Every so often on Popular I hit a knowledge gap that there’s simply no way of talking around, and this is one. I have only ever seen one episode of South Park, after the pub one night, sometime in its first flush of success. I didn’t like it enough to watch more, and that turned out to be it for me and the show – this single aside. If you want a comment on South Park, how “Chocolate Salty Balls” fits into it, its cultural significance – well, the box is open, and I know a lot of the writers here are fans.
With that large and necessary context torn out, what independent life can this song have? Quite a lot. It’s the first outright comedy record to get to #1 since “The Stonk”, but the gap in care, structure and wit between the songs is colossal. There’s none of the soul-shrivelling forced bonhomie of Red Nose Day about this record, where you herd the comics of the day into a studio and pray something half-funny emerges. This is a return to a seventies model – funny songs that got to Number One because they made people laugh.
Except it was never quite so simple. The wheels of the chart require constant greasing, and the applicator here is DJ Chris Moyles, who made “Chocolate Salty Balls” his cause. The last time I touched on the unheavals of Radio One, during Britpop, the station was emerging from Matthew Bannister’s cultural purge. Out went the populist, roadshow-ready entertainer DJs; in came a gaggle of cool kids who knew a bit about music. Gone was the notion that wonderful Radio 1 would be the jolly backbone of Britain’s working day – instead it would move into a tastemaker role, shepherding new trends into the mainstream.
The long-term consequences of this play out across the 00s, but with Britpop at least the strategy seemed to work beautifully. But Britpop faded, and the brash post-Spice wave of tweenpop was exactly the sort of thing the new, cool, Radio 1 struggled with. Bannister’s remade station, you felt, had not really planned on what to do with music it didn’t instinctively like. The old Radio 1 had no such scruples.
And meanwhile, Moyles had emerged as the station’s rising star, very much along the old populist lines – entertainment and banter first, music second, though with a slightly hipper, crueller edge. Promoted to the drivetime show in October 1998, he wanted to foster a big smash, make an impact. Comedy records and hit-hungry DJs had been a regular fit back in the 1970s: they could be again – particularly a record from a show which, like Moyles himself, bounced along on a rep for political incorrectness.
That was one big difference between the old station and the new: the new one could embrace smutty records – if they came from a fashionable source – where the old one huffed and hummed and banned them. And so it was that the national pop station threw its tastemaking weight behind a song whose chorus – and main gag – is a guy singing “suck on my balls, baby”.
Back in the 70s heyday of the comedy record, that wouldn’t just have been unthinkable, it would have ruined the joke. In the days of Judge Dread (“It’s little boy blue with his horn”), the point wasn’t the dirt, it was sneaking it into a public space – like the charts – and sniggering as that space tried and failed to throw it back out.
“Chocolate Salty Balls” can’t rely on that frisson of subversion, even if Chris Moyles might have bristled at the idea he was part of an establishment now. Fortunately, it gets to rely on being funny instead. The central gag – cooking song turns sexual – isn’t just done with panache and left, it’s reinforced by two other, even better ideas. The first is that Parker and Stone know that if you’ve got Isaac Hayes doing your innocent-song-becomes-sex-jam running gag, you use him – so the “recipe instructions” verse of the song is gloriously, creamily over-the-top even without the innuendo (“a touch of va-NILL-uh”) and the music is robustly enjoyable pop funk in its own right.
And the second is that having flipped the cooking metaphor into the sex one, “Chocolate Salty Balls” collapses it back again, paying off the straight-faced tone with the “on fire” gag. It wouldn’t do to overstress the cleverness here – in the end, this is mostly about keeping the promise of a South Park record called “Chocolate Salty Balls” – but having a trick to end on is like knowing how to end a sketch well. It’s basic, but it’s seemed beyond almost every other comedy record we’ve dealt with.
Score: 6
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As culinary smut goes this can’t begin to compare with Bessie Smith’s Kitchen Man. But then nothing could.
Huh? Why am I awaiting moderation?
Funny..
I was passing Woolworths one day, and the music dept was playing over the shop tannoy the hits of the day. Particular track was quite whispery but at one point it gets very loud, and everybody got to hear..
“HEY EVERYBODY COME AND LOOK AT MY BALLS THEY’RE BIG AND SALTY AND BROWN! IF YOU WANT A QUICK PICK-YOU-UP JUST STICK MY zzzIPPP!!!”
The even stranger follow up was the following year when “Mr Hanky the Christmas poo” made the chart, and it basically consisted of the characters from South Park crowding round somebody’s bottom waiting for the titular character to come out. And then sings a very old style (tom mix?) vaudeville song. Nothing stranger than that, chart-wise.
Whaddya know, a “comedy” record which is actually funny. It’s musically pretty good, a cut above many recent chart-toppers, but I can’t help feeling that it would be even better with more gravitas and less innuendo. Know what I mean, nudge, nudge? A high SIX.
South Park was a refreshing breath of foul air, with these potty-mouthed kids and their surreal little perma-winter universe. Yes, CSB is genuinely funny, but my favourite South Park-related single is this:
http://youtu.be/H1qYDSutHF8
Nevertheless, Isaac Hayes plays it with the correct level of irreverence and gets his teeth stuck into that growly “SUCK ON MY BAWWWLS” bit. Fun. (7)
South Park pretty much dominated 1998-99 for me, and many of those early episodes are burnt into my brain, including “Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls” (which must be why the fad for salted caramel has always struck me as vaguely amusing). Isaac Hayes’ character was just one of many great things about the show. It peaked for me with the 1999 movie, which was relentlessly, deliriously funny if you were a fan of the show, and I-wouldn’t-know-what if you weren’t. The movie contained the best South Park song by a mile: not the Academy-friendly “Blame Canada”, but the opening barrage of “Uncle Fucka”, which I would link to here if it weren’t far too wrong taken out of context (and hilariously wrong in context). “Chocolate Salty Balls” is tame by comparison, but still plenty entertaining in its own right, and worth that 6.
I lost track of South Park in the 2000s after moving country, going TV-free and living off DVD box-sets for a while, when Futurama took over as our household’s preferred animated half-hour. With kids around nowadays, it’ll be a while before we settle down to watch the latter-day SP equivalent of “Kyle’s Mom’s a Bitch”. The result is that those early episodes and songs have taken on the golden glow of nostalgia, untainted by whatever has come since… maybe I’ll stretch to a seven.
I’d forgotten until reading the SP entry on Wikipedia that Hayes quit the show after it ran an episode satirizing Scientology. The aftermath as related in his own Wikipedia entry makes sorry reading.
I admit having watched South Park when it first came out as a 10 going-on-11-year-old. I assume that this was a frequent occurrence for kids my age at the time, because cartoon automatically means its for kids, right? I remember my mum stopped me and my little sister from watching it anymore, not because of the swearing or adult humour, it was because of an episode where Stan pukes on his girlfriend.
That probably explains why I’m rather immune to heavy swearing these days.
Anyway back to the song: obviously at that age I didn’t fully get the double-entendre of Chef’s “chocolate balls”, I just thought it was funny because it *sounded* funny. These days whenever I hear it I cringe, not because it’s really bad, but I guess it’s a kind of cringe-humour?
Final note: I haven’t watched the show in many many years.
#6: Speaking of the movie, my mum agreed to let us rent it (hey, remember when video rental shops were a thing?), and I think I was about 12/13 at the time. The second the lines “shut your fucking face in Uncle Fuckerrrrrr!” chirped up she instantly regretted it, haha.
Another one of those, like Chuck Berry and Prince, where you’re glad he got the honour but it’s no Theme from Shaft, is it?
Exactly. It is pretty good fun, but the story of Hayes’ last few years linked to by Rory @6 is desperately sad. (Although it does sound as though Parker and Stone were the good guys there.)
I can’t help wishing Popular got to address, say, this one instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8ha68LhsjU
I was a semi-regular watcher of South Park in the late 90’s and I remember the episode in which CSB appeared: It was my only exposure to the song as I’m not sure it was ever released as a single in the US and I certainly never heard it on the radio.
Which is why I was very surprised to see it atop the UK chart. I had no idea South Park had reached the UK, let alone become popular enough to spawn a hit single that wasn’t even a hit back home. Tom’s review does shed some light on how this peculiarity happened. An amusing thought I had at the time was that this novelty hit by a cartoon character had more musical credibility than its immediate predecessor (like many Americans, my opinion of the SG’s was at a very low ebb at the time). However, a less charitable assessment of CSB could regard it as Hayes’ “My Ding-a-Ling” moment. Yes, it’s funny on the first listen or two but I can’t imagine wanting to hear it over and over again. 5/10 from me.
BTW: worth noting “Theme from Shaft” was a US #1 back in the day. Good stuff.
Favourite SP music-related moment: a written quiz in a German class back in secondary school, conducted in complete silence, when suddenly the phone of a boy at the back rings loudly, and his ringtone is “Uncle Fucker”.
I remember a rough half-minute of tinny swearing as everyone sat frozen in place, until finally the boy turned it off. The teacher didn’t react.
This is kind of fun, and at least suits its talented and disguised performer (I had quite forgotten what happened to him later on – quite awful). Sure, it’s a comic record, and quite a crass one at that (that being the point, obviously), but, huh, it’s not a disgrace or embarrassment, in the manner of “My Ding A Ling”, or (worse still) “I Just Called To Say I Love You”….
I remember even the Telegraph columnist, Tom Utley, as stuffy a cultural and political conservative as one could find in late 1990s England, admitting, quite against his will, writing that he had to admit that he was amused by the song, after being prompted by his son to explain why it was funny….. (to illustrate the stuffy and frankly clueless conservative thing: the only other column from Utley from around this time I can recall tells the story of his car needing repair, his being forced instead to travel by bus, from Brixton to where he lived in either Herne or Tulse Hill, his consequent state of fear and apprehension on discovering that he was surrounded by Black people on a bus in Brixton, followed by his apparent surprise that in fact no-one was to be mugged on the bus between Brixton and his uphill destination, and consequently coming to the conclusion that, golly gosh, isn’t London an amazing multicultural city where everyone gets on well together, I’d have never have imagined this, just wow)
But a bloke with a fruity and deep voice shouting SUCK ON MY BALLS is always going to be funny, at least for a certain number of listens, and all the more so when it comes with an appropriate musical accompaniment. SHAFT. RIGHT-ON.
Have not really watched that much South Park over the years, but the tangentially related “Team America: World Police” movie from a few years, and geopolitical developments, later, has some pretty decent musical numbers – “Freedom Isn’t Free” most notably, and the theme tune/national anthem “America! Fuck Yeah! Gonna save the motherfuckin’ day!” too. Subtle these South Park boys are not.
This, though: possibly the best comic no 1 that has been? 7
as Rosie says at the start of the thread this doesn’t come close (fnar, fnar, etc.) to the filth of Bessie Smith; nor does it match her sense of pleasure. Instead it takes a sniggering approach which, while occasionally amusing, becomes wearing after a while. I’m always a bit uneasy about some white folks’ tittering response to sexual appetite expressed in black music – whether it be Barry White, Prince or Marvin Gaye – and I can’t help feeling that’s what lies behind the South Park writers’ use of Isaac Hayes skills as a singer and producer here
south park is similar to the simpsons in that the seasons where it was a phenomenon now play as strangely unformed ie before it really got good and became what ppl mean when they talk about the simpsons or south park. the simpsons had had songs so it wasn’t novel that south park did also (and tbh the show has never really approached the simpsons in terms of incorporating songs into the show, probably due to the ridiculous turnover time the show has), but parker and stone were clearly huge musical nerds – they had done cannibal! for troma before south park, and they eventually had their own broadway show w/ the book of mormon. 6 seems generous here though i guess the bar is pretty low.
Never really was a South Park fan, at least not in any major sense. I’ll watch it if it’s on and laugh, if I’m spending the evening channel surfing, and I’ve played the (surprisingly good) video game based on it, but that’s about it. So, my experience of “Chocolate Salty Balls” is pretty well divorced from “South Park – the phenomenon”, much like Tom’s is.
And it holds up surprisingly well on its own. The backing track is pretty good, and it doesn’t FEEL like a comedy record, not too much winking and nudging, though I do agree with 4 that it could be played with even more gravity. Frankly, I’d like to see an epic 20-minute version of this where Mr. Hayes does what he did with “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” (one of my favourite records of all time), just to take things even further over the top. There’s a few good gags, the type of thing that are always going to be funny. And of course there’s Mr. Hayes himself. Dude has some pipes – nothing else needs to be said. It’s jolly good fun. 6 it is.
At the legal aid family law solicitors where I used to work, I had a new client come in to discuss some problems with his ex and their son. I asked him to elaborate on why he thought her behaviour was unsuitable and he replied, straight faced, “She been fuckin’ my uncle.”
I didn’t so much as smirk, for which I think I deserve a knighthood.
Discovering South Park as a nine-year-old boy in the summer of 1998 was a glorious moment, as was the Channel 4 Harry Hill Show at the same time. Both were shown crazily late at night, unfairly so in Harry’s case but slightly more understandable for the Park – when we gained cable television in September that year, new episodes were, I think, shown on Sky One at 11pm on Sundays and then repeated 10pm on Mondays. Somehow my mum let me watch these 11pm showings despite school in the mornings, having little idea what the show was but seeing it was a cartoon so thinking it was kid-friendly. She by then would be long asleep, making it just me watching this exciting late-night hidden treasure.
Looking back at the first two series now they’re almost ridiculously tame, bar a few off-colour jokes – the controversy at the time mainly focused around the many deaths of Kenny, who would always return unharmed the next week anyway, and the constant swearing which even then would be bleeped out. The naughtiest thing I used to find with the show was the uncensored use of the word “bastard” which to my parents horror became my new favourite word for a while.
Saying that, on hearing Chocolate Salty Balls for the first time I knew *exactly* what they were insinuating, and found the whole thing very mischievously fun. Similarly the song ‘Kyle’s Mom Is A Bitch’ was floating around the internet as a basic animation at the time, something we didn’t have back then but a friend showed me at their house to my great amusement. Yeah looking back it’s a one-gag song but a nice bit of nostalgia, and fun start to officially The Best Year Ever for music. 6 is a bang-on score.
Delayed-effect irony in pop, chapter 94: Isaac Hayes’ innovative “Theme From Shaft” was one of several unlucky contenders narrowly beaten to the 1971 Christmas number one title by “Ernie,” and even given the already evident irony of the pioneer of song as the point of catharsis of extended dramatic and thematic soliloquy having his biggest hit single with a track which was largely instrumental, there is an extra dash of relish in Hayes’ triumphant return, 27 festive seasons later, finally getting to number one with a song which uses food as extended sexual metaphor.
South Park was always the Stones, or even the Syd’s Floyd, to The Simpsons‘ Beatles; the programme’s art lies in its apparent artlessness, as well as a pretty real picture of disintegrating post-Reagan communities – its nascent Generation X of kids, their faces more often masked than not, who seem scarcely able to communicate with each other, let alone the world. Set next to the relatively foursquare Bart and Homer, South Park is evasive, opaque, and yet rather acute about the politics and behaviourisms of its era, although it still leaves the final door of hope open – Kenny must have overtaken Tom the cat’s seemingly infinite capacity for renewal by now; dispatched every week in every manner imaginable, and next week he’s back for more, talking only with and for himself, and usually in the language of Rabelaisian samizdat scatology.
Hayes was the voice of Chef, of course, and embraces “Chocolate Salty Balls” with more than evident gusto. An octave higher than Barry White, but still deeper than Atlantis (Barry was the Ken Kiff to Isaac’s Caravaggio), he handles the beat-that-Nigella multiple entendres with wonderful good humour, and that’s what makes the record enjoyable, whereas such things as “The Streak” and “Combine Harvester” merely make me cringe and desire a Willy Brandt-style kneeling apology on behalf of my father’s generation; there is no sneering here, just celebration of intrinsic ridicule.
Of course Hayes sends himself up mercilessly – check his climactic exclamation of “You just burned my balls!” which induces a scenario worthy of Oliver Hardy – but still he manages very palpably to mean it; you could swim in his conspiratorial whispered growl of “egg whites” and his licking of “just a pinch of vanilla.” The music, too, is superb, merging from early eighties electronica through to Hayes’ trademark tension band wiring of funk and into a red riot of slap bass, petrol station string synths and clattering drums (the latter magnificently doubling up for the final chorus). Not an entendre worthy of doubling is missed (“Stick ’em in your mouth and suck ’em,” “Just stick my balls in your mouth” etc.) but unlike Tom Jones and his ghastly “Sex Bomb” it provokes nodding rather than squirming – the record also fulfills the valuable function of debunking Jones’ solemn, craggy cabaret stripteases. In addition, “Chocolate Salty Balls” was the first UK number one to be produced by Rick Rubin! 7 steps to sugar heaven
It takes Chef’s schtick from the show (dispensing advice and life lessons to the kids which rapidly drift towards getting laid) and runs with it. Not the best song on its parent album (that’d be Cartman’s raucous cover of Styx’s Come Sail Away), or the best thing to come from the South Park franchise (the still astonishing movie), but it comfortably soars over the low bar it aims for. 7.
I can’t work out which came first – the “preheat the oven to tree fiddy” line or the episode with the Loch Ness monster needing about tree fiddy. I refuse to believe that one didn’t inform the other.
Sample watch: The “Long as I get my rent paid on Friday” line is from George Thorogood & the Destroyers’ “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer”
#12 Funnily enough, I was on a bus around that time when someone’s phone went off with that as the ringtone, and the guy looked absolutely mortified and rushed to switch it straight off. But if you’ve got it as your ringtone, what do you expect?
As for me and South Park, I never really got into it, I was a student at the time so the perfect age for it but I watched the first few episodes and found them a bit dull, to be honest, it never really seemed to me to get any further than The Simpsons But With Swearing, and so I abandoned it. I assumed much of the excitement came from the more conservative American broadcasting establishment. Even when I won a box set of the first series on VHS from Sky magazine (the most late nineties prize imaginable from the most last nineties magazine) I gave them away. I know it’s still going now and apparently it’s still very funny and innovative (and probably cleverer than Family Guy, which I do watch and enjoy despite everything) but too late now.
I did go and see the film, though, which I did enjoy a lot, and the soundtrack, as mentioned, is fabulous. My sister had the album and I remember listening to it all the way while we were taking her to university for the first time (not that I enjoyed that ride much, it was in monsoon conditions).
And, of course, while Mr Hankey never got to number one, it did give us the best ever description of an artist in the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles – “US, male excrement vocalist”.
Funny, I was expecting a lot more love for South Park on FT. I’m a fairly casual fan but there’ve been some incredible bravura moments over the years (BP accidentally summoning up Cthulu, the World of Warcraft episode, the episode where the boys halfheartedly save the world for real so they can get back to playing exactly the same storyline in their computer game, the whole of the movie, obv.)
What’s more, there generally seems to be a pretty solid high-concept idea behind each episode compared to Family Guy’s ‘stun audience into submission with rapid fire gags’ technique. Not that I dislike FG but, there was something in the South Park episode about the manities coming up with FG jokes by nosing balls through random hoops for ‘celebrity’, ‘activity’, ‘location’ and ‘pop-cultural reference’.
It sometimes overplays the schmaltz and the satire (like most satire) isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is but like The Stones or Floyd they’ve stayed on the money throughout their second decade while, like The Beatles, The Simpsons was unmatchable in its heyday but quickly paled into will-this-do sentimentality once the original team disbanded* (actually Punctum, if we’re running with that metaphor, I reckon South Park is more like The Who: a mix of kinetic violence, apparently crude execution masking bravura technique, blue-eyed innocence, weird goofy jokes and off-kilter subject matter).
*this is, I admit, an over-simplified and unfair dismissal of the solo Fabs but not, for the most part, of the Simpsons after series 9 or 10 or so.
#23: the thing about South Park is that its greatest strength is simultaneously its greatest weakness – Parker and Stone’s ability to turn an episode around in about three days means that its satire is always current and usually right on the nose, but damn it ages the episode extremely quickly once those events have passed (hey, remember Saddam Hussein in his spiderhole? Or Terri Schiavo?).
It’s when they don’t rely on up-to-the-moment satire that they produce their best work; either by riffing on trends rather than specific events (Guitar Queer-O, Make Love Not Warcraft), randomness (Jared Has Aides), or social commentary (the still bang-on movie, with a parodic lesson – “Horrific deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words!” – which seems to have been taken to heart by every internet discussion forum started in the subsequent fifteen years).
Er, yes – yes, I remember those things.
The last time Popular went through the “cartoons = bands” routine. Some good ones here: https://popular-number1s.com/popular/2011/03/the-simpsons-do-the-bartman/
And 4 for Bart compared to 6 for Hayes feels about right.
This was on Chef Aid: The South Park album which featured among others DMX & ODB collaborating with Ozzy Osbourne and Puff Daddy, Lil Kim & Ma$e teaming up with System of a Down. There was everything from Wyclef Jean to Elton John to Rancid and Ween and a great Chef/Meatloaf duet. For a 13 year old it gave me a lot of different kinds of music to get into. I started listening to the Clash pretty much because I really liked the song Joe Strummer had on it.
The U2-haters on Popular should definitely check out South Park’s Season 11 episode ‘More Crap’. It appears to be viewable (albeit in low quality) here.
*Bono-haters
I remember being in a packed college hall a year or so earlier waiting to find out who was Cartman’s dad, only to be confrounted with the Terrance and Phillip prank. I stayed with it for a year or so but drifted away. I hadn’t even been aware it is still a going concern.
Chocolate Salty Balls was everywhere in 1999 for me, but I was at a University radio station so I couldn’t avoid it. It was one of only two Hayes tracks anyone of my group could name and of course he’s but a coda to Shaft.
But it’s the Wyclef Jean + Cartman track Bubblegoose which got the wider airplay – whether uni, government or commercial radio stations. One version of Bubblegoose entered the Triple J Hottest at 19, but I’m not sure if this the the original or the Cartman version. And if the original was the popular version, did this make the Cartman version radio pick for Australia? Or was Wyclef still fondly remembered from the Fugees and was here again with the most popular obnoxious kid on television?
Regardless I had never though of Wyclef before Chef Aid and South Park. A bit like Isaac Hayes really…
(And I wouldn’t even register the Fugees until later)
I haven’t seen much of South Park but what I have seen seems to be genius – very sharp, especially the film. I also quite liked Chris Moyles, most of the time. But I don’t find this song funny at all.
Has anyone tried out the recipe?
Probably not worth it – neither chocolate nor salt is listed as an ingredient.
It does mention chocolate in the second verse. You’re right there’s no salt – he must have used salted butter.
Like Tom, I’ve never really watched South Park. Decent-in-parts funk track, a great vocal, lyrics that are funny once – maybe twice at a push. 4
South park eh?
At the time it was one of the most surreal looking things I’d ever witnessed on TV. Crapston Villas being another similar type show.
It didnt immediately win me over as I was following sport when it started in Ireland around March 1998 and only got time to watch it later in the year. Having caught up with Season 2 by early 1999 I was well able to go into school with a barrel load of South Park gags and watched the show fondly.Some good stuff from memory – , the Anal Probe, Cartmans nazi uniform, The dodgy planetarium playing Footloose,Barbooo-rrrrr–aaaa,Chef ‘raising’ half a million dollars, and kenny surviving one episode.
When that ended I was hooked but there was a 7/8 month gap when season 3 started and the magic was all but gone.studying for my finals in early 2001 I did watch some episodes like the sexual harrasment panda and the pokemon pisstake (Big Penis) but it wasnt the draw it once was. I havent got bored of a show like it before or even since.The last episode I watched was in early 2005 when we got a glimpse of Butters Dad! The Movie though was/is tremendous.
It was some shock to the system for Irish TV. Imports were all the rage at the time. Every 2nd show was something from Australia/New Zealand.Home and Away, Neighbours had just started, a country practice,murder call, sons and daughters, Blue Heelers,the sullivans, shortland street and Breakers, a short lived Aussie soap. I watched them all I must admit. My favourite show of the time being Sydney Cop show Water Rats.It was only by the early 00’s did the aussie Tv phase begin to fade. SP really was breaking the mould compared to what else was on offer.
TV seemed so basic in retrospect. The mid-90s seemed very comedy driven/hyped but drama was about to takeover in a big way.The so called Golden Age was on the horizon with The Sopranos about to debut and the Wire/24 not far away either. South Parks influence can be best shown with the birth of Adult Swin. Shows like Sealab 2021 and Aqua Teen Hunger force may not have become so popular without South Park.
As for CSB, well it’s association with a big TV show is the USP here but the first 2 minutes or so wouldnt be out of place on shows like soul train (taking content out of the way!). Quite good for the first half or so before it loses momentum.Many of my age group could have bought it for the accompanying video as well as their hip thing getting to the top but Hayes’ does a decent job of it.6 it is
>If you want a comment on South Park, how “Chocolate Salty Balls” fits into it, its cultural significance – well, the box is open, and I know a lot of the writers here are fans.
As an on-and-off viewer I’d say there isn’t much context needed – the joke in the song is the same as the joke in the series, minus the in-front-of-the-children inappropriateness, but that’s a positive if anything. It’s an Isaac Hayes comedy record, with Isaac Hayes voice and Isaac Hayes backing band, and that’s basically enough to get it a 7.
As an odd tangent – when I first watched The Wire I noticed that the song on the opening credits sounded very much like the intro to ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’, so I made this and put it up on Youtube. It is easily the most ‘disliked’ thing I’ve ever uploaded.
The radio version actually featured an extra verse which went among the lines of:
“Be sure to check the oven… at least after 10 minutes
See when they, RIIIIISE – put your finger in the middle and see if they’re ready(!)
Now when the balls are bakin’, maybe we can go off alone
And get down to some business
Yeah, baby… BABY til your husband comes home…”
You can actually find those on the compilation album “New Hits ’99”, although it is really hard to get a hold of the radio version commercially.
Love Isaac Hayes, but don’t find this funny in the slightest. A very generous 3/10 from me.
I was slightly resentful of South Park at the time because it was on at 11pm on a Friday night and pretty much everyone in my class other than me was allowed to stay up and watch it, so I felt left out. But this song won me round a fair bit – it’s catchy and amusing and works well enough as an actual song too. 7/10.
Many people above have already noted that there were better tracks in South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut – aside from Uncle Fucker and Blame Canada, I have a lot of time for Cartman’s rendition of Kyle’s Mum Is A Bitch.