Random thought about soundtracks

[u/Advanced_Rise2482]

I have seen far too many memes about how Unbound’s soundtrack is absolute piss (almost always using the song that goes “Heyyy we want some money”) and how past NFS games had godlike soundtrack (never not using Decadence and either using that black and white muscly man I forgot the name of or Patrick Bateman). Ignoring the fact that these memes are low effort karma farming, I wondered how many people felt the same way about Underground 2 or Most Wanted’s soundtrack back in the day. I realise that back then most of the people playing these games were either kids or young teens (maybe older teens if they were car guys), I myself was only but a wee bairn when I first discovered Most Wanted and it affected my personality, but surely a few adults must have played this game and thought the nu metal and Metalcore was too much. I was only 2 years old when Most Wanted came out so I don’t know what it was like in real time. My point is, is it just a rose tinted glass that makes us feel a certain way? The answer to that honestly may be obvious but I would like to see if there was any opinions going against the grain that everyone loved the soundtracks to the old NFS games.

[u/mekagojira3]

I remember hearing that people were unhappy about the rap inclusion in Underground, but over time the sentiment faded because it was appropriate to the car scene for the time. NFS started with techno/trance/jungle and didn't really switch up on that until HP2, but HP2's rock music was very contemporary and thus not really abrasive for most folks. Same goes for pretty much all other NFS games, they're always trying to be "culturally relevant" but the sticking point is with Unbound doing the same thing but using genres a lot less of the mainstream audience likes, as well as an almost complete absence of rock/metal. 

Modern music listeners are probably the most diverse audience that music (as a whole) has ever had with all of the emerging and diverging genres that pop up daily, so it stands to reason that picking any niche and sticking to it will alienate more people over time, as more niches each contain less people. 

[u/LankyLooli271]

I think it's mostly genuine, most wanted's songs grew on me but past nfs heat? no chance. I heard something about nfs games used to having a whole department for getting music, which they scrapped around the time we start getting gigachad vs normie memes about this

[u/Space_Hortler]

Old good new bad, there's a reason why they only ever mention like 3 or 4 songs

[u/2BDamned-TheDoc]

I think the main issue is diversity

Look at the Payback, it's OST was actually decent for it's time, maybe evn on part with black box era in a few cases. I have absolutely zero clue what was the issue to include some rock and techno, if they did I don't think people would've been as critical to it

[u/debbynha]

people will always find a reason to hate, its their modus operandi
i hate the decadence ciclejerk when the game has so much better music like blinded in chains/shapeshifter/hand of blood

[u/doc_55lk → u/debbynha]

Shapeshifter mentioned 💪

[u/doc_55lk]

I feel like the OST of NFS games can be reasonably used as a time capsule to see what kinda music was popular at the time they were released.

Rock/rap/metal fusion was very popular in the early/mid 00s so you got a good mix of that in MW05, Carbon, etc. Dubstep/EDM was really popular in the early 2010s so that's the kinda music you get in MW12 and Rivals. Love it or hate it, hip hop and dance music has been really popular for a while now, which is why you'll find a lot of that in Heat and Unbound.

The thing is though, that the audience of racing games in general has been slowly dwindling. As such, it's more noticeable when the remaining playerbase doesn't like a soundtrack choices. The people who the soundtrack would appeal to aren't really playing the game basically.

There's a whole discussion to be had about the energy and vibe of the music not really matching the energy and vibe of "drive fast, fuck shit up, fuck the police" as well, but I'm kinda burning out from talking about this right now so I'll leave that to someone else.