Gta vice city songs
But when combined with timeless hits, the one-hit wonders help realistically fill out the setting and set a more believable tone that covered more bases. Most of the game’s artists, however, had long fallen out of favor. I haven’t mentioned Michael Jackson or Ozzy Osbourne or a number of other popular artists because they were still pretty popular in 2002 when this game first game out. A bygone eraĪnyone familiar with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City will note that I’ve left out some of the biggest artists. And, of course, the fictional band Love Fist let us see the drug-fueled debauchery of the ’80s metal bands up close and personal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I wasn’t enamored with all of them, but I gained an appreciation for the harder rock music of the ’80s that I probably would have grown up loving if I had been the right age. Vice City marked the first time that I had ever heard the likes of Iron Maiden, Anthrax, Quiet Riot, or Judas Priest. It gave me something new and wonderful to experience and enjoy that was right up my alley. Unlike New Wave, Soft Rock, and the like, I was intimately familiar with the heavy bass lines and distorted guitars. My dad was the sort who liked classic rock, so metal was a genre of rock music that I had never been exposed to before. I thoroughly enjoyed the pop music of the ’80s found in Vice City, but I really loved the metal. I mainly was listening to various types of metal or older rock like Nirvana, a band that has embraced the teenage spirit and continues to reverberate even today. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was released when I was in high school, but I wasn’t much of a fan of pop music back then. The soundtrack elegantly evoked the ’80s to me in a succinct way like the aforementioned commercial. I’m still waiting to hear what “so in vies” from Wang Chung’s track “Dance Hall Days” means.
Some of the cultural themes and references were lost on me, and I outright didn’t understand some of the lyrics. And I loved every minute of it, even if I didn’t understand everything.
This was an alien world to both myself and Tommy Vercetti helped bond me to the character because of how much I could relate to him in that aspect. He was let loose into the unfamiliar world of Vice City 15 years later, smack dab in the middle of the year I was born: 1986. This immersion was also helped along by the main character Tommy Vercetti, a man who had been in jail since 1971.
These songs that were popular before I was even born helped immerse me into the era more than anything else. I killed hundreds of men while bobbing my head to Toto’s “Africa.” If any of the outfits had sunglasses, I’d certainly have had no problem wearing them at night. I ran to the musical stylings of A Flock of Seagulls. I spent the better part of two weeks taking in some of the finest representations of New Wave and Soft Rock. Instead, we got a mix of soft rock, heavy metal, early hip hop, and an absolute truckload of New Wave. Gone were the techno, reggae, and gangster rap stations - they hadn’t really achieved popularity in Miami at the time. Much like its predecessor GTA3, Vice City had multiple radio stations that were each focused on a different style of music.
When I actually got my hands on the game, I had no idea what I was getting into. I was sold on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City with this one commercial. And finally, it was the only Billboard Top 10 track that A Flock Of Seagulls managed to get in America, also highlighting the string of one-hit wonders of the era. That aside, this song encapsulated so much about the musical culture of the time: a snare drum accentuated with reverb, a Moog synthesizer, and a wonderfully disinterested singer belting out the tunes in an almost dispassionate tone. “I Ran” by A Flock Of Seagulls was the track of choice and it was, in many ways, the perfect tune to use aside from the delightful visual of Tommy Vercetti actually running in tune with the music. To me, though, the choice of the song for this commercial is what immediately established the style.