#digboye

You may have noticed that I try to keep an air of suspense when doing posts on the King for Another Day tournament such as Thank You, Everybody!. That is, of course, to not spoil the victor of Season 4 Episode 1's year-defining event - but at this point, it's a bit of a fruitless endeavor to try and uphold. Because DJ Professor K's victory celebrations haven't just been contained to his awarded day-long takeover during Season 4 Episode 2 - the takeover that gave us incredible rips like AIN'T NOTHIN' LIKE A CHUNKY BEAT, 88811, Ska Cha Cha (Rotten Mix) at an absolute breakneck pace during the SiIvaSummer All-Star Festival. Because during that takeover, a new flame was kindled - a flame by the name of Jet Set Radio Evolution.

Hideki Naganuma's style of sample-filled funk music is DJ Professor K's headlining ripping source, the one most closely associated with the game that the character originates from. Yet its a style that can be expressed in so many ways, not needing to be derivative of any prior existing songs from the two Jet Set Radio games - September, for instance, is able to sound authentically Naganuma-esque whilst being built off of a song as far away from his style as possible. Jet Set Radio Evolution, then, is an entirely made-up game - its name and logo deriving from a declined proof-of-concept, but its "soundtrack" completely made up by the SiIvaGunner team. This is far from the first fake game on the channel, and not the first one to be done without much of a shred of irony (Kirby Rip Attack is due for coverage on here) - but, notably, its a fake game born specifically to keep DJ Professor K's impact on the channel alive in the Seasons past his takeover. And, well, it took a few Seasons, but during Season 7, the team started going truly ham in utilizing its true potential.

There are a number of these Jet Set Radio Evolution rips I want to cover on here, both ones from DJ Professor K's takeover and from its revitalized usage during Season 7 - but to me, it was One-Winged DJ that really showed just how much flexibility rippers have with Naganuma's style of music. One-Winged Angel has long been seen as a sort of legendary track to rip due just how extensive of a song it is, a song that has a distinctly menacing feel to it that I can't imagine is easy to translate into a rip. Rips like One Winged PSYcho - V​.​S. Sepsyrop feel like absolutely herculean endeavors, and during Season 7 in particular we saw an absolute tidal wave of rips using it, as if it were just any other meme source in the channel's backlog and not this legendary 7-minute long work of art. Hen'yoku no Piraman was the first of these I covered, and while One-Winged DJ is likely far from the last, it still manages to feel like it sticks out from the crowd in just how dense of a sound it has - likely a result of how many people contributed to its creation.

There's the obvious highlight, of course: Chase Beck, the voice of DJ Professor K himself, returns to the role with new lines to supplement the original choir in latin of the original song, and it immediately gives the rip a charm to it, especially all these years after the original event and after Chase Beck's last "needed" performance as the character had long since passed. Before that even gets to kick in, though, its hard not to notice just how many different parts of Jet Set Radio's soundtracks are utilized right from the beginning: a bassline and voicelines echoing That's Enough, samples and pacing from Sneakman, the interlude's melody broken by the noise and chaos of The Concept of Love, and all throughout using small little sound effects and one-second samples from all over the games' soundscapes.

You wouldn't BELIEVE how happy I was to see this rip get requested man!! Chance's Return to Dreamland isn't part of the surprisingly many Season 1 rips to have exploded in popularity - think My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!, Dr. Soulja, Pikmin Park, you get the picture - but its a rip I've had sitting proudly in my playlists for years and a verified banger. And to see that I'm not the only one who knows it exists!!! That warmed my heart for some reason. Fuck yeah.

There's a lot of parallels you can draw between this rip and Door into a Hundred Summers, another one of my Season 1 favorites. Of course there's the obvious one - both are rap mashups utilizing rap music that isn't really commonly featured on the channel, with Chance's Return to Dreamland to date still being the only rip on the channel to use Chance the Rapper's Angels. But beyond that, they have a really similar, enchanting way of grabbing your attention - you click on the rip waiting for the mashup to start, only for the music to dramatically cut away before the song used in the mashup "introduces" it back, at a lower pitch. I'm certain this way of starting a mashup has been used in more than these two rips, yet its a huge part of what's kept them stuck in my mind for so long - it reminds me of Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl in how, even as early as Season 1 they were finding ways to subvert what you were expecting a SiIvaGunner rip to be by cutting the playback so abruptly rather than having the mashup or melody swap simply start playing more subtly.

But the real reason I associate the two rips with one another so closely, and perhaps the real reason they both employ the aforementioned technique of pausing the track used, is what they do with said track in the mashup - pitching it down to create a quite different experience. This is more exaggerated in Door into a Hundred Summers of course, which takes a tune otherwise radiating the energy of a crisp spring morning and gives it a far more reflective, slow, nostalgic feel. What's done in Chance's Return to Dreamland feels almost like the complete inverse - the tune of Kirby's Return to Dreamland's title screen theme is infectiously jolly, and the slight pitch-down is primarily just done to allow it to play harmoniously alongside Angels, a song already infectiously feel-good in its own right. The two thus compliment each other beautifully, sort of similarly to something like World Out There, where the two sources used in isolation already feel harmonious in emotional intent, yet elevate each other to new heights in the mashup.