See ‘Neil Young’ Sing ‘Angela Bassett Did the Thing’ on ‘The Tonight Show’
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Last night on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, it was the viral video and the damage done. Fallon donned his best harvest hat and acoustic for his spot-on Seventies Neil Young impression to send up Oscar winner Ariana DeBose’s “Angela Bassett Did the Thing” rap from last week’s BAFTA Awards, in which she shouted out the evening’s female nominees. After the original rap clip hit the internet and haters criticized its cringe value, DeBose deleted her Twitter. Fallon, as Young, maximized the cringe.
Where DeBose did a shimmy while singing “Angela Bassett did the thing,” praising her work in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Fallon sang it straightly and earnestly as Young, garnering big laughs and applause from his studio audience. After the Jamie Lee Curtis line, he blew his harmonica, made up a chorus, and recapitulated the Angela Bassett line over and over again. The audience ate it up as he tuned his acoustic at the end.
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After Ariana DeBose did the thing and deleted her Twitter, several women have come to her support. Lizzo shouted her out at an Amsterdam concert: “Let’s shake it off! Angela Bassett did the thing, shake it off!” she said with a shimmy. “Angela Bassett did thang. Yeah!”
And Bassett herself did the right thing and conducted a wellness check on DeBose. “I DM’d her last night,” she told Variety a couple of days ago on the NAACP Image Awards red carpet. “I did. It was beautiful. I just wanted to make sure she was OK because, you know, it’s a lot of attention. And she is A-OK.”
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