Photo by Erez Avissar

Within its first three days on sale last week, Grand Theft Auto V grossed $1 billion worldwide. Though big-ticket video games traditionally make huge amounts of money upon their release—and cost $60 per game—it's still worth putting that number in perspective: Iron Man 3, the top-grossing film of 2013 so far, earned $680 million across the globe on its opening weekend. GTAV is a game. But it's also an international, all-caps event.

Like most of Rockstar Games' recent endeavors, GTAV is ultra-violent, set in a gorgeous, open world, and comes packed with an incredible soundtrack. In 2002's Vice City, songs by Michael Jackson, Run-D.M.C., and Kate Bush poured out of hijacked car radios. Last year, HEALTH scored Max Payne 3. In GTAV, there are stations hosted by Twin Shadow, Wavves, Keith Morris, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Pam Grier, and Bootsy Collins, along with scored sections by Alchemist, Oh No, and Tangerine Dream. There are songs by A$AP Rocky, Thee Oh Sees, Future, Robyn, Jai Paul, Ty Segall, Warren G, Eddie Murphy, and dozens of others.

There's also FlyLo FM, a station with 40 minutes of music curated and mixed by Flying Lotus, who's also featured on the game's official three-volume soundtrack. The tone of the FlyLo station is similar to his set, mixing original material with his peers' beats and some prominent MCs. In this case, he's got tracks from Tyler, the Creator, Hudson Mohawke, Clams Casino, DJ Rashad, OutKast, Aphex Twin, and more; somewhere in the world, a 12-year-old is running over an innocent civilian to Thundercat's "Oh Sheit It's X".

Thundercat: "Oh Sheit It’s X" (via SoundCloud)

The gig's a good fit for FlyLo, who has been playing Grand Theft Auto since the first game came out. "Every time they drop a new game, I'm like, 'What the fuck is this song?'" he says. (He got into Toto's "Africa" because of the Vice City soundtrack.) He also reads up on video game news and he's already pre-ordered the upcoming Xbox and PlayStation consoles. "I'm a geek, man," he says. "I'm in it." When I call him, he's just completed about 40% of GTAV's missions.

"Today I'm gonna drive around and rob people

and do dirty, horrible things for money."

Pitchfork: How does GTAV stack up to other games in the series to you?

Flying Lotus: Oh, it kills every other one. It's the best game ever made, dude.

Pitchfork: What was your favorite video game before this one?

FL: Final Fantasy VII, but it's a little dated now. GTAV is like every game in one, though. You wanna just play a racing game, you can play this game. You wanna play a golf game? You can play this game. I played tennis for like an hour. I'm not trying to talk the game up just because I'm involved—I really am in awe of it.

Pitchfork: When you play, do you focus more on the missions, or do you spend time aimlessly killing civilians?

FL: In the past, I usually just fucking do whatever, but I actually care about the story this time. I want to see where it goes. But today, for a little bit, I'm gonna drive around and rob people and do dirty, horrible things for money.

Pitchfork: What other stations in the game do you like?

FL: I like the West Coast Classics one, the DJ Pooh station where it's all L.A. shit. That's my favorite because, when I was originally asked to do this gig, I thought I was going to curate a station that felt more like that. I didn't really know what parameters my station was going to have, so I submitted a whole bunch of different stuff all across the board. A lot of old school hip-hop, new stuff, stuff from my peers, and a lot of rap music, too. There were a lot of songs to be considered, and only a fraction of them made the cut.

Pitchfork: You tweeted that you tried to get some unheard Burial, Dilla, and Aphex Twin stuff in there. What are some other noteworthy things you really wanted for your station that didn't make the cut?

FL: Specifically, I wanted to have Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's "Foe tha Love of $" in there. I wanted to put [2Pac's] "Hail Mary" on there. I wanted to put Underachievers on there. I wanted to put more Brainfeeder people on it. But once some of the guidelines came through, I realized that they wanted it to be more like my live show than anything else.

My only gripe is that I wish I could've had a longer station. It's 40 minutes, but an hour would've been nice. I have to get through the tracks really fast. I considered 57 songs for this thing, including George Duke and Bootsy Collins, who has his own station. I considered Stereolab, Curtis Mayfield, Portishead, Killah Priest, Ghostface Killah, Weather Report, Actress, Raekwon.

Pitchfork: Is it more special to include your own music or something like Aphex Twin or OutKast?

FL: It's all very special. I would drive around and listen to OutKast and Aphex Twin in L.A., and I have my own experiences in the areas that they recreate in the game. I have that shit. I know what it's like listening to Aphex Twin driving down the beach. I get it, and it's special to think that someone else might think that, too. I made this shit for those people.

Pitchfork: Would you ever want to do an entire video game score?

FL: Yeah man! Especially if it's Rockstar. I wouldn't want to get involved with a game that's a stinker—I can smell one of those a mile away. That's why I haven't done too much of that stuff, though I've been asked. It's the same shit with movies: You've got to try and find the right things, because once you start saying you want to work on something, people are like, [affected dumb voice] "Oh, I've got a movie." Then you do some research and find out it's a stinker. But GTA is not a stinker, my friend.

Pitchfork: And you actually appear in the game.

FL: I'm in the game!

Pitchfork: How did that happen?

FL: I was in the right place at the right time. They were wrapping up some scenes in the game, and I was in New York, and they found a part for me that's in the story. I play some gangsta-ass motherfucka from the hood [laughs], and there's a scene where I'm playing basketball. When I recorded my lines, they had this headset that they put on you to capture all your facial features and everything, so they got my face. It's super weird. That's another reason why I wanna beat the game, so I can see how I'm represented in polygons.