The Key To Amazon Prime's Fallout Is Its Use Of Music (original) (raw)

Summary

• Fallout's unique mix of retro-futurist aesthetics and vintage music creates a bizarre, yet striking atmosphere in its dystopian world.
• The use of 30s, 40s, and 50s music in the Fallout series adds an eerie contrast to the violence and brutality of the wasteland.
• Amazon's Fallout show cleverly integrates this iconic music into scenes of gore and violence, enhancing the irony and atmosphere of the adaptation.

If you’ve played Fallout, there are a few distinct things that you might think of when you try to explain its overall vibe to someone. It’s dystopian, largely barren, full of violence, and marred with brutality from all sides. But it also has a distinct retro-futurist aesthetic borne out of its setting in an alternate universe that diverged from ours long before its nuclear devastation.

Not to get too stuck in the nitty-gritty of it all, but essentially, Fallout’s timeline diverges from ours after World War 2. Because different kinds of science (specifically atomic) are the foundations of further scientific progress, we end up seeing aesthetics of the ‘50s and ‘60s alongside futuristic technologies like robots and nuclear-powered cars. It feels muddled and bizarre in the moment, but if nothing else, it’s extremely striking.

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That aesthetic is part of what makes Fallout so distinct from other apocalyptic, dystopian settings, and a huge contributing factor to that is the music. The games have a lot of original music, but you can also tune in to radio stations on your handy Pip-Boy and listen to music from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, with songs from artists like Cole Porter, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and more. This particular time period in music can feel inextricable from the identity of the series, considering how present it is and how crucial it is to the strange time period being depicted.

Not everybody likes the games’ music. I know when I was playing Fallout 4 for the first time, I found it more spooky than soothing to have jazzy harmonies echoing throughout a room as I explored. When my nerves were already raw from fighting off raiders, I tended to prefer to put my headphones on and listen to a podcast or some Midwest Emo to make myself feel less on edge – those singers have beautiful voices, but there is something decidedly and very intentionally creepy about listening to jazz in a building full of corpses. That strong contrast is integral to the irony of the whole setting. It’s a part of the series’ identity, and the creators of Amazon Prime’s television adaptation definitely recognised this.

Not only do we hear music from the era throughout the show, but they’re used as incredible needle drops. They’re used as backdrops to acts of brutal, gory violence, and as soundtracks to beautifully choreographed acts of mass murder. The showrunners know that the contrast between the reality of the wasteland and the smoothness of the music is funny and horrifying in equal parts, and they capitalise on that association to bring the show to new heights.

The people making the show had enough affection for the games that they recognised the music had a big role to play, and that they were also smart enough to take that music and integrate it into an adaptation in a completely different medium. It captures the hilarity and creepiness of the juxtaposition and transplants it into an appropriately operative, ironic role in the show. To put it briefly, that’s extremely cool.

Fallout

Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.