Overly Long Gag / Music

Overly Long Gags in music.

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• "Supa Scoopa And Mighty Scoop" by Kyuss. After the final short riff is played, there's silence. But after a short pause, it's played again. And again. And again...and again. 9 times in total. And the pauses between them keep growing longer, so that you just can't expect that last one riff if you haven't heard the song before (as if you would expect it to be repeated 9 times anyhow...).
• They Might Be Giants:
  • The outro for "Hearing Aid" is several bars of slowly fading noise and music.
  • The outro for "Spy" is a long series of comically discordant saxophone noises and guitar chords, which tends to get extended even further in live performances.
  • There's also the "Dial-a-Drum-Solo" audience participation bit from the New Live Version of "She's Actual Size".
  • Live performances of "Older" tend to drag out the Stop and Go pause in the line "And time... is still marching on" by having the band perform skits and such.
• Shut Up And Explode
• The end of this piano piece by Dudley Moore. It gets to the point where even Moore himself (apparently) can't conceal his frustration from the audience.
• The outer movements of Erik Satie's piano suite Embryons desséchés spend way too long a time banging out the final chords. And that's nothing compared to a full performance of Satie's Vexations, a short and ugly little theme which has a note at the end saying to repeat 840 times.
  • Actually, the big kicker with Vexations is that every chord in that theme has a tritone in it, meaning that it goes from 'short and ugly' to 'really, really weird'. And given that if one (or rather, a group of pianists) does all 840 repetitions it can take upwards of nineteen hours, we can imagine how hard everything is. To give a better perspective on how bizarre Vexations is, every pianist that's attempted all 840 repetitions by themselves had to stop about five, six hours in because they were hallucinating.
• The outro to "Yig Snake Daddy" by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets.
• Many a Playground Song is like this:
  • This is the song that doesn't end...
  • This anime music video, set to "I Know A Song (that Gets On Everybody's Nerves)" was a finalist in the Anime Boston 2008 contest, in the "Comedy" category. It's best if you watch the whole thing from beginning to end. At 3:32, it turns into a Rick Roll.
  • In what may be the most meta example, an AMV finalist at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2009 set "The Song That Doesn't End" to Endless Eight.
• One has to mention "Rocket Morton" by Nurse with Wound...
• There's a 72-minute version of Haddaway's "What is Love". Play it with company, and see how long it takes your friends to realize something is amiss.
• The ending to Counting Crows' "Hanginaround" goes way, way, way, way, too long.
• Flipper's "Brainwash" does this two different ways depending on the format: the original single version ends in a lock groove, repeating the closing lyric, "never mind, you wouldn't understand anyway", over and over until the listener gets up and manually turns the record off. The CD and streaming version just loops the entire (already repetitive) 30 second song over and over for nearly 7 minutes.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Hardware Store" at the 2:23 mark, has a 30-second non-stop listing of all the items said hardware store sells.
  • "Albuquerque" and "Trapped in the Drive-Thru". The ENTIRETY of both of them.
    • When performed live, Weird Al will extend Albuquerque's donut shop section even further than he does in the studio, to the point of listing donuts you've probably never even heard of.
  • Lampshaded or subverted perhaps in "Generic Blues": During the guitar solo, Al pleads, "Make it talk, son, make it talk!" Cue a seemingly endless jam on two notes (a tri-tone apart, giving it a siren-type quality), but Al cuts it short: "Okay, now, make it shut up!"
• "99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of-"* smack*
  • "99 bottles of smack? Hot Damn, that's a party!"
• Flanders and Swann abused this trope horribly every time Swann gets to sing in a foreign language. In "In The Desert" it probably goes on too long but it's more than made up for by "Kokoraki" in which Flanders (audibly) grows more and more impatient with the length of the song and when it finally ends (Swann remonstrating that he was forced to omit eight verses) remarks that Swann "can sing the rest of it * Swann sets in for another few verses* SOME OTHER TIME * Swann ignores him and carries on* " (spoiler for the sake of the comedy. You really should listen to their original stage shows).
• The extended drum sequence at the end of The Stone Roses' "I Am The Resurrection" from The Stone Roses
• Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". Four minutes of song, and roughly 13 minutes of solos.
• Devo is on record with causing audience members to try and stop them from playing in their basement days. The first known performance of the song "Jocko Homo" occurred when they were hired to open for Sun Ra at a private venue (they got in by pretending to be a Bad Company cover band). They baffled and annoyed them with original songs, culminating in a (reportedly) thirty-minute version of "Jocko Homo". A heavily trimmed recording of this appears on DEVO Live: The Mongoloid Years. At some point while they are endlessly chanting "Are we not men?" an audience member grabs the microphone and calls them "A bunch of assholes" (other people have apparently also been throwing beer cans). At the end, the band jams on "I Need A Chick" while the promoters come to unplug them.
• MC Chris has elements of this in a lot of the skits on his albums, but none more so than in "Happy Hunting", when a gameshow host lists the names of a huge group of Bounty Hunters. By the end of it he's calling out names like, "The Lamp", "Curtains", and "El Table".

• Arlo Guthrie's "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree". It's over 18 minutes long, is supposed to be about a diner owned by a woman named Alice, but is primarily occupied by a story about going to jail for littering. Watch part one here and part two here.
  • The sequel, "The Alice's Restaurant Multi-Colored Rainbow Roach Affair", clocks in at just over half an hour.
  • Arlo Guthrie re-recorded "Alice's Restaurant" to mark its 30th anniversary. Though this version moves at a considerably quicker tempo than the original, its length stretches beyond the original by a few minutes due to a hilarious extra section where Arlo speculates about the role of "Alice's Restaurant" in the Watergate scandal.
• Paul and Storm use this in their song "Shake Machine (Parts 1&2)". The entirety of part 2 (one minute and twenty-eight seconds) is the closing saxophone cadenza. In their commentary on the track, they describe this as pulling a Steve Martin, referencing the aforementioned scene in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.
  • "Opening Band" concludes with a final "Hello." that's drawn out for 22 seconds during which you can hear the "audience" coughing and fidgeting.
• Ivan Cutler's I'm Happy. (I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy ....)
  • Likewise, one of Chumbawamba's earliest recordings was an intentionally terrible song called "I'm Thick," released under the faux band name of 'Skin Disease.' The lyrics consisted of the title, repeated dozens of times.
• Phil Spector had one of his girl groups, the Crystals, record a single called "(Let's Dance) The Screw" - not intended for release, but intended solely for the ears of Phil's former business partner, who left Philles Records in a huff. Side one is an extremely bland twist number that drags on for five minutes, its lyrics consisting of little more than the title; side two is more of the same, except at half the tempo.
• Graham Chapman of Monty Python...he likes traffic lights. He likes traffic lights. He likes traffic lights. He likes traffic lights.
  • Monty Python's unreleased "Hastily Cobbled Together For A Fast Buck" LP ended one side with an Eric Idle solo piece called 'Laughing At The Unfortunate,' which climaxed in a grating loop of Eric laughing.
• The Beatles inserted a short groove containing unintelligible gibberish right at the edge of the side-two label on original UK pressings of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." For listeners whose turntables did not shut off automatically, this loop would continue endlessly until the needle was lifted from the record.
  • Numerous other bands later mimicked this technique. The Who ended The Who Sell Out with a looping plug for their label, Track Records; Pink Floyd inserted an endlessly dripping tap at the end of 'Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast' (on Atom Heart Mother); and the final burst of feedback on side four of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music continues into the run-out groove so that it can repeat infinitely.
• The band Blasting Trout Overbite once did a college open mic performance where they closed a short set by endeavoring to play The Champs' "Tequila" for as long as possible before being kicked off stage, ending up playing it for an estimated 10 minutes. The song was specifically chosen because it's fairly repetitive to begin with, so it would take a while for the audience to notice that something was amiss.
• From the Leo Kottke album My Father's Face, the track called "Doorbell"
• On Oasis' third album Be Here Now, the tune called "It's Getting Better, Man". The outro plays this trope straight. In fact, at least half of Be Here Now plays this trope pretty well.
• The uncut music video for Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" begins with two men in a car (who are obviously meant to be parodies of gang members) trying to woo two women standing on a street corner, and using every conceivable sex joke (and every variation of "fuck") they can think of. This goes on for a solid three minutes, then (just as it seems it might continue indefinitely), their car gets rear-ended and pushed forwards by a stretch limousine that keeps going...and going...and going for the next forty seconds. Only after this does the video start properly.
• "(Let's Talk) Physical" is a remix of Revolting Cocks' "(Let's Get) Physical" that consists of a seven minute loop of a snare hit and Chris Connelly yelling "TALK!". It's meant as a parody of repetitive "extended" remixes of songs.
• Slowed down Sci-Fi Classics. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song clocks in at about 26 and a half minutes.
• There are some children's / folk songs out there which consist of several connected verses, which tell a story that returns to the beginning after a while and starts again with the first verse.
  • Like a German song that has Liese (the woman) asking her "dear Heinrich" what she should do in case the pot has a hole. He gives her some advice. Then she asks about that advice, and so on. The English equivalent is "There's A Hole In The Bucket".
• Melvins manage to do this with silence: The track "Pure Digital Silence" has a band member adopting a ludicrous Fake Brit accent to announce "And now, for your listening pleasure, a few moments of pure. digital. silence", followed by about a minute and a half of exactly that. Since it's near the end of Prick, an album full of frequently cacophonous studio experiments, it might have also been intended as a breather.
  • "Pick It N' Flick It" from the same album may also be an example, as it's essentially a minute and a half Big Rock Ending without an actual song attached to it.
• "The Boring Song" by Status Quid (one of the many aliases of parody band The Hee Bee Gee Bees). Oh not again, please not again...
• I'm so fresh you can suck my nuts!
• A few Das Racist songs are made of this trope.
• "John & Yoko" from John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Wedding Album is basically them two calling each other's names for half an hour straight to a Heartbeat Soundtrack.
• The skit "You Play Too Much" on the Method Man album "Tical 2000: Judgment Day" has Chris Rock introducing the rapper as a guest for a New Year's Eve party. Instead of introducing him by name, however, Rock spends about a minute rattling off a Long List of nicknames, which grow more and more absurd as the list goes on (name-dropping Mr. Hankey, Mike Tyson ["Kid Dynamite"], and actress Marla Gibbs, among others). Eventually, Meth gets fed up and takes Rock's microphone away, telling him to skip the long introduction and "just say 'Meth'" next time.
• In "Tosh" by Fluke every single line except one has the word "super" in it somewhere. For example:
  Super grass for gain. Super power games. Super secret spy, undersupervised.
• Superchunk's EP The Laughter Guns ends in a bonus track titled "The Laughter Guns Episode", a spoof college radio program in which the hosts ponder the meaning of previous Superchunk single "Hyper Enough" for 42 straight minutes.

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