Music Genres In Saints Row

By Erica Moutter

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…