FUSE TV - Rockingjay: "The Hunger Games"-Inspired Music Genre

Just like certain musically inclined Harry Potter fans play wizard rock to celebrate their favorite obsession, Hunger Games fans are creating a niche music genre that centers around the dystopian franchise hitting theaters today.

Called Rockingjay in punning nod to the trilogy’s final installment, Mockingjay, this sub-genre pays tribute to Suzanne Collins’ awesomely addictive sci-fi books. (Although “tribute” is an awkward word to use here, given that it essentially means “human sacrifice” in the series.)

“I didn’t know about Rockingjay music at the time that I wrote it,” keyboard-playing Hunger Games fan Kaysy Ostrom told Fuse. “I just felt like I needed to explain how I felt, and the way I do that is writing music.”

Acoustic guitar-strumming fan Katie MacDonald expressed a similar sentiment. After reading the books, she knew she had to express her love for the story and characters musically. “I need to get it out, and I need to put it into music and I need to get it into [a form] that people can hear,” MacDonald told us. “So they know how I was feeling when I was reading it, and maybe what they were feeling.”

Alex Carpenter has even filmed videos for his Hunger Games compositions, including “In the Hunger Games,” a song featuring the following lyric: “You can be Katniss and I can be Peeta, waiting for a cannon midnight in the arena, in the Hunger Games.” You can hear Alex perform that song live in our studio at the bottom.

“I think music is especially well-suited to The Hunger Games,” Carpenter told us when he swung by our studios. “There’s such a strong emotional core to the books, and while there is a lot of action and a lot of crazy stuff going on, at the heart of it is really Katniss Everdeen’s emotions and her ability or inability to trust people.”

Clearly, this series has made a strong emotional impression on its fans—enough that it led them to craft their own creative works. To watch Kaysy, Katie and Alex talk about (and perform) Rockingjay tunes, watch the video above.

To hear Alex Carpenter performing two of his Hunger Games-inspired tunes live from the Fuse studio, watch the videos below.

Alex Carpenter - "In the Hunger Games"