Although Halloween music is a deeper and more diverse topic than one might initially expect—see, for instance, our brand-new Power Hour on the topic—the Halloween novelty song is still a pretty tight market. When it comes to modern successors to “Monster Mash,” there are really only two credible offerings on the block: Nick Wiger’s “The Monster Fuck” (and its various Comedy Bang! Bang! evolutions) and, for somewhat tamer audiences, 30 Rock’s “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah.”
Now, at long last, the internet oral history trend has gotten around to Tracy Jordan’s beloved gold seller, which evolved from a two-line cutaway gag in a second-season episode of the NBC sitcom, into an increasingly goofy full song, complete with a cameo from Donald Glover as Tracy’s exasperated producer.
And more, as it turns out: According to writers Robert Carlock and Tami Sagher—talking to LAist this week—Glover also apparently sang on the song, doing “a pretty amazing” impression of Tracy Morgan to help fill in some of the vocals. Carlock didn’t specify which lines Glover sang on, but he did note that the future Atlanta creator also helped write the lyrics in general, joking, “If only I knew that I would be producing Childish Gambino.”
Carlock and Sagher also discussed the origins of the idea—i.e., Tracy’s hunger for a sort of double-holiday novelty song that would keep him in royalty checks for years—and how it tied into the show’s sometimes-crippling addiction to elaborate cutaway jokes: “But you walk down there and realize, ‘Oh, we’ve built a cemetery set for this eight seconds of time, and we’re taking three hours out of our day to get these eight seconds,’” Carlock ruefully noted. “But it didn’t stop us from continuing to do that forever.”