#hinchy

It's funny: for a surprising number of posts now, I've been sort of writing "around" the works of the ripper Harmony Friends, without ever - excluding collaborative projects like Balcony Fusion Collab - actually covering one of those works for a post. Which is a damn shame!! Because in their four-year tenure on SiIvaGunner, Harmony Friends had a pretty notable impact on the channel's life, from making Donkey Kong a mainstay of the channel's identity through creating the Coconut Gun Rap as referenced in CG Man HD Remastered Edition, to directing the incredible King for Another Day Tournament and pushing the boundaries of the channel's scope as described in NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2), and many ways more. But, most importantly of all, they led the trend for a series of very silly YTP-esque sentence mixing rips on the channel, of which Tactical Three-Time Grammy Award-Winning Action remains a personal favorite.

So what am I referring to with these "very silly YTP-esque sentence mixing rips"? Well, if you'll recall just earlier this week, the April Fools rip Our Sweet Parsley was made specifically in tribute to Harmon Friends' work of this kind - the ones that edit and twist easily-identifiable song lyrics, primarily from Sonic the Hedgehog games, to pure comedic off-the-wall effect. Sentence-mixing is an age-old skill of the YouTube Poop trade, yet it feels as if Harmony Friends' work with rips like Thunder, Rain and Lightning, A Ghost's Bean Soup, and of course The Coconut Gun Rap were what turned said work into a mainstay on SiIvaGunner in particular, to show the potential sentence mixing had as a method of effective bait-and-switching, messing around with the track *just* enough to feel wrong in a fun way whilst still being easily missable up to a certain point in the song. Yet this bait-and-switch appeal was, as I've mentioned many times before, something that primarily worked within Season 1 itself, within 2016, when the channel's mere existence was still so novel, unknown to so many. Season 2's shift to having more takeovers and events was a brilliant way to keep the channel fresh, whilst also directing several rippers in the team to try their hand at once specific joke within their individual style. And THAT is where Tactical Three-Time Grammy Award-Winning Action comes in: on the day of Smoothness.

It feels as if I've talked enough about the Grammy-Award Winning 1999 Hit Smooth by Santana feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty for a lifetime already back in Haltmanna feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20, but its appeal should be pretty obvious to anyone who's ever heard the song. Put succinctly, is at once incredibly memorable and well-composed, and has lyrics that are as memeable as can be. Pair those traits with the iconic status Snake Eater from Metal Gear Solid 3 already has in gaming circles, and with Hinchy's aforementioned knack for the silliness, and the result was a rip that felt destined to occur at one point or another. The moment the rip starts, the moment you start anticipating the James Bond-esque opening fanfare to Snake Eater, only to be met with the all-too-familiar first riff of Smooth, you KNOW exactly what the rip is going to be, and you KNOW just then and there how perfect of an idea it is. I'm already a huge fan of rips that do completely original vocal covers with new lyrics such as Maskettaman - Dr. Pavel's Fly​-​So​-​Good, but something about how Tactical Three-Time Grammy Award-Winning Action keeps ping-ponging from Snake Eater to Smooth's vocals scratches a very particular part of my brain - as if I'm waiting with every line to see how it could be merged with Smooth's lyrics. And at every turn, I'm rewarded oh so blissfully.

From outright replacing the bridge's bellowing "But you're so supreme!!" with Smooth's "'cause you're so SMOOTH", to the way that the pause in "not for honor but for you" is removed to give way for extra syllables on the part of Smooth's vocals, together forming "not for honor but / to suit your mood", each change feels oh so deliberately done to maximize both sides of the rip. Althewhile, just like My Sweet Parsley and its contemporaries, the original instrumental still plays - Smooth never overtakes the running Snake Eater melody, merely complimenting it with flourishes from its own vocals or guitar riffs. Yet by the time they actually DO overtake the song as the chorus builds, it all feels so natural already, the Snake Eater instrumentals fit Smooth's emotional high so well at this point - its shocking how well the balance is maintained throughout the whole rip. And because of that, Tactical Three-Time Grammy Award-Winning Action is more than just very funny: it's a genuinely great take on Snake Eater, as the contributions from Smooth in a way help punctuate the song's existing high points, althewhile of course still being very funny.

The last post made me nostalgic for Season 1’s ending, so fuck it, here’s another rip from back then - the File Select Fusion Collab, a rip with close to 20 creators involved. What a “Fusion Collab” entails has changed quite a fair bit over the years, as the collaborations have grown larger in size with each year. Nowadays, they now tend to focus on individual artists rendering a specific track in their own style across a longer video, such as with Season 2’s Wood Man Fusion Collab. But with Season 1, the meaning was a lot more nebulous - they were almost all made under the direction of toonlink (otherwise goes by “tunedlink” and “toonlinkirl”), and were made more in the style of YTPMVs, having a base song to build off of with an everchanging barrage of styles and sources intermingling at once.

These were released every now and then over the course of Season 1 and were always appreciated, yet today’s choice in particular stands out among them. Being released during what was effectively presented as the ending of the channel, it has a unique kind of emotional baggage to it, it leans into celebrating the entire legacy of the channel and all of its inside jokes. The full-circle moment of getting Joel Vinesauce himself to narrate a section in the middle of the track was perfect - the person whose joke got the entire channel started, now gets invited to formally close it out, with a speech still very much rooted in that niche joke culture SiIva itself thrives in. And it just keeps going in that direction - the rip builds in a congratulatory, yet bittersweet way to truly signal that the channel is about to end, a giant thank-you letter to the entire community that had been fostered over the channel’s small 9-month lifespan.