The Music in Fallout
/!\This article is the script of my intervention in Game Dolls Advance episode 4.
So today we're going to talk about music in the Fallout game series. This idea came by chatting while drinking coffee with my phd in video game comrade Esteban Grine addressing the phenomena of post-capitalist societies in the post-apocalyptic universes, thinking that it was funny that there was only remixes on certain aspects of life and lore in Fallout.
This time we're going to complain about how much fallout's diegetic music is a total missed opportunity. You maybe want to tell me, "But Rose, have you played all Fallout and know everything well? And I'll tell you that obviously no, I've played Fallout 3 and New Vegas and that's it, I didn't have access to the first 2 before now and not a machine powerful enough to play 4, and now I just don't have time to play, in fact
So Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, what is it? It's two games developed by Bethesda's teams after getting the license, open worlds quite similar to other Bethesda games from the Elder Scrolls series. We walk around in desolate lands after an atomic war, and we act as a person who laboriously exits a horrible shelter/tutorial in Fallout 3, and we act as an amnesic courrier in New Vegas. And these desolate lands are the ruins of our capitalist civilization that have become a post-capitalist capitalist society.
So when I'm talking about diegetic music, what am i talking about ? Well, we're gonna talk about what people listen to in this lore. Fallout is known to be a sort of frozen parody of the capitalist universe of the 1950s, with radios broadcasting microsillons of popular music of the time, i.e. Rock n roll, rhythms blues, vocal choirs known as "doo wop", and in reality full of other stuff. But it basically revolves around these genres. So the world is stuck in these vocal and guitar choir radios. And I'm not kidding, actually, that is that all the time. Almost no variation.
And where it's itching me really bad, it's that if you give 200 years to people, musical instruments, and microsillons, and all the time in the world, there's a slight (big) possibility that other creative expressions of sound would emerge, whether there's sound aesthetic trends, rivalries, aesthetic clashes, local scenes, new unsuspecting musical instruments, a lot of very interesting and inspiring little creative stuff... So what's Fallout in all of this possibilty ?
Screenshot of a playthrough of 3 where the player is talking to the NPC Three Dog.
In fact, in Fallout 3, beyond the few songs that dj Three Dog broadcasts, there is an side quest that concerns music. It's really nice, but that's all you got. It's about the violinist Agatha who lost her violin and would like you to go find it. And once it's done, hop, you have a new radio station to listen to, solely violin. Well, it's nice, it changes from the same 15 songs, but you have to like the violin. Like, ok. And after that? Nothing after that. If we shoot Three Dog in the story, he's replaced by someone but it alters the playlist by deleting songs, it doesn't add any. The newcomer has no different taste of music.
Screenshot of a playthough of Fallout 3 where we can see Agata playing violin.
And for New Vegas, there's nothing more than playlists in those same aesthetics, sometimes some strange or funny radio messages, but nothing to say that there's been a reflection around the sound.
So here I am, with my big feet, explaining how we could do better.
So if there are people from Bethesda who read me, first, hello, I'm Rose, hire me, or not. And here are some ideas. Also, if you tell me it's not possible in the lore to do this from a technological point of view, we still fix laser guns and robots without troubles.
In the ideas I can get out of my hat like this, we have:
- Expand playlists to other genres: A huge genre recorded in the 1950s is classical music. Because classical music scores are in the public domain, classical music could quickly be exploited to capitalize on the music industry recorded in the early 20th century. There's a lot of orchestras that have recorded old dead composers.
So we're hearing some in a cannibal casino lobby in New Vegas, and it was something added in Fallout 4 where there's an uninterrupted Classical Radio. But again, it's just a playlist, there's no game around, nor even a reflection or a side quest.
And it could have been a great thing to add in side quests, to get some recordings from remote locations. These recordings, we could have stored them at home in our personal discotheque to listen, or give these to the local DJ who could broadcast these randomly with a small phrase like "From our preferred donor, a little Schumann's Traumerai". A collectathon that could have been a little bit fun and create some environmental narration.
A particular genre that could really have been brought to Fallout would be Space Age Pop, a sub genre of exotica. Easy listening is one of the most designed music to go with capitalist desire, music inspired by so-called exotic music for the United States, i.e. calypso, mambo, samba... So what about Space Age Pop? That's kind of the same as easy listening but with an addition of funny sounds of theremins and electronic instruments developed in the 1950s that emulated what the composers of that era thought to be space sounds. - We could also remix the what already exist: There are plenty of places with loudspeakers, radios and gramophones, why is there so few pirate radios but also people playing to remix gramophones? In a moment of perdition, people could have discovered scratching and concrete music by playing recorded sound material. We could also have imagined a super mutant concert doing experimental, one using a gramophone as a noise source, another using a low-power laser gun into a metal can, another one using a super-mass as a percussive instrument on the ground.
- Finally, new things could emerge: Fallout exists in a parody of the 50's, so what can be better that musical genres inspired from the 30's to 50's,that could still be pretty close but still a little "post", to mock or to tribute. By creating new old music as Cindy Lee can do, the most incredible drag queen guitarist that mixes songs inspired from this period with loops of larsen, noise baths, ethereal voices. One might think of people who would hijack useless tools like a chainsaw in a world where there is no more wood growing to use it for sound purposes, thereby creating the first chainsawdoowop concert. Because otherwise in live music in Fallout, there's not much. There's a robot singer, Magnolia, in Fallout 4, who sings jazz standards, and there's two singers in the Atomic Wrangler who can be recruited and who will perform a handful of songs in New Vegas, on already existing tracks.
Animated gif from a playthrough of Fallout 4 showing Magnolia performing.
My theory about additional music is that these are probably aspects already reflected by the creative teams of Bethesda but they didn't had the rights of modification on musics dating back to the 1930s, only broadcasting rights. These broadcasting rights are also extremely expensive, so expensive that despite the forcing to integrate Elvis performances in New Vegas, there is no song of him, all because of the cost of broadcast rights according to one of the devs on Bethesda forums.
Which makes me ask one last thing: What do we do with the public domain in this?
For those who do not really know the public domain, this is where creative concepts and things are elevated when these things are no longer subject to copyright, i mean by that those things are elevated many decades after the death of the person who made those things. It varies from country to country, and it often takes a long time. It is a pool of things accessible to all, and the only condition is the non-exclusive exploitation, you are free to do whatever you want with all these things as long as your neighboor has the same freedom as you also on it, that is to say, that we have no right to privatize what is in the public domain. And if you ask yourself, no, there is no public institution that pays attention to the preservation of the public domain in the face of capitalist drifts when those are fundamental commons, and I find it sad as fuck.
Anyway, I'm back on Fallout. There are recordings that have elevated in the public domain, which could serve as a support to remix by the people living in the Fallout world. There are classical recordings like Scott Joplin's The Entertainer, the most popular piece of ragtime, that could be used in this sense. But also a whole bunch of music recorodings made by dead people a long time ago if the right of elevation in the public domain had not been made so confused by vampiric right holders.
Anyway, that's what I wanted to rant about on Fallout music.
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