Respect My Conglomerate
Re-visiting the overlooked Grand Theft Auto IV, and the power of nostalgia
The year: 2008 (more specifically- late April)
The drink: Capri Sun (Mountain Cooler flavor)
The snack: Little Debbie Cosmic Brownie
The platform: a phat daddy Xbox 360
#1 song in the world: Lollipop by Lil Wayne
#1 movie in the world: Iron Man
Yea, dat pre-MCU content
Grand Theft Auto IV starts off pretty slow. You’re a Yugoslavian war veteran named Niko Bellic, who arrives in America on a cargo ship. That’t right, he’s not even Russian. I didn’t know either!
Your cousin, Roman Bellic, is full of shit. You came to America because Roman promised you the “American dream,” fast cars, beautiful women, and the cutting-edge Internet cafe on every street corner.
Instead, you spend the first handful of missions working as a taxi driver for Roman’s taxi service. Wait, did Rockstar Games invent Uber in the year of our lord, 2008?
You see that little rec circle on the left? That means it’s one of Roman’s taxis :)
A Heroine Quest with Playboy X
Then before you even realize it, it hits you. You’ve moved from the GTA-equivalent of Brooklyn (Broker), to The Bronx (Bohan). You’ve met a girlfriend, a Rastafarian, and a roided-up gearhead who is 100% based on Vin Diesel. And to top it all off, you’re running cocaine for a Puerto Rican drug dealer named Elizabeta Torres.
And in this particular mission, Blow Your Cover, you meet 2 very important side-characters: a biker named Johnny who is “sitting on a big pile of heroin,” and a guy in a rainbow-colored hoodie who looks like he’s straight out of a Lollipop-era Lil Wayne video, named Playboy X.
See if you can guess which one is Johnny and which one is Playboy X :)
Now, why is Playboy X even here? There’s no doubt that Niko and Johnny are a match made in heaven. Buzz cuts. Drugs. Heavy accents (Johnny sounds like he belongs in Red Dead). Rockstar Games even made a spin-off DLC centered around Johnny (The Lost & Damned, which was soon forgotten when the superior The Ballad of Gay Tony came out). If it weren’t for the hard streets of Liberty City, Johnny and Niko might have even been lovers!
Playboy X, on the other hand, is simply here because he looks great. Rockstar snapped on this character model, and they knew it. Playboy is like a glitch in the Matrix. GTA IV’s color palette is made up of browns, grays, and Escalades. When Playboy X enters the picture, it’s almost like a unicorn showed up to sell you LSD. His effortless swagger and charisma jump off the screen- much like his rainbow hoodie.
Niko, Johnny, and and Playboy embark on a heroine quest :) to the borough of Dukes (can you guess the real-life equivalent? I’ll give you a couple of paragraphs to figure it out). The objective? Help Johnny sell his heroin! But, why is Playboy here? We still don’t know. Yet.
It turns out to be pretty fun, though. The drug deal is a big set-up by the Liberty City PD, and Niko & the gang have to shoot their way out of it. You kill a lot of cops. With a shotgun. Like, a lot of cops. It’s really fun.
Eventually, all of the cops are dead, and biker Johnny is nowhere to be found. But guess what? Someone is still there with you. That’s right, it’s our magical unicorn, Playboy X. THIS is why he’s here. He needs a ride home.
(It was Queens. Dukes is based on Queens.)
Now, prior this particular mission, the rest of Liberty City was restricted to you. You were stuck in Brooklyn, and if you ever tried to cross the bridge to visit Algonquin (Manhattan), the game would slap you with a 6-star wanted level, meaning that the entire United States Military had a shoot-to-kill order on our little Niko Bellic.
But now? After Playboy X asks you to take him home? The Algonquin Bridge is open now, baby. Because Playboy X’s apartment isn’t in Brooklyn. It’s not in The Bronx, either. His apartment is in the heart of Liberty City. And he needs YOU to take him there, baby.
And this is it, this is the reason I wanted to write this article in the first place. Except I couldn’t reveal this in the title, because in the year 2020, it’s hard to talk about this person without already having pre-conceived notions.
When you hit that bridge, those Times Square lights start to appear in the distance.
And you’re listening to GTA IV’s hip-hop station The Beat 102.7.
Sure, technically you could be listening to any radio station in the game, and technically any song could be playing at that moment.
But in MY world? There’s only 1 song. And it happens to be one of my favorite video game moments ever.
That’s right, I fooled Greg into reading an article about Kanye West.
What do I know?
I know it's been a while sweetheart,
We hardly talk, I was doing my thang.
I know I was foul, bay-bay,
Ay bae, lately you’ve been all on my brain.
I can’t hear Kanye West’s Flashing Lights without thinking about this particular video game moment.
Not only that: I can’t hear Kanye West’s Flashing Lights without thinking about New York City in general.
So how does that work? How does my brain associate one song with such a very specific moment in time? And what is this deep feeling that I get in my chest when I hear it?
Nostalgia
A while ago, the almighty YouTube algorithm recommended me to a channel dedicated to music essays, called Trash Theory.
One video peaked my interest immediately, titled, “How The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979 Evokes Decades of Nostalgia.” It’s purely coincidental that the song 1979 is actually featured on the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack.
The description of the video reads:
Nostalgia is a weird concept. We have an idea of it as this vague longing for the past that marketing teams are continually attempting to mine for profit. But from its Greek origin, the word comes from nóstos meaning homecoming and álgos meaning pain or ache. In its original form it was considered a form of melancholy, the idea that you can never fully return to where you came from, that once away home will never be the same.
In short, nostalgia is the past idealized.
Flashing Lights has been my favorite song since this moment in GTA IV.
When I hear it, I get transported back to this pre-MCU spring of 2008. Sitting in my bedroom, eating Little Debbie’s and drinking Capri Sun. Not thinking about money or calories or politics. I think about my dirty Xbox controllers, and my blue iPod Nano. I had an iHome set-up, with my iPod waking me up every morning with an entire GTA IV playlist that I created with songs from the game. For years, I basically woke up to Flashing Lights every day.
And that feeling in my chest? It’s sadness!
I’ve always been a naturally sad person. In 2008 it didn’t feel normal, but that’s what they want you to think when you’re 15. When you’re 27, you realize that everyone is sad. Your parents, your cousins, your siblings, your grandparents. It’s normal!
But now, in the year 2020, not only do I experience that nostalgia from a cool video game moment. I experience nostalgia for what Kanye West represented in 2008, and how much that has changed.
But I’m not going to get into all that. Some other time :)
Moondog’s Movieboat
The movieboat is a magical boat ride filled with all of the extremely useful information that populates my brain.
This first article bounced around a couple of topics that I think about all the time: Grand Theft Auto, Kanye West, and sadness.
I’m starting to realize that I probably have attention-deficit disorder, and sometimes I really need to spill some shit out of my noggin. So, let me know if there’s anything specifically that you want to hear about. I might ignore it, though!
If you’ve made it this far, send me an eggplant emoji!
Moondog