Grand Theft Auto V, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Playlist

The American suburban teenager is an unwitting lab rat in a sadistic social experiment: what happens when food, friends, education, and entertainment are accessible only via two-ton moving metal cages?

The answer is that they die. Car crashes killed over two thousand 13-19 year olds in 2022. Accidents continue to be the number one cause of preventable death for American teens, followed by murder and suicide. Compared to adults, teens are less likely to drink and drive, but when they do they’re at much higher risk of crashing.

In high school I was in Students Against Drunk Driving (which has since broadened its purview to oppose “Destructive Decisions” in general), not because I particularly cared about driving under the influence, but because all my friends were in it. The main event was the annual “SADD Walk”: we’d meet at our high school, get bussed to a different high school five miles down the road, and then walk back to where we started, all of us wearing matching black SADD shirts.

The point of this exercise continues to elude me. Maybe as drivers whizzed past us they’d see the word SADD out of their peripheral vision, be confused, and google it (ideally not while driving). Like I said: my friends were in it, and they were cooler than me. They had Xbox 360s and custom-built gaming PCs that they used to play Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, while I only had a Wii; they already had licenses and even their own cars, while I still relied on my dad to shuttle me around.

My dad is opposed to all recorded music and drives in complete silence. “Peace and quiet” is his favorite phrase. When he taught me to drive in the parking lot of the elementary school I attended, he warned me to never drive with the radio on—I’d get distracted and before I knew it I’d crash, another victim of a Destructive Decision.

But of course, once I passed my driver’s test (after failing twice) and started borrowing my parents’ green 2001 Honda CR-V to finally access food, friends, education, and entertainment on my own, I listened to the radio—mostly 88.5 WXPN, “member supported radio from the University of Pennsylvania.” All my friends went to Penn, the Ivy League school that counts Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione as alumni. I applied and was summarily rejected, opting instead to attend the public and less prestigious Penn State. When I visited Penn and met my friends’ friends I’d tell them I went to Penn … State. No one laughed.

If I had time, I’d catch one of the free weekly concerts at the WXPN building on Walnut. They’d some pretty good acts: St. Vincent, Waxahatchee, Ra Ra Riot. But back at Penn State I didn’t have a car, and streaming 88.5 FM from my computer just wasn’t the same. The radio station I listened to the most in college was FlyLo FM in Grand Theft Auto V—my dad bought me a gaming laptop when I graduated high school, which meant I could finally catch up on all the non-Nintendo games I missed.

As I replay GTA V on my refurbished PS4 over a decade after its release, now that it’s generated $9.54 billion in revenue and become the much ballyhooed “most successful entertainment product of all time,” I’m happy to report that FlyLo FM is just as good as I remember. It’s still a masterpiece of curation and mixing: the way Machinedrum’s “She Died There” is slowly stripped to its bedrock drum and bass beat as DJ Rashad starts rhythmically repeating “it’s wack,” the way Flying Lotus himself says he’s “bringing you some of the greatest music the world has ever heard” over the sublime, subdued hook of “Windowlicker” before announcing “EY-PHEX” as the drop kicks in, the way the entire set seamlessly wraps back around on itself in a gentle wash of shimmering synths and whispering chimes—I know this because I mashed the last and first tracks together in Adobe Audition, just to check—it’s the best station in the game, regardless of whatever some SEO keyword-infested listicle may claim.

I do agree, though, that Frank Ocean’s blonded Los Santos takes second place, mainly because it’s also a mix of experimental electronica, hip-hop, and oddball picks like Alex G. What knocks blonded down for me is the inclusion of ads for in-game products, one for an oversized pickup truck “that says fuck you to your MPG-conscious hybrids from Japan,” and another for the all-electric “Pfister Neon” that lets you “ show the world that you can not only afford a fully electric sports car, you care about the earth more than most people.”

It’s a tiny detail, but these two ads are emblematic of GTA V’s failed attempts at satire. If gas-guzzling trucks are for patriotic rubes and emissions-free EVs are for self-congratulating snobs, what counts as a normal car? Is there any car that doesn’t deserve mockery and scorn? If GTA V depicts conservatives, liberals, celebrities, paparazzi, hillbillies, hipsters, cops, crooks, spooks, feminists, and women in general as some combination of vapid, vain, delusional, and just plain irritating—then who is worth taking seriously? What, if anything, is worth believing in?

Because lemme tell you, confused social commentary notwithstanding, Grand Theft Auto V believes in the automobile. Every car has a name and real-life analogue—there are fake Porsches and Lamborghinis, but also Priuses and Smart Cars—with fully rendered interiors complete with functioning speedometers and stereos that display the station you’re actually listening to. And as carefully as the cars are built, even more granular attention is paid to their destruction: doors can fall off, glass can shatter, tires can pop, engines can fail, and if you smash into a utility pole hard and fast enough—as I did during the first street race mission—the player-character launches through the windshield screaming and twirling through the air before crumpling onto the concrete.

As I sprinted back to my mangled, stolen car before ditching it and stealing another one, I realized that the ultimate fantasy of GTA isn’t the fact that you can commit a mass shooting anytime, anywhere. That’s every American’s constitutional right. The real freedom of GTA is the freedom to never worry about parking, to leave your car wrapped around a pole or the sidewalk or the middle of the street. I moved to Pittsburgh without a car — as a grad student I could take the bus and light rail for free — but once I started dating my fiancé Grace and driving their VW Beetle, I haven’t stopped thinking about parking. I have the Go Mobile PGH app on my phone and know the price and parking hours of most neighborhoods, if we’re going downtown I check the availability of different garages on ParkPGH (use the Oliver Garage, it’s markedly cheaper and still centrally located), if we’re driving to Lawrenceville I check Google Street View to find the side street with the most spots—my god, now that I escaped the suburbs and live in an actual city I can’t walk down the street without instinctively checking where you can park and when street cleaning is.

That’s why I still take the bus to the University of Pittsburgh where I work, why when I’m home I take SEPTA into Philadelphia like I did when I visited my Penn friends, and why I’m still disappointed that unlike in GTA IV, you can’t ride the train in Los Santos. Grace also buses to work at Pitt, but at the end of the day I pick them up in the Bug. I ripped an mp3 of FlyLo FM from Youtube and synced it via iTunes to my phone like it’s 2013, and I’ve been listening via Bluetooth as I pop over to Oakland. Otherwise, I tune into WPTS, Pitt’s student-run radio station—now that I’m 30 and have no idea where to find cool new music, college radio continues to be a good bet.

I parallel park on Fifth Ave right before a bus stop. Pittsburgh Regional Transit is threatening to eliminate nearly half of all bus routes because of a budget shortfall, and with our Penn alum president slashing and burning all forms of public funding, there’s virtually no chance of relief from the feds. We’ll be forced to rely even more on two-ton moving metal cages. 

When Grace finally finishes work and gets in the car, I turn the engine on, the radio off, and take us home. They’re tired, they need peace and quiet. So do I.

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