So, is it just me, or does everything about the strip sound wrong? When I go there, I get this eerie music and what sounds like a dozen murders going on in the background. I don't know what it "should" sound like, but surely something more upbeat.

I haven't heard all of the New Vegas tracks yet, but (with the exception of what they play on the strip ~and I've not heard those)... I think the sound track has been wrong for the last two games, and really could do without the radio altogether.

The original series used ambient tracks to define an area, (and some of those were used in New Vegas); but they only used a 50's tracks in the first ones to reference how it once had been (and those were only in the game titles ~not in the game itself).

Being set in in an alternate timeline, had they wished, they could have had generic 50's beat songs created for the game even in Fallout 1, but they didn't. What they did, was to create an atmospheric track for every major location in the game, and those tracks truly set the appropriate moods for each place. IMO the only appropriate 50's music for the Fallout series, is whatever tunes you might salvage off of an original pre-war record or tape; :shrug: but that's not to say I think they'd be played often or preferred by those currently alive in the Fallout setting. (but... because of the theme, you'd hear them in New Vegas (on the strip), and I'm surprised that Obsidian did not implement it such that the PC could find and sell old world records to Mr. New Vegas).