What kinds of music are popular in the Shadowrun world??? I'm making a Dwarven BootBoy for the new campaign.I'm goin to have him be into 21st century
& "modern" Streetpunk/Oi! ,HxC & Ska.I'll probally make up some bands for my GM to use in the campaign.
Dwarven BootBoy

Imagine making a human bootboy in the 2000s and having him be into swing jazz and the like. If you can take him seriously, go ahead with your plan.

~J

And just what's wrong with swing jazz?

>>>>> For corny old 20th C flat-vids? Nothing. But I wouldn't want my crew to know that I listened to it for fun anymore then our Sammy wants the world to know that he buys used woman's panties over the Matrix. <<<<< -Bot

>>>>> I DO NOT YOU SICK FRAGGER! <<<<< -Double D

>>>>> So is that where all my missing underwear has been going to 'Double D'? <<<<< -Miss Understanding

>>>>> AAARRRGGG! <<Connection Lost>>

>>>>> I wonder if he smashed his comm again? *chuckles* <<<<< -Bot

Nothing, apart from the fact that street toughs don't usually listen to a lot of it, despite being the rebellious youth music from eighty years ago.

~J

It all depends on how you want to play it. From some of the novels and supplements I've read about the SR world most music is pretty much lame if it's put out by the corps. Take a look at most popular music today.

Now that being said I could see some music lasting the test of time. Rolling Stones, The Who, The Doors, AC/DC, hell maybe even Danzig would still be around in small doses or remade for the 10th time by some SR world band.

When players ask me what SR music sounds like I say depends on the genre. For instance I would think that Troll Metal sounds like Rage Against the Machine fused with Kataklysm. Brutally Hard Death Metal with a political message. Some huge 7 foot Troll with a Death Metal growl would scare the s**t out of anyone! Especially if the Troll in question was a she!

Hip Hop and Rap might still be around but the only good stuff would be put out by underground labels and be more regional. It wouldn't be as popular in the main stream as it is today.

Basically any fashion and pop culture in SR is just a hyped reflection of the time period when the writer wrote said supplement or novel. All the early SR stuff is 80's punk music themed. So take from that what you will. Do what you want and make the world your own.

You should have your character listen to emo, and then have to explain to every single player you play with that emo isn't what they think it is.

~J

There is also Or'zet rap. Gangsta rap straight from the 'hood in a language for orks. Sota 2064 again.

Well I like Futurerama's take on "Clasical Music".

*EDIT*

However I'd be more inclined to say that Star Trek, ect is guilty of being lazy and not wanting to trust the viewers to remember Classical Music won't mean the same thing in the future as it does now.

Possible derail:

In regards to the use of classical music in Star Trek - The use of said music is a thematic element. Picard, the captain who most often played classical music, had an affinity for the past: from wooden sailing ships to French vineyards and archaeology. His appreciation for music was meant to showcase his upbringing as well as thematically connect the characters to the past, to his and the crews' relationship to their oceangoing forebearers, hundreds of years in the past. As well, the appreciation of classical music has long been a staple of gentility, of which Starfleet officers are meant to be a shining example of. Considering the use, I don't think classifying it as lazy is a fair statement.

'Strue. There's also the fact that the canon of Classical music is music that has already endured for between four hundred and a hundred years (ok, so the old stuff is more properly Baroque, and the new stuff more properly Romantic, but just you try picking five random people off the street and seeing who knows the difference). Once it's lasted this long, another few hundred years doesn't seem that odd.

~J

I gotta agree with Kage here. Classical music will always be with us. It's part of Western culture. I don't see Symphonies going away. Now it may only be Corp types who pretend to like it but it will still be around.

Basically you could play a character who likes just about anything. You can always put in your background something like "My grandmother used to play me her old New Kids on the Block CDs when I was a kid" for your Troll Street Sammie and DARE anyone to say something.

I had a player whose Ork Merc liked Michael Jackson. The whole catalog. Seriously. Background knowledge 6 in the skill and spent karma to get it up to a 9. He also liked John Hughes' films. Had a 5 in that skill. Dude you can't help but love a character who has a framed Sixteen Candles poster in his squat where he keeps his Stoner Ares in the closet. He spent 1500 nuyen on that poster.

I think the best way to think about music in the 2070's is to look at where music was in the 30's. 70 odd years ago pop music was a lot of ragtime early jazz. Then comes rockabilly and finally actual rock'n'roll. Look at early Johnny Cash and Elvis and how much more modern musicians have built upon those legacies.

I typically think of music in Shadowrun as being a lot like today's except for being louder, harder, and edgier. Kind of the way I think of the world of Shadowrun in general being louder, harder, and edgier.

Thrash Classical, Heavy Classical, and Death Classical.

…Hair Classical?

~J

Rush?

Now, I'm going to have to play a discotech troll.

A velvet suit, a good pair of dancing shoes, and an Uzi1V; comin' at ya.

Night Fever; Night Fever!; (don't know anymore of the song)

Matter of fact: Night Fever is going to be his street name.

Don't forget the spoon on the chain around his neck.

~J

I'd say you could take any musical style, stick "Trog" or "Elf" or whatever race in front of it, and have your own new style. Also, I'd say most of today's styles would still be valid, but they'd be considered "classic" or "old fart music". But it depends on your character. Most typical teens today might not have a clue about the Beatles, but there will still be some oddballs that love em.

As for current music trends in Shadowrun, I think there'd be a lot of angry protest music, along with a ton of mindless pop produced by machines with little to no human input. With the advent of cybersynths, there would probably be a lot more instrumentals and musical interludes, because you could probably do some incredible things with an instrument you control with your mind. Freebird, for example, would grow from the extended 15 minute version to the 45 minute one.

Just a few thoughts.

Watching RL music in my neck of the woods (and for that matter, pop culture in general), whatever happened in the last decade is very unfashionable, but the stuff from a decade before that is cool again. Anything older than that is either, "classic", forgotten, or small subculture FANatics only.
So in 206x, I would expect all the 205x stuff to be looked down on (Jet Black, the Shadows, Dark Angel, Shield Wall etc) but 204x stuff (Early Maria Mercurial, for example) to be back, while Concrete Dreams have hit the Beatles/Stones/Zep-style "classic" status

It's a Cyberpunk theme (which Shadowrun draws influence from) but a lot of the music popular among the street crowd in my games is political rock - Rage Against the Machine is a good example of this.

Surrounded by so much meaningless garbage, many of the "indie" bands my hip street freaks like are trying to re-insert the message back into music - proving that just because you have a track machine and a hook does not good music make. It's gotta be driven, not just have rythym. Drownin' in the empty sounds! Yo! Yo! Yo!

*coughs*

Sorry.

What about music composed by artificial intelligences? You could argue that their creations would be the first new form of music since Hip Hop.

What form such music would take is something we humans may not actually be able to predict.

What purpose would a machine have in crafting music? Why would an AI wish to create music at all?

And we can guess what form it would take - mathematically precise, deep in theory, dead in soul.

~J

While Concrete Dreams may have lost some of its lustre, I always though Shield Wall would outlast their temporal fame. I also liked what was written about them a lot more. Kinda like The Smiths versus Depeche Mode. Concrete Dreams' side projects were embarassing, from what I recall. Not so for Shield Wall.
Anyway...

Trace Dump: Though many would argue that this style was pioneered by DeeCee artist Wavefront, the style only gained mainstream credibility following the success of artists such as Uh4.17, 8th Winter, Tetsu Arashi, and Lotus. Like most descendants of the glitch genre, trace dump is characterized by circuit-bent electronics, home-assembled preamps and effects, and a heavy use of sampled sounds. What sets trace dump apart is the use of random WiFi datastreams parsed through the 'dump' - a piece of either software or hardware that maps packets (based on size, time sent, and content) to a set of drum noises. Usually these noises are snippets of audio data likewise captured from a wifi heavy setting. In this regard, trace dump could be seen as almost entirely made of 'found sound', and performances tend to be shaped and altered by the wifi activity of the audience.
Calling cards: dissonant, grating, harsh, alien.
Popular with: deckers, intellectual edgeculture members, disaffected but literate citizens.
Bands: 8th Winter, Uh4.17, Lotus, Tetsu Arashi
Real-world inspiration for GMs: Bitcrush, Gridlock, Tarmvred, Converter

Upshot: The latest in a long string of youth-culture genres, upshot is the current world's response to the recent tragedies of Crash 2.0, the rise of corporate militarism, and a sense of uncertainty about the future. While in the past many punk-based genres would dwell upon the hopelessness of life and leave it to the listener to draw the conclusion to live fast and die young, upshot musicians often explicitly state their feelings on the matter. The message is simple: life sucks, but we're still alive, and we'll fight to stay that way. Popular among the young, poor and disposessed, upshot has yet to see much commercial success - but like the myriad subgenres of punk and rock over the past century, it's only a matter of time. Stylistically, upshot artists tend toward forceful and evocative yet simple lyrics, relying on their own vocal power to overshadow simple musical arrangements. While many who are not fans of the style would call the musical arrangements crude and the sound 'typical' of the culture it represents, adherents insist that an uplifting message to those who have lost hope is greatly needed.
Calling cards: simple, evocative, thrashy, community-centric.
Popular with: the down-and-out, punks, the poor, ork & troll communities, local thugs.
Bands: Subculture Sublimation, Clenched Fist, Tunguska
Real-world inspiration for GMs: Michael Graves era Misfits, "It's Not a Fashion Statement, It's a Deathwish" by My Chemical Romance (simply for instrumentation), Muse

More to come later.
Also, in defense of 'old music remaining popular', in some cases it's just dated. In others, however, the roots hold true. Look at certain trends that stay constant. Nick Cave's cover of "Black Betty" doesn't strike me as any more dated or 'unhip' than the original Alan Lomax recording in the 1933 (and earlier roots in the 19th century). Similarly, you can examine the soul and funk influences in GZA's highly modern Legend of the Liquid Sword and see that the form may have changed, but the general stylings remain the same. And how far has the apple of Portishead fallen from the 30s torch singer tree?

I tend to figure that while there ARE fully new forms in 2070, you can trace the roots back much farther. Especially given the prevalence of late 2050s 'new agey' fusion/elven music that seems to follow the easy listening/Loreena McKennit model of reinventing much older styles.

While we are on that subject. What year did Shield Wall release their 'big album'? The one big D gave money to?
And ahh... concrete dreams, quiet possibly the worst adventure ever. Also the only published one I have played in. Fucking vampires.

The adventure was "Mercurial" (In Concert at Underworld 93). Never played it. Maria Mercurial was friends with the CD crew and was occasionally a guest musician for them.

I believe Shield Wall's "Mother of the Sea" was started in 2054, but was only completed in 2062.

I can imagine a socially-polarized Sixth World in which there are only two types of music, Punk and Elevator.

There is no music within the Arcologies, only Muzak.


Of course, 80s hardcore Punk is the quintessential Shadowrun music. The inclusion of excessive amounts of gratuitous Punk can really help being an SR game back to its roots.

I also imagine that The Blues would be popular in the Shadows and the streets, considering all of the depressed f-ed-up people living there. I so have this image of a baddass Shadowrunner playing an electric blues guitar for the nine-tenths-naked elf nymphomanic who is chained to his radiator.

You know hyzmarca, now I'm so going to have to use that image.

Ten karma if you can guess which best movie ever made I blatantly stole that image from.

...speed metal polka.

I want a physad with Unarmed Combat (Riverdance). It could double as an artistic skill for centering! GM objections to using Rifles as a centering skill is one thing, but how could any GM possibly claim that Riverdance doesn't count as a centering skill? Besides, I think it's infinitely less lame to have a concentration in Riverdance than it is to have a concentration in Kick Attacks. What kind of mercenary is going to specialize in kick attacks, after all? Riverdancing, though...

...and here I was considering using the Fish Slapping Dance as a centering skill, me...

I've kind of figured a genre of music per edition (or so).

1st Edition) Hair Rock (Poison, Motley Crue, Etc.), Punk & Heavy Metal
2nd Edition) Grunge Rock (Nirvana, Alice In Chains), Punk & Thrash Metal
3rd Edition) Alternative, Punk, Rap (with the start of the "Orksploitation" craze)
4th Edition) Hip-Hop/Rap, Punk, Speed/Thrash Metal, Heavy Metal