What a strange game for a strange time.
During the end of the Gamecube's life span, the well of releases was drying up pretty rapidly and no one was quite sure of Nintendo's future. All we knew is that there was a set of peripherals called the DK bongos. Previously these things had been used to control music games, but what else could they do? What else should they do? War drums? Nintendo had an idea.
Many of the creative geniuses who would later be responsible for the Super Mario Galaxy series got together and created a combo-based rhythm platformer. The point of this game, near as I remember it, was to create a perfect sequence of chained together bananas. You controlled the game by hitting the bongos. Hitting the right bongo made DK run right, hitting the left bongo made him run left, and I believe hitting both made him jump, or maybe you had to clap, it's been a while.
All I know is that my hands were fucking killing me.
After you scored as many points as you could, you took on one of these crazy Kongs in a king of rock em', sock em' battle using the same bongos. Then the game tallied up your score.
What I remember most fondly about this game was the creative character designs and just how batshit crazy it was to be controlling a game this way. I believe they rereleased this game on the Wii, but there was nothing like playing it for the first time on the Gamecube.