#moder112

Y'know, I've had this rip in the drafts for a pretty long while - I've wanted to write about it for so long, but its almost difficult to explain why I like it so. I sometimes wonder how many other people are as attached to the original Intro Title / Minigame Theme - Barbie Horse Adventures: Blue Ribbon Race as I am - it was a genuinely shocking little rip that managed to utilize the creepiness of the original song, whilst also tying it all subtly to the ongoing side story of Mr. Rental's rampage on SiIvaGunner. Yet it was the kind of rip that didn't make its presence all too known after the fact - save for a big reappearance on SiIvaGunner Fusion Records last year with *** EVERYTHING IS FINE ***, the rip's appearances have been pretty darn scarce. That is, at least, on SiIva - what I learned in researching for coverage on old town ribbon race, is that the meme took on a life on its own elsewhere in the internet.

That's right, it's fan channel time again - the very same one that V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r covered not that long ago, even. Its always a bit difficult to discern...anything, about Vvvvvavvvvvvr from the outside looking in, because of just how vast and bizarre its output is - its a channel that accepts submissions of just about ANY kind and has made it its brand to basically be a dumping ground for any sort of vip (Vavr's name for high quality rips) possible. Yet through it all, in 2017, a certain familiar Barbie game for Game Boy Advance made a reappearance - with a vip simply named Horse: Blue Ribbon. From there, the meme was reborn on the channel as just "Horse", mainly using a remix of the original theme by ripper Moder112 as its main source for future vips - continuing to see use pretty regularly in a number of bizarre, spooky rips.

All of that was, of course, entirely lost on me - yet in a way, that made discovering old town ribbon race on SiIva all the more impactful for me. I had no clue that others remembered this bizarre one-off horror rip as much as I did, nor that there had secretly been this subset of rippers already fiddling around with how to turn this eerie theme into something so hummable. Old Town Road is a song I already find deviously catchy, one I've covered before with Mob Corral - and so to me, old town ribbon race wound up feeling like the perfect culmination to things all those years later. The rip that had filled my 2016 self with such intrigue was now finally being played around with in fun, creative ways - by, as I'd now later learn, none other than the very same ripper who'd been doing so for years beforehand without me knowing.

There is of course a comedy to old town ribbon race inherently, in making a country/pop banger out of a theme otherwise most known for how much it unsettles people. But there's that other part as well - it IS genuinely a banger, using so many creative and fun GBA-quality samples that all feel in line with the original creepy song, even including the sampling of Among Us sound effects used for its percussion. A lot of the samples are from Moder112's prior mentioned remix, yet the authenticity of the rip was so good that I hardly even considered that as a possibility - it doesn't sound like its using anything "fan made" so much as its just naturally working outward of what Old Town Road would sound like in this style.

Suddenly, the memories all come flooding back.

Ever since I started taking this blog seriously, I'd known what today's post would be. I've celebrated a good few events on here - Christmas, Halloween, Voiceless Week, and so forth. Yet for the second of February - the day of the sequel - there was only one event fit to be covered. The legendary Chain of Memories II Day.

I wanted to make sure, before the day of reckoning came, that I'd made a post covering long-time ripper ShonicTH, as he's very much at the core of this event and all that surrounds it. As I described in Trial of the Heart, ShonicTH was one of the first members on SiIva that felt recognizable from their output alone, due purely to just how prominent his love for Kingdom Hearts and its music was. Soon enough, that expression of love would extend into ironic shitposting, as we got exposed to what one could consider an inside joke turned channel meme. As a Kingdom Hearts megafan, ShonicTH was aware of a subset of the community on YouTube who would post "remastered" music uploads from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, only for the remastering effort to simply be slathering the original tracks in heaps of reverb. That is of course terrible for the sake of remastering, but undeniably fucking hilarious for the sake of ripping to SiIvaGunner - it wasn't long until we'd start seeing reverberating rips of Chain of Memories posted to the channel, and not long therafter where a very iconic catchphrase would begun being spread in the comments of each one of them.

"LOL with all that reverb and also it being KH, I know exactly who made this one. Good stuff my dude." -SSB_Seal, SiIvaGunner YouTube Comments

In SiIva's later years, the idea of SiIva uploading rips that have no intention of sounding good is kind of just commonplace, be it with Sex - Steve Harvey or even Snowball Park - Super Mario 3D World. But what the Chain of Memories reverb in-joke would eventually culminate into, on ShonicTH's birthday on May 13th 2017, was an entire day dedicated to these rips: the entire game's soundtrack of 38 tracks were ripped and all posted to the YouTube channel at the exact same time, promptly flooding the sub boxes of anyone who wasn't prepared. Chain of Memories Day became the sort of thing I would tell horror stories about to my friends, the perfect example of just how thoroughly unpredictable SiIvaGunner was, and how fucking funny it was all along the way.

But that's the thing - it was, in some small way, able to be predicted. If you'd been following ShonicTH's imprint on the channel up until May 2017, and knew that it was his birthday, you could've at least been prepared for what was to come. NOBODY was able to be prepared for the secondcoming - Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories II Day.

Season 4 Episode 1's main mission statement, before being wholly engulfed in the King for Another Day Tournament, was to make a season more unpredictable and chaotic than anything the channel had been before. And on August 31st, we saw perhaps the best demonstration of those efforts - 69 rips from a made up sequel game, 28 of which were some sort of absurd spin on the theme song Simple and Clean, uploaded at the span of once per minute. To call this day a rollercoaster would be an understatement.

Because, like, as only the second rip posted across the event, Kingdom Hearts-type beat began as sort of giving us false hope. Compared to the rips of the Season 2 event, it was just a pretty neat trap remix of the Hollow Bastion theme, with little indicating the intents of the rips to follow beyond just being moderately trashy in the way trap music tends to be. That room for doubt would be soundly squashed in the minutes to follow, as every rip seemed to be getting worse than the last. Simple and Clean (Gamma Mix) is, in no uncertain terms, LITERALLY just noise, as four separate poorly-done covers of the original song are laid atop one another with a metric fuckton of reverb, as the culmination of three prior rips each adding one more garbage cover onto the pile. Simple and Clean (Omicron Mix) features a bizarre audio recording of a poorly done Donald Trump impression, pretending to hold a speech whilst actually just reading the lyrics to Simple and Clean, althewhile a Kazoo blasts faintly celebratory music in the background. The amount of layers of irony at play to be making one of the channel's first-ever jabs at America's most ridiculed man take place during an event like this is simply incredible, and its the kind of rip that's so thoroughly unfunny that it loops back to being comedy gold.

To say that the day was painful would be one thing, yet it was the kind of pain that felt like a genuinely unbelievable experience to be part of. After Simple and Clean (Mu Mix), I think most of us expected the event to be over, with the typical Snow Halation celebration video a la Snow Halocean and its many predecessors. And yeah, despite the dubious quality of the cover, Simple and Clean (Mu Mix) was still giving the event a sort of "final" feel, as the rapid uploads halted at a nice, sufficient 29 rips.

Only a few minutes later, the rips would continue as if nothing had even happened - we'd been utterly bamboozled.

Having lived through both the Chain of Memories Day events makes me feel like a genuine survivor of war, yet when looking back on the events in hindsight I can't help but let out a sickening, yet joyous cackle. And I wanted to put Simple and Clean (Psi Mix) as the headlining rip of this mess because how well it encapsulates that joyous side to it all - through the reverb and through the context, you can tell that Keeby10 was genuinely having a ton of fun preparing all these bizarre rips for the event. SiIvaGunner is a fantastic source for quality, amazing rearrangements, but as I talked about in Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday - as performed by Bob Dylan, there's something so thoroughly enjoyable about seeing the human nature behind the channel shine through from time to time. Simple and Clean (Psi Mix) isn't going in anyone's playlist of bangers, but it embodies so much of the fun that defined the event, and by extension so much of the affection that the team clearly hold for ShonicTH and his niche in-joke about Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories music remasters.

Seven years removed from it, there's an undeniable magic to the first Season of SiIvaGunner. Setting nostalgia aside, I think the best way to describe Season 1 in particular would be...chaotic? It was a time before the channel had much of any quality standard, where any little idea could be tried just for the hell of it, and where a lot of rippers pursued individual passion projects disconnected from the main direction of the channel. I've covered one of those on this blog already - Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix] - but today, we're taking a look at the legacy of a certain Barbie game's music on the channel.

Late in Season 1, during the channel's normal procedures, a peculiar figure named Mr Rental began showing up in rips of his own made-up game. Dissecting that entire storyline isn't really relevant for where we're going today: All that needs to be established is that the Mr. Rental rips were effectively ms-paint cartoon episodes about the titular character's absurd and often violent tendencies. In one episode in particular, Mr. Rental declared a mission statement to "ban all mashups", and thus began to show up suddenly in otherwise innocuous rips. What this translated to in-universe was Mr Rental being a full-on serial killer.

Which transitions us to the Season 1 rip, Intro Title / Minigame Theme - Barbie Horse Adventures: Blue Ribbon Race, a rip with barely any music, and no album release. In truth, its not really trying to be a rip, once again playing to the chaotic nature of the Season I described before. The Barbie game in question is infamous for its title screen music being strangely eerie for the type of game its in, which this rip runs with - it plays the music to unsettlingly uneven camera footage of a CRT with the game's boxart, which slowly distorts Barbie's face before smash-cutting to a US Emergency Alert screen. In the midst of the channel's normal upload schedule, viewers got to see full-on analogue horror, as the majority of the video uses the Emergency Alert to inform viewers of a serial killer running loose in the SiIvaGunner universe - Mr Rental. As the rip ends, the words "EVERYTHING IS FINE" ominously flash before some ARG clues flash.

The storyline would eventually end, and this rip in particular never quite amounted to much in the end beyond scaring the shit out of unsuspecting fans. Yet those fans - like myself - were never able to forget it. It would appear that the team didn't forget, either: In both Season 3 and Season 4 Episode 1, the original rip would be referenced with remixes of the actual song, and now finally in Season 7 we have todays rip. As part of SiIvaGunner Fusion Records, *** EVERYTHING IS FINE *** is an extremely high-level, genuine quality arrangement of the original song, finally leaning headfirst into the full on horror sound of it with utmost sincerity. Several more layers are added to the track as it goes on to give it a sense of escalation, and at parts it feels as if its transitioning into a fully new piece with the lead melody. The original track's short nature was used as a baseline to craft something even darker, even moodier...and best of all, its able to play on that Season 1 nostalgia to heighten those emotions althemore.

As one may be able to deduce just by my obsession with the channel as a whole, I have a strange fascination with absurdist humor, and really just stuff that's flat-out stupid in general. Believe me, it becomes harder by the day to stop myself from just going off the rails about Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day from earlier in the same season as this rip, arguably the channel's most unhinged takeover its ever had. But in the same spirit of stupid Vine humor, I today bring you Battle with Jeffinite.

It should be mentioned that, in a lot of ways, Season 4 Episode 1 was aiming to bring back the chaotic nature the channel had during its first season, similar but more all-encompassing than Season 3's Nostalgia Takeover. This was evident in a lot of areas, with the notable example for this rip in particular being how it was actually part of a small ARG on the channel. Season 4 Episode 1 hosted the third annual SilvaGunner Spooktacular Halloween Horror Special, and turned it into a full-scale murder mystery episode wherin several memes were framed as suspects of the murder through their rips. One of these suspects was Jeff the Killer, who through this GIF and others had his likeness merged with the very normal and funny Vine meme My Name Jeff. Basically - every rip with Jeff-like contents was a sign that Jeff the Killer might've committed the event's murder.

I am unfortunately speaking as an outsider here, as I wasn't able to participate in the ARG due to not being as invested in the channel during the event. But like I said, the Season's mission statement was a whole lot more all-encompassing than just the ARG nature, and so I'm able to appreciate the rips made during it for their absurdity and insane creativity althesame. Though I'm glad we've since moved past Season 1, it still feels very heartwarming to see it honored so often.

So, what actually is the rip we're talking about today? Its pretty simple really - take the intense EDM theme of Infinite's boss fight from Sonic Forces, and turn it into a full-on Jeffpocalypse. It took me a while to realize that the song isn't just using the isolated My Name Jeff clip as its audio source, but rather the fanmade "Trap Remix" of the song, which is then pitchshifted into the quickly repeating beats of the original track's melody. Having these two tracks coexist rather than using My Name Jeff's vocal samples really helps bring the two together, as its now neither full-on mashup or full-on YTPMV. And though I can't say I understand the choice to place Sonic sound effects into the mix leading up to the chorus, they absolutely help the beat sound all the more absurd-yet-banging.

Though the theme hasn't lived in my mind for long, and I'm still a bit miffed I wasn't able to pay too much mind to the event as it was happening...its almost just as magical to dig these treasures up years after their original context.