Rip highlight: 17/06/2025
Fresh Bro-in-my-Bot [D-Type] of Bel-Air
Season 9 No Album Release (Read More) Brobot L-Type Battle (Beta Mix) - Super Paper Mario
Ripped by Cosmic199X
Happy Pride!
One of the most fascinating aspects of SiIvaGunner, in being a long-term community built on leveraging outside sources, is in how said tributes morph into culture all of its own. Ten years into the channel's life, we still see the ongoing circulation of bits once made within a context far different from today, be it due to no longer being timely or being continued well past the relevance it once had to its originator. Think, for instance, of Chaze the Chat's fixation on Maroon 5 continued in rips like Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces.com, or the entire Season 7 April Fools' event seeing the channel pay tribute to itself through rips like ...of 2023. But with rips like Fresh Bro-in-my-Bot [D-Type] of Bel-Air, something quite perculiar happens - where a joke once made in timely reference takes on a life of its own as an in-joke just for longtime fans.
In the days before SiIvaGunner, in the age of the splintered "SoundClown" community operating under their own channels, not many built dedicated followings all their own. But there were, of course, exceptions; many of you may well have heard some of Mowtendoo's legendary work, mentioned briefly on here long ago on rips like Ganja Man 9: Hash Blunt Hash (Shorty's Stage), and many more of you are likely familiar with the much-smaller following Triple-Q nevertheless had, which was directly paid tribute to within Planet Wisp Mashup Medley. But of these channels, few were given as much direct attention early in the channel's life as BotanicSage, a mashup artist whose output (looking past the plethora of Space Jam mashups) consists almost entirely of "unironically good" jams. Its the kind of mashups that still get ample views today, with several videos with multiple millions of views, many of which iconic and ingrained into the subconscious of the prior decade's internet users. K.K Good Day, 16BIT MAGIC, Pokemon GSC Is What I Like, it all feels part of that long-gone internet mono-culture that I wrote about on Colress Museum, where most everyone with even a passing interest in SiIvaGunner would inherently know who BotanicSage was.
Which is the point from which the bit began. While other artists in the scene either got straightforward tributes, or wound up like Triple-Q joining the team outright to continue in making rips like with RNR (Rip No Riffs), BotanicSage was different. His channel was already so widely recognized, already defined as one playing to the same niche as SiIvaGunner of making "unironically good" mashups...how do you make a tribute to that interesting? The secret laid right in SiIvaGunner's home turf - subversion! Akin to the double-whammies like Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl, the rips paying tribute to BotanicSage operated under a two-stage structure where its not just taking the "unedited video game music" and making it a mashup, but then subverting *what* that mashup is doing partway through its runtime.
When this trend initially started, this allowed the rips to really effectively gut-punch their target audience. Since BotanicSage's mashups were so ingrained in people's minds already, even if they couldn't already clock that a rip was in direct reference to one, it would often just sound "correct" right off the bat. After all, we'd heard rips like Dr. Soulja, which merely touched up an already-known mashup, so doing the same to BotanicSage mashups wasn't some unthinkable thing for the channel to do. And there's a moment, right before that subversion kicks in, where you feel good about yourself for "guessing" what the rip was going to be beforehand, or like you're an elite tier of SiIva fan for identifying BotanicSage mashups correctly. And then the twist hits; often made all the more shocking through leveraging particularly garish sources like Goomba Got Back or It's Everyday Bro.
And yes, Fresh Bro-in-my-Bot [D-Type] of Bel-Air pulls this off with aplomb just the same. Cosmic199X, whose work I've written about before with Season 7's Viva La LOWAS, is a no-nonsense good-ass-ripper, with a rich history spanning back to Season 2 and contributions to both VvvvvaVvvvvvr and TTGD, and has as a result been around the channel since the very start of this bit and the height of BotanicSage's popularity. But what really draws me to this rip in particular - beyond the finesse with which it *was* indeed executed - is the way the joke its building on has taken on new life so many years later. Case and point, the fact that there's even a possibility that someone reading this may not have known about BotanicSage before reading this says it all. That implicit understanding that the audience ought to be aware of what these rips are riffing on has tapered off, just as the idea of the internet mono-cultured has become a thing of the past. As, again, written about on Colress Museum, you can no longer confidently assume that the channel's audience KNOW the specific lore you're referencing, let alone when its to something effectively part of the decade prior. But while that often makes it harder for rips to find their target audience, I believe its only made the BotanicSage fakeout rips funnier in execution. Because now, what was once a swerve hidden behind the expected becomes TWO layers of gut-punching for the average viewer.
And what makes that two-hit-combo work so well, is just how unassuming that first layer still is. There are so many classic rips in the channel's life, as I wrote about on Light Plane (Krabby Mix), Dr. Soulja and more, where the joke just feels so *correct* right when you hear it. Speaking myself as someone who hadn't heard the original Fresh Brobot [L-Type] of Bel-Air, Fresh D-in-my-Bot [BS-Type] of Bel-Air sounds like a classic rip right off the bat, the kind of mashup you'd expect to have been done years before already. Its a classic weird-funky mashup tune, paired with, as explained back on Man, why does every Bleck actor gotta rap some, a game that wears its weirdness on its sleeve; even without the BotanicSage knowledge, its a rip that simply SOUNDS right.
But the fucking twist, man - its so stupid, its so childish and silly, but it genuinely still catches me every time I listen - even with seemingly unassuming intro, it switches right as the vocals kick in to using hit 2012 forum weapon "The Fresh Prince of Dick Butt" as the source. The way the song is already sped up to match Brobot L-Type Battle's BPM, how relatively low in the mix the vocals are, paired with the genuinely somewhat-solid Will Smith impression those vocals have, coalesce into something that still catches me off guard on relistening as I listen. A lot of the comedy is, of course, carried by just how entertaining the original video is, with how the performer tries so hard to squeeze dick-in-my-butt into every section, made even funnier on the parts where there's so much room to exclaim as to make the declarations feel even prouder. But mesh it with a soundscape so intent on not giving you any room to breathe amidst its freakiness, and its amplified so many times further; all made possible just because of Cosmic199X's spark of brilliance on how to keep a 9-year old channel bit going yet further.
And that kind of cribbing from the past, never truly letting something be forgotten, even when so much of the audience has, is at the heart of the channel; be it its jokes, its lore, its old contributors' niche little interests or the very crux of SoundClown as a community persisting so many years later. In some ways, refusing to give in is bound to make things less effective, less able to impress and stun the way passion projects like, for instance, Chaze the Chat's Maroon 5 obsession resulting in Everyday Goodbyes (SiIvaGunner Band Cover) did. Yet with rips like Fresh D-in-my-Bot [BS-Type] of Bel-Air, the bit has only gotten funnier with time, and seeing just how many people in the comments got completely thrown off guard by a bit I was so well aware of just by knowing the ol' reliable trick of checking the Composer in the description... it reminds me of just how cool it is that the channel has kept going for this long, to where commonplace channel lore to me becomes delightful surprises to newer fans.
