I’ve long been a consumer of trash teevee. I’m not proud of it but, as one of the real housewives would surely say, I own it. I’m not sure where the hell I bought it though…
One of my past guilty pleasures was The Gong Song, which was a untalent/game show mashup. They brought shitty performers on-some ironic, some clueless-and when the judges had enough they would beat the hell out of a gong like a demented, untalented Carl Palmer or this burly bloke:
One of the ironic gongsters, the Unknown Comic, inspired my nickname for the Darnold: the Insult Comedian. That, in turn led to this May 2016 post and meme:
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It’s time to circle back to the post title at long last. It’s a modest proposal for future Trump pressers. He’s notoriously thin-skinned as we saw last week when he refused to take a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta. Then there was the infamous “you’re the puppet” exchange with HRC when she called Putin’s Pawn a puppet. Here’s my helpful suggestion: the Trumpers should roll a gong out for future press conferences, which will allow the Insult Comedian to bang the gong when he gets a vexatious question. It would be a ratings smash. Literally.
If only we could end the Trump misadventure by beating the shit out of a gong. We cannot but it sounds like a swell way to vent, doesn’t it?
All this talk about gongs has given me a benign earworm, so I’ll give the late, great glam rocker Marc Bolan the last word:
One more thing. This post was inspired by a tweet by my online friend Megan Romer about the inauguration of his illegitimacy:
OMG yes! And maybe we could have, like, a big gong or something in case they're not that good? Or like, a big hook to pull them offstage?! https://t.co/1GGhozDMNO
— Megan Romer (@meganromer) January 15, 2017
Guess I lied about the whole last word thing again. We are living in the post-truth world, after all. So it goes.
A couple of things about the T. Rex selection: First, it had to be called “Bang A Gong” in the U.S. because “Get It On” had recently been used as a song title by some group named Chase. The T. Rex song is the one everybody remembers.
Second, in a Top of the Pops lip-synch, the piano was played by none other than Elton John before he was Sir Elton (the studio version is Rick Wakeman, who went on to play in some other bands).
Bonus bit: Marc Bolan screws up the chorus by singing it an odd number of times at about the 3:00 mark. As he launched into third “Get it on,” you can hear everyone else sort of drop out for a beat, and then Bolan (perhaps realizing that he went one time too many) cuts off after the third iteration, hanging one of the backing vocalists out to dry. For the rest of the recording, you can almost hear the other people in the studio watching each other closely, in case there’s another mistake.