In the
popular game franchise, Saints Row,
music/music genres play a very important role in the identities of the characters and the themes of the gangs featured in the franchise. Saints Row so far
consists of four games (I will not be including any DLC or expansion games in
this discussion). The first two are quite serious gang themed games (often featuring rap music), and the latest two games have become very silly and over the top (using electronic music as a poster child). Music genres play a huge role in Saints Row. Whenever the player enters a car (or in the background
constantly in the fourth game) they are able to choose a radio station. The
radio stations each have their own genres and do not mix and each radio host is
very stereotypical to that genre. The gangs featured in the game are also derived from certain music genres, for example the gang, the
Luchadores, seem to be fully derived from rock/metal music fan culture/aesthetics. It is reasonably safe to say that much of the Saints Row game play revolves around the idea of cultures and stereotypes of certain genres
of music, whether satirical or not.
The franchise always goes to a lot of trouble for the radio music in the games featuring hundreds of tracks from every genre http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/saints_row_2/news/full_saints_row_2_track_list_revealed.html. The radio
stations, as mentioned, each represent a certain genre and the hosts of these
stations hold the stereotypical characteristics and ideologies of these genres. For example the Underground channel in Saints Row 1 and 2 is a channel playing alternative and indie
music. This channel and its host are hipster (cultural group associated with
alternative and indie rock music) and keeping with ideologies of the genre the radio
channel is rogue. It is an illegal channel that can only be picked up in some
parts of the city and the anonymous host claims it is so he can spread the
music that no one will otherwise hear. This fits in with the common and
annoying hipster ideal that they are the discoverers of good music “before they
get famous”. The
songs used on the channel are indeed very unpopular or unknown, some it is even
impossible to find a non-live recording of on You Tube. For example this song by The Saps is only avaliable as a recording from the game:
Then there is the more
obvious channel, 106.66, first called “The Krunch” then from Saints Row the Third, “The Blood”.
This
channel plays death metal. With the tagline “You like pop
music?! Go fuck yourself! 106.66 the Krunch!” you can see how this falls into
the fan ideologies of the metal genre. The host yells everything to the listeners,
puts down other genres, and is violent. Genre as an aesthetic can clearly be seen in the channels logo which uses flames and harsh fonts, commonly used in album art for metal artists. This host like many others is a satire
of the fans of the genre associated with the channel where he and the channels
attributes are so over the top it is humorous. The genre influences on the hosts and channels that play other genres
help to set the radio feature of the Saints
Row franchise apart from other radio features in similar games as it uses
its fiction as a game to go way over the top in satirizing real life fans of
certain genres. This shows how the radio element of Saints Row was influenced, almost reliant on genres as ideas/practices to illustrate the various radio shows in a way recognizable and humorous to the player.
The gangs of
Saints Row change per game but their
identities are always shaped by the music they listen to. Every member of each
gang listens to only one kind of music. This can be seen when you enter a gang
vehicle and the radio is set to a certain channel and when you enter their
cribs and the music is playing in the background. In Saints Row the Third the gangs are made more into cultural
Identities rather than just gangs like in the previous games. In other words
the gangs are more about their gimmick in this game than their activities and
members. Most importantly for this blog are the Deckers.
The Deckers are neon
wearing, young, English gamers who are derived from electronic dance music
(EDM). EDM as a genre is associated with raves where people use
lights and neon while dancing. The Deckers ONLY wear neon. Nothing but fluro
blue neon and even the cars glow with neon lights. This displays the idea of a music genre as a consensus of many elements. In the Deckers we see EDM as a fashion, a practice and an idea (lecture 8, Nabeel Zuberi). All the members are also
young gamers which ties the two cultures together as they often are in real
life: http://playlists.net/gaming-pvp. This encompasses the idea that a genre can affect other aspects of an audio-visual phenomenon as the electronic music genre is consistently tied with gamers so the Deckers were made into video gamers as part of their EDM identity. When they are fought by the player EDM plays in the background to
solidify the Deckers’ identity as can be seen here:
Over all the
Saints Row franchise is very reliant
on music genres to code the identities and ideologies of characters within the game
to the player. These are sometimes satirical and other times a very important
feature in a characters identity like the gangs each exclusively listening to
one genre. The music genres in this game influence the fictional world, most
times for the sake of character identity, but sometimes the genres really do shape the world like in the case of the Dubstep Gun…
