#brubsby

Hey, it's February 29th, the Leap Year day! The strangest day on the calendar, I realize, ought to be celebrated with a bit of a strange rip to go along with it, and there was certainly plenty to pick from. The channel has seen its share silly rips like :D, utterly unhinged rips like Sex - Steve Harvey, and everything bizarre other kind of weirdness out there like Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options or waterwraith pokos. Yet what surprised me about my rip :) wasn't for being the most silly, or most chaotic, or what have you - but rather, for being an utmost perfect blend of all the above kinds of rips, whilst remaining shockingly listenable.

I mean, there's something eyebrow-raising about the rip's mere existence alone. A rip from PONG? As in, one of the first video games ever made, the one from 1972, which barely even had SOUND in it, let alone music? The channel's obviously tackled a number of strange cases of games to rip before, such as the ongoing Circus trend with Five Nights at Freddy's and rips like Chex Invaders, but there really was no precedent for what to expect with this rip before clicking on it - the only prior rip of PONG was a whopping 15 seconds intentionally playing off of how little audio the game has to begin with. How could my rip :) hope to make a relevant joke out of PONG worthy of 3 minutes of runtime?

The answer, as it turns out, was to just do every single thing at once.

It starts off so innocuously too: the joke of adding rapidly repeating PONG sounds of various pitch to form a discordant melody, similar to that of CrazyBus, is a pretty funny bit in of itself! Yet before that bit has had even the slightest time to register, it's joined by Space Jam's infamous backing beat, a source that I've only covered in a good light here through actually impressive rips like Hoopache and Mother, Father, TechnoMan, yet is most well known in the community for being perhaps the most overdone and easy-to-use mashup source of them all. Before THAT has time to settle in, it's joined by yet more infamous mashup sources: The Season 5 demons themselves Yankin and Astronaut in the Ocean of Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier fame, Crank Dat Super Mario, Watch Me Whip/Nae Nae - and, to note in case you're not listening to the track yourself as you're reading, NONE of these sources ever sound as if they ever go away from the mix. What in its first seconds is nothing but isolated bloops of an ancient arcade machine becomes this absolute cocophany of noise and melodies, yet through some miracle (and skill on brubsby's part) they're guided along to still form some sort of melody.

All the noise is mainly guided by the use of Gangnam Style as a surprise source amidst all the rest, whose melody builds and builds toward its own climactic beat drop Gangnam Style, upon which everything goes silent for just a moment, approximately eight sources all fading at once...before exploding back onto the scene like an unstoppable mob. Its just keeps going like this - by the end, twelve different sources are all competing for attention. Or at least it sounds that way - I genuinely have no clue if some tracks get phased out as the rip progresses, but the rip's noisiness never appears to die down until the very end of its runtime.

As the years have gone by, and the SiIvaGunner channel has grow older, we've been given a far more clear insight into how it operates. Back in the earliest days of Season 1 and Season 2, it all felt like a very exclusive, hush-hush project, and a lot of (mostly non-fan) people were seemingly convinced that it was all masterminded by one person. Overtime, the albums and the rippers credited therin have gotten more attention, and events regularly open up to submissions from the community - not to mention the team's openness with interacting with fans through places like Discord or Twitter (or on here!). And for me, part of that mystique gradually peeling away, was also realizing that for every excellent rip the SiIvaGunner team approves and releases, there's likely a dozen mediocre and unrefined rips submitted with little care in their production. And right as I was truly realizing this key part of SiIvaGunner's operation, by the end of Season 4 Episode 2 - I'm met with Your Rip's Shit, Mr. Grinch.

What I find to be the most interesting part about Your Rip's Shit, Mr. Grinch, is how it reflects on fan submissions in more than just one light - most evidently shown by the fact that Brubsby himself was a fan submitter during the time this rip was uploaded. The joke of the rip is immensely simple but very effective - its a parody performance of the original You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch, with lyrics changed to explain the various common ways for a rip submission sucking ass. Yet for as funny as that is in its own right, its framed in an entirely different light when you realize it's a joke told from the outside - not told by SiIvaGunner's core team to make fun of the submissions they receive, but told by a submitter amidst all the rest to point out the flaws in their own little community. That one little change alone creates a new sort of spark of joy from Your Rip's Shit, Mr. Grinch: that the core SiIvaGunner team saw the submission, and found it genuinely hysterical as a critique on the tribulations they themselves were going through.

The ripper of a previously-uploaded You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch rip, KnightOfGames, once commented that he found Your Rip's Shit, Mr. Grinch to be so funny, that he renamed his own rip to be given lesser priority than this new submission. Something about that interaction just really makes me smile - especially when remembering that the rip itself isn't exactly intended to be a perfectly executed work of art. Its vocal performance has similar little snubs and hiccups that I found ever-so-charming in Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday - as performed by Bob Dylan: the performances' added touches of humanity oddly enough make them feel more human and genuine.