(no subject)

[camwyn]

I have long held that one of the reasons for the cultural stagnation of the Fallout universe is that rock and roll failed to develop there as it did in ours. Oh, it appeared, but briefly- very briefly. A few wonders, like the King, appeared and made themselves regionally famous, but then vanished from sight. At best it was an aberration, a blip, something more remembered for producing nonsense like 'One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater' than anything of real note. Rock and roll was, after all, a music of change and rebellion, and that just isn't something we see in the Falloutverse no matter how hard we look.

At least, not in the States. I can't help but wonder if there was a brief time overseas when it might have existed in other countries long lost to the Bomb, and I kind of hope it was, because without it the image of an Enclave junior officer kicking back in the Adams Air Force Base command crawler in the wee hours of the morning, chair-dancing to the scavenged sounds of an ancient German record on which only the track Moskau is still listenable, wouldn't exist.

Comments

[genarti]

And this is an excellent mental image, I have to say.

[chn-breathmint.livejournal.com]

I'd thought you'd meant THIS track, Moskau.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lork4zxRGxI

- Mel

[camwyn]

Haven't actually heard that one before. I'll have to give it a listen when I go home. But, no, I meant the Dschingis Khan one.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

It stands to reason, also, that the blues did not survive. Without rock and roll, the British Invasion bands would not have reached further back, pulling forth Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf and their contemporaries, and men like Pinetop Perkins (who passed away last night), BB King, and John Lee Hooker would have perished in obscurity, never known for the influence they had on American music.

[batyatoon]

I have heard it said that if it weren't for rock music, the Fifties would have gone on forever.

Isn't that kind of what happened in Falloutverse?

[camwyn]

Pretty much, yeah. There are no visible indicators of segregation in any of the ruins, so that aspect of the Fifties appears to have fallen by the wayside; however, in-universe commercials for the Vault system cheerfully lay the responsibility for meeting a nice boy and repopulating the country at the family's daughter's feet, and all the prewar outfits for women have skirts. The Vault-Tec commercials and the in-game narration provided by Vault-Tec when you walk through the ruins of their exhibit at the Smithsonian< Air and Space Museum Museum of Technology all loudly and cheerfully point to Mom's role as baker of cookies and She Who Cleans Up After Those Darn Messy Kids. Only a handful of elements in downloadable content indicate women's presence in the Army (one dead woman in a group of five or six kidnapped medics in Mothership Zeta; one simulated woman in the medical tent in Operation Anchorage; some of the NPC soldiers who follow you in Operation Anchorage have a chance of being generated as females), so I have a feeling Fifties gender roles did not get taken apart.

(I also have a feeling that the Pill was never invented. That would have been as much of a mentality-breaker for the Fifties as rock music.)