The Colour of Vice City Sunsets
“Yesterday's faded. Nothing can change it. Life's what you make it”
I was 15 years old when I first heard The Colour of Spring. I even remember where I was and what I was doing the very moment the first track—“Happiness Is Easy”—started playing after I inserted the CD into the disc drive (remember those?) of my Dell something-or-other with one of those fat, black-chassis monitors displaying some sort of low-resolution Final Fantasy wallpaper, no doubt. The year was 2006, and I was at my mom’s house playing Okami for the PlayStation 2, which had been released that same year. Weird association, I know, especially considering the album’s 1986 release date, as you were probably expecting something more along the lines of “I had just finished watching ABC’s afternoon Benson-MacGyver block before I slipped the cassette purchased direct from the local Sam Goody into my stereo system’s tape player.”
But, alas, I am a millennial perpetually dreaming of times in which I did not exist, which worked out well for me because the early 2000s were a sort of '80s revival for teenagers whose parents were video games instead of real, present human beings. This '80s revival was ushered in by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, whose mature themes and violence prompted some backlash, especially from Christian fundamentalists—particularly a certain disbarred attorney named Jack Thompson, quoted as saying, “If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brains.” (I’m not going to source this because it’s a matter of public record, and the guy wouldn't deny it anyway.) And while Jack Thompson is a reactionary kook, he’s probably right that kids shouldn’t be playing computer games in which they can bang hookers in the back seat of a car, then chainsaw those same hookers' limbs off moments after the deed is done. It follows that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is very violent indeed.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is set in a fictitious reimagining of Miami, Florida, circa 1986; the game largely appealed to young male adolescents by allowing them to roam the city murdering people indiscriminately with a variety of weapons (including a katana for beheadings and a chainsaw that could be stabbed into the roofs of cars when jumped atop) while soliciting prostitutes and dealing drugs to buy lavish properties and stealing cars (hence the game’s name). The game also included a series of story missions that mirrored the plot of the 1983 hit movie Scarface, but no one I knew wanted to play these missions; instead, they opted to run around the city engaging in the aforementioned bad stuff, spraying adolescent angst all over the digital denizens of Vice City in some sort of teenage, masturbatory “fuck you” to mom and dad for making them go to school five days a week, clean their rooms, and eat their vegetables—or something.
It’s interesting, considering that most of the kids I knew who could afford a PlayStation 2 and Vice City didn’t have much to be angsty about to begin with (this includes me, as I was not immune)—as if the dullness of modern first-world existence stirs up a primordial angst that is always there just kinda waiting to be unleashed. Or maybe people just need something to be pissy about, and, despite homeostasis and all the distractions in the world, we just wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have something to complain about constantly. (There’s truly a wealth of insight into the human condition to be gleaned from children’s obsession with violent computer games—especially Grand Theft Auto, which has only grown more violent since my time playing it as a kid—but that’s a topic for another piece, and one that I am wholly unprepared to write about.)
Out of all these violent activities, the most important to teenage me was the stealing and driving of cars, because Grand Theft Auto: Vice City included 10 radio stations that played a variety of era-appropriate music from different genres, including Talk Talk’s “Life’s What You Make It” from their album The Colour of Spring, released in 1986. “Life’s What You Make It” begins with Mark Hollis—proverbial frontman of the group, though the entire band was just as important—playing a strong but simple piano melody, like that of a child messing around on the keys for the first time, and this melody steps in weird time and jazz, driven by tribal drumming that is both manic and highly structured, and is just an instant head bob before a majestic guitar riff washes over the whole thing, echoing pure '80s dreamstuff all over the arrangement, accompanied by an organ-mellotron combo that evokes sudden epiphany, like all the things you thought were really serious and important suddenly aren’t so much, and you are just very small and a meteor could hit your place of work at any time and some things are just totally out of your control so you might as well just sit back, relax, and take it all in—as if life is what you make it very much so indeed.
It goes without saying that, as a 15-year-old kid driving a stolen digital car at 80 mph through busy virtual traffic with a low-poly ocean shoreline in one corner of my eye and an electronic sunset dithering pixels of purples and pinks in the other corner of my eye, all while listening to Talk Talk on the in-game radio, the song (“Life’s What You Make It” by Talk Talk featured on Flash FM) had a profound impact on my earliest aesthetic values. Even in a game as violent and ugly as Vice City, you can still find a beautiful sunset and an almost transcendent peace just driving around looking at stuff, and in this way, Vice City isn’t so different from real life. You would think that, with such a strong connection, the song would remain tied to that moment, evoking only Vice City Sunsets. But—much like the entirety of The Colour of Spring—“Life’s What You Make It” doesn’t merely accompany the mood of a time and place; it is the mood. It creates the mood. It carries with it the mood, transforming the aura of any time and place into its own. You could be in a crowded airport, psychic anxiety and stress all around you, and play any song from this album, and you would suddenly be transported to another world. Talk Talk knew this too—just listen to the fifth track, “Living in Another World.”
Every track on The Colour of Spring creates and projects its own world, like jumping into an impressionist painting made of sound. There’s a transcendent sparseness that feels like driving down a beachside road with no care in the world other than what’s immediately right there in front of you. A beautiful shiver runs through the spine; it’s nearly eerie how ethereal the whole listening experience can be. I listened to The Colour of Spring while at the pool with my daughter years ago, and now I have to listen to that album every time I go to that pool; it transformed the space: the pool is beautiful now; the pool is The Colour of Spring now; I cannot explain it; it just is. The album is its own time and place; its own world; its own universe; it creates its own life. Play The Colour of Spring anywhere, and that place is transformed.
In the world of The Colour of Spring, there is simultaneously so much going on and nothing going on that it's hard to put a finger on exactly what makes it so special; there are unexpected flourishes of guitar, both electric and acoustic, over jazzy compositions, and Mark Hollis’ vocals, which can only be described as distantly odd yet strangely intimate—perhaps the most intimate you’ve heard in your life—driving in the ethereal auras as if fallen angels were pushing the head of a pin into the pitch of space, thus poking some light into the void; these angels are not dancing; instead, they are just kind of muttering enochian while walking with a slight sway to their gait on a beach where the clearest blue waters are kissing the most velvety sands and seagulls are hovering overhead not to steal food but to guide the way.
Two years after the release of The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk would go on to record Spirit of Eden, and three years later, Laughing Stock; on these two albums, Talk Talk dropped their synthpop stylings completely, leaning into incredibly sparse jazzy arrangements that border on the improvisational. Both Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock would go on to become cult classics of the quote-unquote post-rock genre, where pop structures are thrown away entirely in favor of sparse, unpredictable arrangements that focus on filling rooms with a certain atmosphere—basically, the whole post-rock thing took its cues from Talk Talk. The Colour of Spring embodies much of these sparse jazzy post-rock soundscapes—especially in songs like “April 5th,” which is only a ghostly synth warble, a basic piano melody, and Mark’s haunting vocals, but also in “Happiness Is Easy,” which bursts here and there with acoustic guitar and organ flourishes dangling from a wild double-bass line that seems to have a mind of its own—and while The Colour of Spring is, at its core, a pop album, it’s a pop album wrapped in a cocoon that is in the process of cracking, with a little proboscis and the tip of a wing popping out. The Colour of Spring exists somewhere between synthpop and jazz, somewhere between virtual and reality, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, somewhere between ugliness and transcendental beauty, but never ugly itself.
It’s a shame that The Colour of Spring reminds me so heavily of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, because that game is just so violent, disgusting, and ugly. But I can’t shake the mood of driving down those digital roads, watching those digital sunsets while listening to “Life’s What You Make It.” Even in a game as ugly as Vice City, those sunsets were so stunning and beautiful that, perhaps, their beauty imprinted on my mind forever.
But, upon reflection, it seems more likely that those Vice City Sunsets didn’t imprint themselves on my mind—Talk Talk imprinted them for me.
Perhaps the only beauty in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is Talk Talk.
#TalkTalk #Music #GrandTheftAutoViceCity #ComputerGames #Autobiographical