Rockstar’s radio page names no real DJs

Rockstar put up a music page for Grand Theft Auto VI on 8 October, and the part of it that travelled was the line-up of hosts. Read the page itself — 945,589 bytes of it, opened here on 9 October — and every host credit on it is a character. Cocoteo FM is hosted by El Martillo and La Gata; Back Country Radio by MW and Delta Dawne; AfroBank FM by Burna and Palmsy; The Chamber 106.6 by DJ Kerry and DJ Tom; Flash FM by Robyn and Alex; Dirty South Classics by Trick and Trina. Twelve names, none of them belonging to a person who exists outside the game. The real names that filled the headlines are not on the page at all, and that gap is the part of the reveal nobody counted.

It is not that the page avoids real names. It prints dozens, in the chapter list attached to each station preview — the three songs a station plays between its DJ segments, with credits. Bad Bunny is there, as the artist of EoO. So are Axel Rulay, Farruko and El Alfa; Romeo Santos and El Chaval de la Bachata; David Allan Coe; Loretta Lynn; Hank Williams Jr. and Waylon Jennings; Asake; Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor; DJ Lag, Robot Boii and Kamo Mphela; Black Sabbath, Pantera and Slayer; Charli xcx, MGMT, Zara Larsson and Pink Pantheress; David Banner and Lil’ Flip; JT Money and Solé; and DJ Khaled with Trick Daddy, Rick Ross and Pitbull. Eighteen songs across six stations, every one of them credited to a named act. The page is scrupulous about names. It is the slot they go in that decides what anyone can check.

The clearest demonstration sits on one station. Dirty South Classics is fronted by Trick and Trina, and its third track is “Born N Raised”, credited on the same page to DJ Khaled featuring Trick Daddy, Rick Ross and Pitbull. The full name the host slot declines to print is printed three lines below it as a guest credit. Nowhere else in the six does a persona and a person sit that close together, and the arrangement is the page’s own rule made visible: the microphone gets a character, the liner notes get a name.

The identification of the twelve came from reporting and from the artists themselves. Pitchfork, publishing on 8 October, names Bad Bunny and RaiNao for Cocoteo FM, Burna Boy and Palms Trax for AfroBank FM, Slayer’s Kerry King and Tom Araya for The Chamber, Robyn and the model Alex Consani for Flash FM, Trick Daddy and Trina for Dirty South Classics, and for Back Country Radio Morgan Wallen, Lana Del Rey and her husband Jeremy Dufrene. RaiNao is quoted from a statement she gave Pitchfork; Lana Del Rey is quoted by Rolling Stone; Burna Boy told Hypebeast the station is his. Three of the twelve personas therefore have a first-person statement behind them somewhere. The rest rest on the resemblance between a legal name and a character name, which is how Burna becomes Burna Boy and Trick becomes Trick Daddy — a good guess, and not a credit.

The page also disagrees with the reporting on one headcount, which is worth noting because it is the only thing here anyone can check twice. Rockstar credits Back Country Radio to two hosts, MW and Delta Dawne. Pitchfork gives that station three people, adding Dufrene without describing his role; Kotaku, relaying the same reporting, says he voices a character called Mud Dog Mike, described as the station’s roving reporter and swamp meteorologist. Neither “Mud Dog” nor “swamp meteorologist” appears anywhere in the 945KB page, so that description belongs to the other document Rockstar published this week rather than to the music page. One station is therefore credited two hosts by the studio and three people by the coverage, and the third is a fictional personality rather than a third seat in the studio. The other five line up two for two.

What the page’s own data says is smaller and stranger. In the payload behind it, each station’s host field holds a translation key — vi_music_radio_cocoteo_host, vi_music_radio_back_country_host and so on — while every track credit is a literal string. The host slot is localisable; the liner notes are not. Whatever Rockstar is doing with those twelve names, it is treating them as script rather than as billing, and that is a change in form rather than an accident. The earlier games in this series put real names on the air — GTA V had Kenny Loggins on Los Santos Rock Radio and Pam Grier on The Lowdown, GTA IV had Iggy Pop on Liberty Rock Radio, all relayed here from the reference lists rather than read in-game. On 19 November the end credits will say who lent the voices, and that is the document that settles a question the music page was never asked to answer. Until then, hosted by Bad Bunny is a sentence about casting, and the only host credits on paper are the twelve characters.