The Special Meter American Wasteland: History Repeating
Just as the "American Wasteland" game and soundtrack payed homage to the past, I am doing the same, 20 years later.
Welcome to THE SPECIAL METER — a series on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games and the culture surrounding them.
If you missed the first six releases, you can check them out here:
The Special Meter 2: ‘Ollie the Magic Bum’ and Skateboarding’s Portrayal Problem
The Special Meter 3: Tony Hawk Made Skateboarding So Big that Even 9/11 Couldn’t Take It Away
The Special Meter 4: Last Shot at the Jocks
The Special Meter Underground: You Don’t Pay to Get In, But You Pay to Get Out
The Special Meter Underground 2: Chair Hops and Sit Flips
As always, if this is your first time reading, go ahead and subscribe. I’ll be done with this series soon, so you can rest assured that you won’t just have to read about Tony Hawk video games for much longer. Most importantly, this is a free blog. I can’t justify charging you American or any other currency for this.
But, if you want to go ahead and share, like or comment to give me that little algorithm boost, that’d be fun. I’m gonna say save the comments for the bottom, though, because this post could solicit discussion. I hope it does, at least.
There will be no song choices at the top of this blog post. You’ll see why in a second.
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland was a lot of things. The franchise was now fully in its cinematic era, alongside other video game franchises that realized they couldn’t just get away with basic goal-oriented gameplay and needed some narrative in there. The plot of the game echoed past games, to some extent, your nobody character takes a bus to Los Angeles to chase their dreams, like so many before them. As soon as they get there, they’re jumped and robbed of their stuff except for their board.
After meeting the punk-rock-pixie-dream-girl mandatory for stories like this (voiced by the actor who did Susie on “Rugrats”), you get cleaned up, geared up, and make a new group of friends — fashionable, cliche misfits just like you.
American Wasteland’s Los Angeles is boiled down to Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Downtown LA and Santa Monica (among other little specific locations). It’s a game that pays heavy homage to the past – not just recycling a plotline about leaving the nothing town in favor of the city full of dreams and finding your chosen family along the way. Santa Monica being the home of the “Z-Boys” like Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva, features heavily in the lore of the game’s plot, which itself is extremely reverent of the “original” kinds of guys.
The soundtrack, though, is what made the game really stand out, and continues to be the first thing people talk about when they think of this game.
In order to pay respects to the past, the game’s developers asked the punk and punk-adjacent bands of the time to cover some of the punk bands from skateboarding’s early heyday, when skaters and punks were both truly outcasts, before the tastemakers decided to borrow looks and sensibilities for the sake of mainstream fashion. It harkens back to a time where Tony Hawk was not a cool guy in his Southern California town.
The soundtrack was released as an album (a first for the franchise, and rare among video game franchises at all), with a cover referencing the Clash’s “London Calling,” itself referencing Elvis Presley’s first album. Nothing is truly original.
Here’s what Tony Hawk told me the time I interviewed him for Vice about the soundtracks (I’m in bold):
Oh, that was such a blast. That was the most fun for me because I got to request, not just songs, but bands. Alkaline Trio did “Wash Away.” The TSOL original song is super hard to find, and it’s not a good recording anyway.
Did you pick that for them, or did you just reach out to them and ask them to do a cover?
We sort of put a blanket offer out. So, it was like, “Hey, we’d love you to do a cover of old punk bands, such as this, this, this.” And they’d come back with their choices.
For a refresher, here’s the full tracklist, with original artists in parentheses:
Taking Back Sunday - “Suburban Home”/”I Like Food” (Descendents)
Thursday - “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone you SHouldn't've)” (Buzzcocks)
At the time the game came out, most of these bands were still sort of scrappy upstarts getting to play on bigger stages at Warped Tour or getting some rotation on MTV2’s rock blocks. Now, obviously, some of them are legendary in their genres, dusting off old material for nostalgia festivals themselves. Some of these bands were sort of lost to obscurity or, should we say, less commercial appreciation, since I did just go on and on about how punk going mainstream wasn’t a marker of its value among the people who cared about it. I’m sure a ton of people love The Bled.
But this game and its soundtrack were almost 20 years ago. A lot has happened since then, and just like the bands in 2005 got to cover their influences, I think it’d be fun to do that again with the current wave of emo/punk/whatever bands. I’ll be honest, some of the bands from that soundtrack were on Warped Tour stages that eluded me. I just never got into some, but that was part of the challenge here, right? Not only did I have to go back and do a little bit of research for bands from the 00s that I never got into, it also presented an opportunity to draw throughlines to the bands of today, which I have also ignored at times.
That’s the thing with punk rock sometimes. You have the bands that you got into at a very particular time in your life, and you stick with them. You don’t even realize that the albums you listen to on the daily are 20 or so years old. And it’s often too easy to just dismiss new bands in the genre in favor of the Orgcore bands that soundtracked your youth (and video games) – unless you’re Ian Cohen basically. Truthfully, I see bands whose names all tend to use the same words (teenage, beach) or using lowercase/all caps as an aesthetic choice and something turns me off. That’s a me problem. Skill issue, as they say. It’s not fair to the bands.
So, with all of that in mind, I created a similar soundtrack of punk/emo/whatever bands that are active right now covering the bands from the original cover album. Just like Fall Out Boy got to lean into their hardcore influences, bands right now have plenty of 2000s band DNA. Some bands I know very well, some I knew mostly by name only from reading the blogs/tweets until listening more over the last couple weeks. To that point, I wanted to dig into some bands that I knew I was not giving fair attention, and hopefully listen with intention to spot their influences/similarities/sensibilities they shared with these other bands to “assign” them something that would let them, theoretically, play to their strengths.
Here is my list. It is not perfect, so please scream at me in the comments section if you have better ideas:
Hot Mulligan - “Can’t Be Saved’ (Senses Fail)
Oso Oso - “A Decade Under the Influence” (Taking Back Sunday)
Teenage Halloween - “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid” (My Chemical Romance)
The Armed - “The Hey Man!” (Emanuel)
The Menzingers - “Walk Away” (Dropkick Murphys)
Sweet Pill - “Stare at the Sun” (Thrice)
Militarie Gun - “This Mystic Decade” (Hot Snakes)
The Dirty Nil - “Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy” (Fall Out Boy)
Pet Symmetry - “Another Innocent Girl” (Alkaline Trio)
Microwave - “War All the Time” (Thursday)
Joyce Manor - “A Life Less Frightening” (Rise Against)
There are quite a few bands I would love to have used, but I wasn’t quite sure where to put them. Actually, hold that thought.
I do have an idea for one of those. If you played THAW, you might’ve noticed that there’s a cover of The Misfits’ “Teenagers from Mars” by The Network. The Network was the semi-anonymous side project from the guys in Green Day. With that in mind, I’m choosing to include Mannequin Pussy covering The Network’s “Transistors Gone Wild” for the special extended edition of the cover comp.
Again, any suggestions, arguments, etc., go ahead and throw me some comments (nice ones):
El invitado musical de Snakes y Sparklers de hoy es Hinds.
Oh, hey, thanks for scrolling down. When I was a kid with skateboarding/punk rock dreams, I obviously connected with American Wasteland pretty hard. Looking back on it now, I remembered that a big part of the plot of the game was that the character Mindy was creating a zine called “American Wasteland” about skateboarding and culture, etc. A piece of media about skateboarding and the culture around it, huh?
When I was a kid, though, I was fascinated by magazines about music and skateboarding. So, I think the seeds of my future career were already sewn. Making a print magazine back then was tough, but to do it in this day and age is a real labor of love. With that, I am going to plug a zine that I was lucky enough to be a part of. It’s called Portable Model, and it’s being put out by Chicago writer Miranda Reinert’s new Two Flat Press. It’s available here, and it’s stuffed to the freakin’ gills with 115 pages of stories on the theme of music and tangibility. There’s even a crossword.
(Editor’s note: Don’t tell the people currently in charge of the journalism industry that the magazine in the video game was funded by a video.)