When I turned on the rusty radio for the first time on the wasteland of _The Fallout 4_ and heard _The Ink Spots_ singing “I don’t want to set the world on fire” in a hoarse voice, the absurdity was like radiation dust covering the whole body in an instant. At this moment, a mutant fly is buzzing not far away, and my character is holding a laser gun made of straws and batteries. This is the most exquisite recipe of the radiation series — cooking the most bitter black humor in the post-apocalyptic world with warm old songs half a century ago.
I remember that at night in Diamond City, I controlled Knight to search for supplies on the dilapidated street, and the cheerful melody of _Wouldn’t It Be Nice_ floated out of a broken window. The Beach Boys sang the fantasy of a perfect future, and the reality in front of them was: a super mutant was gnawing on the corpse of a radiant deer two blocks away, and the distant fraternity’s airship crossed the bloody sky like a metal whale. This extreme misalignment of sound and picture produces a wonderful chemical reaction — it does not weaken the cruelty of the end of the world, but makes that cruelty sharper and more memorable.
The most ironic sound scene takes place in the nuclear coke factory. _Orange Colored Sky_ It sings brightly in Orange Colored Sky that love is like “an orange light in the clear sky”, and the player is stepping on the remains of radiation cockroaches, looking for drinkable nuclear cola in the ruins that used to be an assembly line. When I finally found the working jukebox and put it in the bottle cap to play _Civilization_, Bobby Darin jokingly complained about the “inconvenience of primitive life”, and my character had just cured radiation sickness with a treatment needle and was cracking the password to a smart toilet terminal. This multi-layered nested satire constitutes the unique narrative aesthetics of the radiation series.
As the time of walking in the wasteland became longer and longer, I began to judge the safety of the area through the songs on the radio. If the desolate guitar sound of _Big Iron_ sounds, it usually means that there is a friendly post station or caravan nearby; and when the rock music with the metaphor of a nuclear explosion in _Atom Bomb Baby_ appears, be careful of plunderers or worse. In the desert of New Vegas, _Blue Moon_ was suddenly played when I was chased by the claws of death. The blues about loneliness actually made me laugh out loud in a desperate situation — this is the magic of radiation, which turns despair into an absurdity with music that can be savored.
I will never forget the dusk at the Starlight Rest Station. The sunset dyed the broken walls into gold, and the piano prelude of _Maybe_ flowed out of my beeping boy. At the moment when the lyrics “Maybe you’ll think of me” sounded, the date in the game jumped to the anniversary of the outbreak of the nuclear war. At that moment, the sweet love song of fifty years ago suddenly became a civilized requiem, and I, a frozen survivor from the pre-war world, became the only latecomer of this grand funeral.
After clearing all the main lines, I formed a habit: playing the song list of the radiation radio on rainy days in the real world. When _The End of the World_ sounded in the carriage, the city lights flashing outside the window suddenly had a different meaning. This is the ultimate achievement of the radiation series of music design — it has changed the way we listen to history. Those dusty old songs were reborn in the context of the game and became a time tunnel connecting the two worlds.
If you also want to experience this unique aesthetics of deconstructing the end of the world with nostalgia, the _Fallout_ series will give you the most profound inspiration. Here, every old song is a key, which opens not only the memory of the war, but also the eternal inquiry of the contradictions of human civilization. When the last note dissipates in the silence after the nuclear explosion, you will find that the most pungent irony is often wrapped in the sweetest melody.
