Soundscapes of The End

Cracked desert as far as the eye can see with only the occasional scorched and dilapdated structure breaking the flatness of the horizon, a sunburnt void where only the remnants of the Vegas Strip remain properly lit, and small settlements scraping by to survive. There is barely any life here, and what life there is left is hard, dangerous, and generally miserable. Some find solace in the blunt simplicity of the end of all things while others—those playing slot machines and gambling money that lost its value when nuclear blasts smothered the world—hold on to what past they have left, even if they were born long after that past was ever a reality. That is the way of the Mojave Wasteland. This is Fallout: New Vegas.

The sounds of the Wasteland are few and far between. Sometimes a wind below and sometimes one can hear shouting or the screams of some unfortunate wanderer. The staccato of automatic rifle fire rings in the distance. But what stands out the most is the vast silence of the end of it all. Like the flatness of the Mojave Wasteland, the sounds of the land, or lack thereof, are drab, flat, and are hardly anything at all. That is why the disc jockeys of Fallout’s retrofuturist apocalypse are so special. And from a biased standpoint as someone who loves 1940s to early 1960s country music, the radio stations in Fallout: New Vegas become almost mythic when tied to the world they exist in. Like any RPG, everyone approaches and plays these games differently. Some folks probably never use the radio in their Pipboy and just let the game’s sound mix and orchestrated score do all of the sonically thematic legwork. Not me though. Every time I start a new game, one of the first things I do is open up the radio screen and tune in to Mojave Music Radio. 50, 60, 70, 200, and 300 hours later and I’ve yet to turn it off. That radio station, to me, is the most important character in Fallout: New Vegas.

Marty Robbins, The Roues Brothers, Peggy Lee, and Eddy Arnold narrate my journey through Fallout: New Vegas. Their songs repeat, repeat, and repeat again. Maybe Marty Robbins will song of “the ranger with a Big Iron on his hip” while I get into a cramped, chaotic gunfight with Ceasar’s Legion in an old general store or maybe Peggy Lee’s haunting voice will sing of Johnny Guitar while I stroll into the ever-lit New Vegas Strip in the wee hours of the morning. It doesn’t matter when, where, or why, but Mojave Music Radio is always playing. It is one of the few constants in every play-through of New Vegas, for me at least. It doesn’t matter when a certain song plays because, regardless of the situation, every song on the situation plays at the right time (I mean these songs were curated and pulled for specific tonal, sonic, and thematic reasons after all). I can’t look out into the vast moonlit Mojave Wasteland without Johnny Bond’s “Stars of the Midnight Range” playing in my head if it isn’t already playing in the game. There is a certain tonal legwork that these songs do that makes up for some of the weak spots in the game overall. The nuclear-scorched western motif doesn't always work, but Mojave Music Radio will trick you into thinking it does. You might be blasting away with a plasma rifle while Marty Robbins croons about six-shooters, and it shouldn’t work, but it just does. It feels right.

And like the dirty, rusted world itself, there is a sense of weariness, age, and use to the songs chosen for Mojave Music Radio. Each song has the texture of pulling an LP from the used records section, blowing off the dust, and letting the needle drag across it. There are probably skips and scratches, the production (obviously and beautifully) is sparser than it is today, and thus age creeps its way into the sonic landscape of every song which, ironically, gives them new signs of life and new stories to tell. Only a few songs actually exist on Mojave Music Radio, and while this is probably due to licensing/music budget stuff, I like to think of the reason for so much sonic repetition and replays as due to the fact that there just isn’t much recorded music left at the end of the world. These few songs are probably from the best kept 7" or 12" left in the nuclear wastes of the vast Mojave. Disc Jockeys make do and those who tune in don’t mind the repetition because it's better than no music at all. Maybe it reminds them of a world they can barely remember or have only heard about in stories passed down from their parents and their parents’ parents, and that is enough. Fallout never directly speaks to the power of music as a cultural or communal artifact but the mere fact that radio stations and disc jockeys survived while the world died says all that needs to be said.

There is also a vast irony at play to the rotation of tunes on Mojave Music Radio. Fallout: New Vegas is an incredibly violent, and at times, distressing video game. And yet the music is usually pretty upbeat, at least tonally. The lyrics are often forlorn and sad but a breezy guitar lick is a breezy guitar lick. We can tap our feet to it but Fallout: New Vegas presents us with a reality where we might be unloading a riot shotgun into a gang of marauders while that same guitar lick plays. Better yet, the wrong song will often play at the wrong time (and this happens a hell of a lot more often than the right song playing at the right/perfect moment). For example, I watched one of my companions get plugged through and through by endless arcs from a laser rifle while Guy Mitchell’s “Heartbreaks by the Number” loudly played. It was a funny, sad moment. Hell, maybe it was the right song at the right time, and while Fallout’s ironic wit hardly ever really works, it's in these random moments where it pays off in spades.

The end of the world is a weird thing to think through, and it seems like we’re currently living through it. Like Mojave Music Radio, music is a constant as the world heats up, water levels rise, income disparity grows, and as billionaires flee to space on phallic rockets. Some songs hit at the right time as they criticize the end of all things while others exist to pull our focus from the end to what joy there is left. Other music just fills the startlingly numbing and slow decay of everything all around us and within us. Who knows if the music today will survive the apocalypse of tomorrow, but if Fallout can somehow act as an example, then maybe some recorded music will survive thanks to those who are as startled by the silence of endless nothing as we are. New music will be made and maybe one day we’ll all hold hands at the last Lollapalooza while the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans meet the newly built seawalls on either side of Chicago. But before everything ends, I’ll probably play Fallout: New Vegas a few more times and find myself getting lost in the warm twang of Mojave Music Radio before going and thumbing through the dollar record bin at local record stores looking for old country records, much like the ones in the game. And as Tony Vice and Jerry Burnham sing: “Let’s ride into the sunset together, stirrup to stirrup, side by side…when the day is through, I’ll be here with you, into the sunset we will ride.”