I Hope GTA 6's Soundtrack Is As Timeless As San Andreas

Happy Grand Theft Auto VI was originally supposed to release today day. While there’s no doubt there will continue to be tons of articles drip-feeding information and speculation about the game in the lead-up to its actual release in November, everyone and their mom have christened it the final video game that could slap any price onto itself and move the needle for years to come, or they make guesswork of its plot from the few tidbits we’ve gotten from Rockstar Games. I’ve never actually been concerned with GTA as a gangster shoot-em-up game. I like it as a fun little sandbox game that I can chill in and listen to good music—something I can only hope GTA 6 will be just as good for.

My earliest memories of playing Grand Theft Auto go back to Vice City. Of course, I was six and shouldn’t have been playing a violent game where you could wander the streets and blow random passersby’s heads off. I had the wherewithal to recognize it was referencing Scarface (since the film was a Thanksgiving staple with my family, alongside The Godfather), but nonetheless, I was a kindergartener playing GTA: Vice City because my older brother (who’s 25 years older than me) didn’t punk me with the tried-and-true passing of the unplugged controller. He let me free-roam using his finished memory card.

There, I’d spend countless hours beelining to the tank I knew he kept in his Tony Montana garage and cause mayhem until I got wasted. That is, until my mom caught wind of my brother letting “baby Isaiah” play the M-rated game unsupervised and bought me a PlayStation 1 with more age-appropriate games like Spider-Man, NASCAR, and Looney Tunes, like hand blocking a trained puppy with a toy to keep them from teething on furniture. While I acquiesced to her wishes, I’d already gotten a taste for GTA’s sandbox potential and longed for the day I’d be “old enough” to play to my heart’s content. That day would come when San Andreas came out.

Like history repeating itself, my brother would let me play his copy of San Andreas when I turned 12 with my mom’s blessing, since I’d already seen the worst of it. She didn’t know about Hot Coffee, and we wanted to keep it that way. But I didn’t fall in love with San Andreas for the debauchery it promised. I loved it for its music. While Luke has gone on record as saying Vice City has the best (licensed) video game soundtrack of all time, my favorite is San Andreas. I loved the songs on San Andreas so much that I’d boot up the game for the express purpose of turning on the radio and having CJ go on a road trip to the countryside while flipping through its stations. I took my sandbox role-playing so seriously that I was obeying traffic laws.

With San Andreas being “the Black GTA game,” with an immaculate time capsule of cookout classics including but not limited to Michael Jackson, The Isley Brothers, Rick James, Boyz II Men, and Slick Rick, the licensed OST already felt like home off rip. But what pushed it over the edge as a formative gaming experience, one I’ve been chasing in the years since with games like Saints Row, is its all-star playlist of licensed OST serving as a gateway to music I’d otherwise never have heard. More specifically, it exposed me to absolute banger folk and country music songs before 9/11 irreparably warped the genre into that jingoistic Bo Burnham bit.

Thanks to San Andreas, my musical tastes expanded after hearing Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses,” Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn’s “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” Whitey Shafer’s “All My Exes Live in Texas,” Hank Williams’ “Hey Good Lookin’,” Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts,” and (my all-time favorite) America’s “Horse With No Name.” Many of these were classics that didn’t make it into Rockstar Games’ GTA: The Trilogy remaster.

Looking back on it, my love of road-tripping in San Andreas has everything to do with my brother taking me on night drives when I was little to help me fall asleep. My memory now plays back those drives like that one dreamy, Wong Kar Wai-esque clip of Anthony Bourdain adrift in a busy city street. He’d hit the expressway, and I’d nod off singing OutKast’s “So Fresh So Clean,” knowing damn well I didn’t understand what it was they were rapping about, but was fully convinced André 3000 was the coolest guy alive.

It's uncanny that my nostalgia for those nights would manifest as San Andreas music, which I’d return to in my daily life as my own sort of digital nostalgia playlist. And with GTA 6 dropping the week of my 30th birthday, I hope its OST will hit the same mark as my all-around fun sandbox game. But I’m not gonna lie, I’m nervous it won’t. Case in point: I couldn’t tell you a single track on the GTA 5 soundtrack, and I played that jawn front to back.

That’s not to say GTA V didn’t have bangers. It’s just that, as a time capsule of the music I was listening to back then—music I knew inside and out—it never stood out the way San Andreas’ Smash Bros.-style “All the warriors” tracklist did. If anything, I remember more of the silly shit DJ Cara would say between tracks than the tracks themselves. Deadass, I had to look up that Freddie Gibbs rapped "Welcome to Los Santos" this weekend. As someone who fucks with dude heavy, it's not a good sign that I couldn’t recall his presence on GTA V’s OST. And what with GTA 6 shaping up to be the latest piece of media slow-cooking during the unreality of the Trump presidency, I’m also worried that whatever podcast-type listening experience it no doubt has queued up will age more like The Boys or an SNL bit than something as timeless and razor-sharp as The Simpsons.

But more than that, I can’t shake the old man feeling that today’s popular music just doesn’t build the same way older tracks did, where songs had multiple verses, a sticky chorus, dynamic instrumentation, and four-minute-plus runtimes. Now, sometimes the best we can hope for with songs today is something shy of two minutes that feels more formulaic and derivative than unique and bold.

Having lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for almost a decade, I know firsthand how rural music scenes can feel frozen in time. I’m talking about folks blasting Tech N9ne and Hopsin while Jid and J. Cole were blowing up everywhere else. Sure, the big Drake hits filtered through, but only because they were inescapable. Otherwise, contemporary hits had as much chance of getting play as a third-rate phone carrier’s signal coverage in areas that weren’t metropolitan. One of my best friends confirmed that Florida is pretty much the same way, which has only increased my fear that the frozen-in-time songs phenomenon would carry over in the game as well. But if GTA 6 wants to be a true time capsule, its licensed OST needs to have bangers Floridians would actually bump.

Should GTA 6 have a similar frozen-in-time vibe to its licensed music as GTA V, I can only hope its soundtrack leans less on the pop music slurry built to trend as a TikTok dance and more on that euphoric 2016 prom night energy—the kind of tracks I’d throw on during a late-night cruise across the highway. Should all else fail, I’ll look forward to muting the game and spinning San Andreas’ soundtrack instead.