Season 5
No Album Release (Read More)
Concrete Jungle (Concrete Man Stage) (Alpha Mix) - Mega Man 9
Ripper Unknown
Requested by fezaki! (Discord)
The big appeal of Season 5 of SiIvaGunner for me, four years after the fact, is that it contains so many gems that I'm yet to discover, due to my detachment from the channel during 2021. I've been the song and dance a number of times; despite a handful of cool happenings like the Masked Wolf / Yankin' rivalry covered on Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier, and the neat audio drama stories like what I discussed on Knowledge of the Depths, this was the year where the channel felt rather aimless in overall direction going forward. Without a huge investment in the ongoing story, I myself felt less engaged to want to investigate every uploaded rip as closely as I otherwise would have wanted to; yet despite lacking in overall direction, the production quality of rips had begun reaching previously unseen highs. Though the King for Another Day Tournament had ended two years prior, it felt to me as if the quality that said event promised had begun seeping into the channel's everyday uploads, as if the team had understood that layered, ambitious arrangements and mashups were just as appealing outside of events as they were as part of them. As a result of all this, Season 5 saw TONS of rips just like Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix); tragically underrated, largely divorced from the channel's goings-ons, yet OH so deliciously quality.
Sometimes, the great appeal of a rip is understood right from just hearing the concept. Joke lists on wikis can't always communicate immediately the effectiveness of a YTPMV, mashup or arrangement, be it the inherent comedic sound to Slope Dude's mix of sources, the sheer audacity and polish of no more nuzzles in my skin, or the context that surrounds a meme as dense in history as Bottom G and Lagplane. Yet with Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), after seeing it amidst my requests and searching for it on the wiki, it clicked IMMEDIATELY just why this rip was worth discussing. Soulja Boy is a character who's been around in ripping circles since the channel's earliest days, an icon prominent in the SoundClown shitposting scene that SiIvaGunner grew out of; and a single glance at Dr. Soulja should be enough to immediately tell you why. From the listener's perspective, its an immediately charming and funny source, be it from the iconic steel drums and finger-snapping percussion or how its paired with the dorky, almost pathetic attempt at coolness that Soulja Boy's performance in Crank That evokes. From the perspective of the ripper, Crank That is in the same category as songs like Space Jam discussed on Hoopache and the yet-to-be-covered Chip tha Ripper freestyle; As comedic rap music with 4/4 time signatures andimmediately recognizable, funny-sounding beats, they're almost comically easy to just drag-and-drop on top of existing 4/4 video game music with little to no tweaking. It was their ease of production, and how it led to an absolute overabundance of low-effort rips throughout Season 1, that resulted in the entire Mr. Rental storyline covered on Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options; its this entry-level skill floor that makes rips like The Jamminest of All stand out immediately in quality; and, indeed, it's the knowledge that all Soulja Boy is good for is his funny sound on Crank That that makes Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) such an immediate stand-out.
Indeed, as you may well hear from just a few seconds of listening; Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) is far from your everyday Soulja Boy rip, reinventing the scene even after Season 4 Episode 2 had already done so a year prior through the Crank That revitalization covered on Koopa Street. It is, paradoxical as it may sound, a Soulja Boy rip *without* Crank That in focus; still filled with Soulja Boy's immediately identifiable, half-hearted attempts at self-confidence, but notably lacking in those immediately identifiable steel drums. They're still there, to be clear - they make an absolutely triumphant appearance midway through the song playing whats best described as a backing-instrumental solo at 0:44 - but a majority of the rip is instead spent covering the separate Soulja Boy hit Bird Walk. Comparatively, it's notably quite a louder song than Crank That; the vocals layered and reverberating make Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) sound almost oppressively excited, like you're listening to a group of cheering Soulja Boys in the stands, their cheering given amazing melodic direction through Concrete Jungle's fast-paced melody. Deeper in the mix, you can indeed hear that Bird Walk's lead vocals are pitched to follow along said melody in a way similar to rips like I will Never be a Redneck, yet its fittingly buried underneath the loudness of Bird Walk's vocals mashed up with the melody, the chiptune lead still also playing entirely unaltered right alongside it.
As someone completely unengaged in the larger Soulja Boy discography, the rip is a genuinely super fun listen in large part due to how familiar-yet-unfamiliar it sounds throughout. You hear bits and pieces of Crank That, you can identify Soulja Boy's unmistakeable swagger, and yet it never *quite* sounds like something you've heard before; which, honestly, makes it pretty funny that the rip is using music from Mega Man 9 in particular. The game Aiming to more or less be a spiritual throwback to Mega Man 2 in every way but name, the Concrete Jungle theme can pretty easily be compared directly to Wood Man's Stage theme in structure and the level it's used within; a comparison only made funnier given Wood Man's own high importance on SiIvaGunner itself as written about back on Nice, Slick, Blackness. In that sense, intentional as it may or may not have been, Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) is almost like a bizarre, alternate-reality version of the kind of rip you'd expect to hear during Season 1 or Season 2; Soulja Boy and Wood Man, but it's not quite Soulja Boy, and it's not quite Wood Man, and yet its an absolute indisputable banger despite those restrictions. The, pardon the choice of words, uncanny feel of the rip is only emphasized by how, per the Wiki, two of the songs of which pieces of are used in the mix remain completely unidentified; nevertheless, they add to the cacophony in a way that still feels composed just enough to stay on track. Variety and escalation, like I've discussed on rips like Be Cool, Be Wild and Be My Girl, is the secret spice to making a SiIvaGunner rip truly memorable, and these little sprinkles keep the rip's energy topped up throughout its 3-minute runtime.
It's a damn shame that the rip's author remains completely unidentified, as there is tons of small little details in execution that I feel the need to commend. There's so much fun had throughout the rip, combining Bird Walk with whatever additional sources join the mix in ways both subtle and blatant, the aforementioned occasional but understated appearances of Crank That's steel drums, or, as also mentioned briefly before, how the rip still insists on having a quiet vocal lead pitch-shifted to Concrete Jungle's melody despite ultimately being secondary to the mashup playing above it. In particular, though, there's a moment right around 01:11, just a few seconds after the first unidentified source is added to the mix, where the progression of the song - its percussion, backing, melody, etc. - is halted for a split second, just to recapture a vocal quirk of the newly-added source. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, the kind of subtle tweak for flavor I otherwise associate with rips by recognized rippers like Eazystep or Sweatpants Select; and yet here it is within Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), an album-less, less-than-20K-views, 4-years old uncredited rip that I only found out about from a chance encounter on my submission spreadsheet. And it's a rip that's not just well made, but one that takes perhaps the most played out concept in all of SoundClown history - 4/4ths rap mashups - and twists and subverts your every expectation on them in ways you never thought SiIvaGunner could do five whole years into its run. That right there is, once again, the absolute magic of Season 5 SiIvaGunner for me in action; that classics on the level of Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), rips waiting to showcase the ground they've secretly broken in being conceptually genius and filled with quality in execution, could just be waiting around every corner.
