The Soundtrack Of My Childhood And Other Songs To Run Over Pedestrians To
This song is in GTA IV, I hear across the share-house-party kitchen.
You’re tearing down the Great Ocean Highway. Cara Delevingne screams some page 6 parable in your ear. Lady (Hear me Tonight) blares as you narrowly miss another SUV. You’re easily making 120 and need to go faster. One traffic cop among the rabble of pigs behind you howls on the loudspeaker, beckoning you to pull over. It’s almost dinner. I - can - tell - by - the - look - in - your - eyes. You can’t hear a thing. All you hear is Modjo. Britney. Cara. You’ve hardly left your room in days. Faster.
This song is in GTA IV, I hear across the share-house-party kitchen. More a crumbling monument than a final bastion of the vulgar American satire wave, such a reference is seemingly all that remains next to slowly disappearing South Park reruns and the odd Adult-Swim branded drug paraphernalia. The lone and level sands stretch far away, etc, etc.
Over an almost 26 year run, the cultural space Grand Theft Auto has occupied is an ever evolving one; a boogie man for middle-class parents, an endorsement of misogynistic violence, and the best-selling product of an industry built on extreme exploitation and trampling of workers rights. Yet, above all these glaringly detestable aspects, as well as the game’s main objectives — theft, violence, and money — it is remembered by most young people for its soundtrack.
Despite having the ability to rob, murder and go to strip clubs (all supposedly alluring activities to my underdeveloped 15-year-old mind) the vast majority of time I sunk into playing Grand Theft Auto games was spent driving around listening to the radio. When I turned 16, I did this in lieu of progressing my real life L’s license: eat your heart out Baudrillard. Before I was ever really interested in FBi or 2ser, I was listening to Non Stop Pop FM and Liberty Rock Radio. More so than any RYM review or /mu/ thread, my music taste was influenced growing up by Channel X, Radio Broker and Flash FM.
In the style of Frank Zappa — or perhaps more lovingly, of Ween — these in-game radio stations form a strange mix of parody and tribute to various music genres and subcultures. Cara Delevingne, host of Non Stop Pop FM, plays the part (a charitable use of the phrase) of a hyper-hipster-poptimist DJ, dropping lines like “Smile, be happy, dance, laugh, please!” and “Anyone who doesn’t like pop music is a superior, smug, self-satisfied wanker!” in between Black Eyed Peas and Fergie. In GTA IV’s Liberty Rock Radio, Iggy Pop plays (again, hardly) a grizzled old school rocker disillusioned with a younger generation: “Surfing the internet on your phone, what a great invention — updating your social networking page as you walk into traffic!” he yells between Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe.
You’re cruising through the Las Venturas main strip as George Clinton ‘Loopzilla’ reverberates through your cadillac. The city lights blind you on the new family TV, a Sony 40 inch passed down by the better-off cousins. New age graphics, beams of light reflecting and refracting across every pixel: your car is written and directed by Michael Mann. It’s 37 degrees this boxing day, but you don’t care, because the blinds are shut and you’re finally allowed to play a now seven year old game.
“It’s like Kant said: you can be an active originator of experience or a passive recipient of perception. I tell the fellas behind the diner that all the time” says Mary-Bell Maybeth, host of GTA San Andreas’ K-Rose Radio. Like a million other things, the line probably went over my head when I was thirteen. Flying over my head, too, was the fact that I happened to be experiencing one of the last instances such effort was put into mere parody. Fifteen years and a hundred million late-night-host Trump impressions later, the idea that someone might actually put genuine wit or originality into their satire seems fantastical. John Oliver and every other clapter comedian wishes they could write throwaway sketches as good as the “Executive Intruder Extermination Service” ad-break for an audience of pre-pubescent teenagers and unemployed twenty-somethings that only care about running over one more pedestrian.
This attention to detail really thrives where it pushes into the niche. Switching to Radio Broker, one of many iterations of the ‘hipster radio station’ appearing through the series, you find a time capsule of Brooklyn-bohemian alternative and electronic rock circa 2008: UNKLE, The Black Keys, and LCD Soundsystem all blast through your hijacked sports car. Once, scrambling for a crowd-pleasing playlist at a family gathering, I threw on the KULT FM playlist that happened to be in my recently played. I knew the first track to come on — Baby I Love You So by Colourbox — was a hit when my uncle spoke the universal oldhead sign of approval: “I haven’t heard this song since the 90s.”
My favourite will always be Channel X. Before I even press triangle to hijack some hick’s pickup, I can already hear The Circlejerks or Millions of Dead Cops ringing in my ears. The muscle memory of holding down the d-pad and flicking the right stick to 3:30 still remains strong, and some of my favourite bands were found in late night dirt biking sessions blasting Descendents and Black Flag.
You’re bombing it down Mt. Chiliad on the tiniest little motorbike you could get your hands on. ‘AMOEBAAAAAA, AMOEBAAAAAA’ The Adolescents roar through your shitty TV speakers. Like every other time you’ve done it, your jump is perfect, but something is wrong; this time you’re Twenty-One, not Fifteen. It all feels a bit barren.
The eerie emptiness of early game worlds like GTA San Andreas is a topic already discussed at length. Yet, unlike other games that face this phenomenon (often Half-Life 2 and other source engine games) the post-story experience of GTA games is one of solitude, not horror (discounting one particular theory of a bigfoot NPC hidden deep within the San Andreas countryside.) Perhaps it is this contrast between a seemingly living, breathing cultural world found in your car radio and the empty world your car inhabits that provokes such a distinctly melancholic feeling of flânerie. It feels obvious to anyone who has picked up a game for more than five minutes that if video games are ever to be considered ‘art’, the site of production will be in the interaction between artwork and audience. No matter what a slew of 2013 articles say about The Last of Us signalling the beginning of the medium’s inclusion as art, the Playstation ‘movie-game’ mode of storytelling ignores what makes the form unique and interesting, not to mention the story essentially being a B-Grade ripoff of The Road. It is in the GTA franchise that this phenomenon is particularly evident. In all my hours playing the games, it is never in the over the top, South Park-esque story missions that the most meaningful experiences are found, but when idly cruising around the map, listening to the radio. Here is the medium used at its best: the player and creator are equal partners in the production of meaning.
Grand Theft Auto and the milieu that produced it is dying a slow and silent death. Though nobody will say it, we all know the pre-emptively lionised GTA VI will never truly work, its predecessor having barely caught the tail end of late naughties ‘offensive’ comedy. Now the generation that still thinks Daniel Tosh and Chris Lilley are the world's greatest comedians all have full-time jobs. I for one am very happy to see that era fade into obscurity, though one must truly have no heart to not mourn it even a little. ‘Hipsters are annoying’ and ‘is this burger vegan?’ as jokes in and of themselves define the early 10s as much as any Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend album.
“Soundtrack of my childhood,” my Dad opines as Blind Faith plays on the radio. I hear my Mum say the same for Yellow Brick Road, my uncle The Specials. When I think of the soundtrack of my childhood, will I think of stealing cars, gunning down cops, Vespucci Beach, lying to my parents about what games I played on my friends’ Xbox, wanton misogyny, Niko’s fading American Dream, all at 150 kmph? Too late, I guess. The defining feature of such a soundtrack is its aversion to curation: it is predetermined, decided before you were even born. Was the game over before it even began for me? Will my memories all eventually boil down to algorithmic addiction and base consumerism? Was it ever more than that for anyone? The answer to these questions is simple: shut up, my favourite song is playing, who cares, roll with it.