When I beat Grand Theft Auto V, late on a Wednesday night in February, after bleeding the damn thing dry and having it nearly do the same to me, I felt a sense of finality, as if I were closing a chapter in my life. I’d been playing it much longer than any of my other friends: I'd outlasted the ones who’d gotten bored and quit, and the hardcore gamers had long since finished it. It had become my private thing. I picked Ending Three, where Franklin, Michael, and Trevor unite in a Godfather-esque “settling of debts,” culminating in them pushing a crooked federal agent, locked in the trunk of a car, off a cliff and into the ocean. The fucking thing was over, but it felt like I had barely scratched the game’s surface. All I could do was sit back in stunned silence as “The Set Up” by Favored Nations (the music video to which we’re premiering above) played before me. The song, with its steady, frozen-faced backbeat that chugs along in the way that backbeats by bands associated with DFA tend to, conveys the same sense of resolute open-endedness that GTA does.
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