observed that “reality hits you hard bro” during a now-infamous Fox TV interview.

Lindell uttered the memorable phrase during an energetic  interview about a car crash in Phoenix, Arizona, a little over a week ago. In days, T-shirts with his phrase were printed. Then the Gregory Brothers wasted no time in turning his words into a song.

As of time of publication, the songified version of “reality hits you hard, bro” has been viewed 1,070,000 times.

“We thought this was just a spectacular story, first of all, and then just described in wonderful fashion by George Lindell,” Evan Gregory told an anchor at the same Fox station that originally interviewed Lindell. “So a lot of people were sending this to us and as soon as we saw it we thought this is great.”

“The most important thing in any pop song you hear even on the radio, is a good hook. And the guy wrote the perfect hook,” Sarah Gregory, also a Gregory Brothers member, told the Fox anchor.

The Gregory Brothers became a household name with their “Auto-Tune the News” series, which parodies the cadence of broadcast news anchors. Their most popular song is their Antoine Dodson’s “Bed Intruder” song, which has been viewed more than 90 million times, and they’ve also delved into Internet memes with numbers like “Can’t Hug Every Cat.”

In the Daily Dot’s recent interview with the Gregory Brothers, the group discussed its methods for finding potential hits like “reality hits you hard, bro.”

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*First Published: Sep 28, 2011, 4:37 pm CDT