My mom did, and the house reflected that. I had no control over the radio in my house, for example. The music I knew was what everyone around me liked. I didn’t bow at the altar of any artist or genre. Until my Saints Row 2 revelation, I was musically agnostic. I’d had years of conditioning to that point that reinforced that alternative music, rock, punk, emo and anything derivative of them were the property of white people and could never belong to little brown boys like me. But I don’t think I can really broach the topic of this music, primarily fronted by white people, without really unpacking that part of the appeal behind the station and the music was that it had any proximity at all to minorities. Generation X is just one of the stations you can listen to on your way to where you eventually wreak havoc. It’s not this great facsimile of either of those, but it was undoubtedly concerned with them. It’s a game about gangs and the hood, plain and simple. It should be noted at some point that for the uninitiated, Saints Row 2 is not about this music at all. Red Jumpsuit Apparatus’s breakout song and only real hit, “Face Down,” is on the radio station, in case you doubted how quintessentially emo and 2008 this game is. The song Paramore won’t perform anymore, “Misery Business,” is on there too, as well as Panic! At the Disco’s ridiculously titled “Lying is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off.” Songs that I literally wouldn’t hear for another decade at least, like Minus the Bear’s “Knights,” made the cut. My impression of it isn’t particularly good, but it’s kind of there from some angle I haven’t found yet. Taking Back Sunday’s “MakeDamnSure” is so stuck in my head, I learned it on guitar this past summer amidst pandemic boredom and isolation. The setlist on the radio station was packed with bangers that’ve stuck with me long after I stopped playing Saints Row 2, though I guess even now I haven’t really put the game behind me. Adorably, it was also before I cursed regularly, so I’d censor myself so as to not get whooped by my aunt. This was back before I knew that most people find it annoying when others just belt out every word to every song they hear, especially if they’re butchering it, as I likely was. I absolutely lost it every time My Chemical Romance’s “Teenagers” would play. My favorite song that’d come on was one I didn’t even know was from one of my favorite bands growing up. I’ve never heard so much Jet as when I flitted back and forth between these games for weekends on end.
At about the same time that 11-year-old me was playing this on my cousin’s PS3, they also had Rock Band, so I was just absolutely inundated with the stuff. Generation X was home to a lot of early 2000s punk, emo and alternative music, which would end up not just defining my tastes but awakening me to music in general. Veteran Child may have been a mistake but his taste in music kind of slapped. So yes, just all around yikes, but bear with me for just a second. In Saints Row 2, there is a radio station called Generation X, operated by a…white Rastafarian burnout named Veteran Child, who I just discovered is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris.
While nothing good could presumably come out of playing a 13-year-old game that has aged so incredibly poorly, I did manage to enjoy my time with it for one particular reason. Last week, I randomly booted up Saints Row 2 for the hell of it.