I’m King Kong and I’m ten feet long,
Got a big six gun and everybody is scared.
I’m King Kong, got a hydrogen bomb,
I can blow up your houses so you better beware.

Everybody wants power,
Everybody wants fame.
Everybody wants money.
La-la-la-la-la, King Kong…

Well, here’s a monster for ya!

OK fine, sheesh, Dad jokes aren’t popular among some of you whippersnappoids, I get it.

You can leave.

The rest of you? Let’s continue our Halloween playlist by returning to a Top 10 band for most of us here at HokeyCorps Industries Ltd. Yeah that’s right, we’re talking The Kinks and their bootstompin’ 1968 track King Kong.

Yeah, we can’t deny it. This one is such a deep-track, it never appeared on any of their studio albums. And a B-side,no less; the flipside to Plastic Man, which even less folk barely remember. If at all.

But King Kong? Zowie! This beast is the growl under the floorboards. A shadow lurking against the skyline. A fuzz-drenched, echo-chamber stomp from Ray Davies and company that punches somewhere between garage rock and proto-metal.

And I love it. Of course I love it. It’s the freakin’ Kinks.

Ray is singing King Kong like some hybrid mad scientist/carnival barker. Somewhere between novelty tune and existential growl. Simple lyrics but the subtext is pure Ray Davies: ego, greed, power, the absurdity of wanting to be the biggest monkey in the jungle.

Meanwhile, we got those sludgy, primal guitars, a warning-siren bassline, and rhythmic drumming trying to drive the beast… further somewhere else. Just not here.

Play it loud, shake the walls, and drive these monstrous little babymen back into their sludgy swamps from whence they came. The Kinks saw the monster in all of humanity, and in Kong Kong they satirized the beast to shreds while still bringing the stompin’ rock.

Little man’s weak and big man’s strong,
Everyone wants to be King Kong, oh yeah.
I’m King Kong, I got so much money,
I can buy anybody who gets in my path…