PicoBlog

Happy new year and thanks again for subscribing and/or reading.

I seem to think the subject of this week’s newsletter is a massive deal, but all the evidence points to the contrary.

What do you think? You had a copy, right? That Perry Farrell song is great, the Devo one even better, and despite everything that Rick James performance really shows why he sold a load of records.

I can’t be on my own on this, can I?

When you ask people about the first album they bought, a lot of the time they will qualify it by telling you about the first album they bought for themselves with their own money. For me that was ‘Performance and Cocktails’ by Stereophonics. What they’re not telling you, however, is what the first album they owned was.

For half a century, the album was the medium for music, and for a lot of people who grew up during that time there was a peculiar phenomenon - the compilation album. People my age will instinctively think of the ‘Now!’ series, which originally came out in the early 80s. By the end of the decade a load of competitors popped up representing different agreements between different record labels who clubbed together their repertoire to enjoy shared sales.

Eventually, because of how ubiquitous these titles were in the album charts, multi-artist compilations became exempt from the normal album charts and have since sat on their own in a separate chart.

The ‘Now!’ series still regularly out-sells contemporary number 1 albums in the UK charts. The latest in the discography came out in November 2022 - the 113th edition - and would have landed at number 3 behind Dermot Kennedy and Taylor Swift in the regular album charts based on the number sold in the first week.

Compilations used to have a huge impression on young people because of the variety of music on them as well as the fact that we’d hear them while we were at the start of our musical journeys. A CD compilation used to be an easy gift for a child of a certain age.

Compilations and soundtrack albums were huge, and the massive sales on them enabled labels to be creative instead of just licensing in well known hits. Think of the soundtrack to the 1993 movie ‘Judgement Night’ which saw 11 duets from unlikely artists like Slayer and Ice-T or Mudhoney and Sir Mix-a-Lot (yes, really).

Interestingly, Sir Mix-A-Lot and Slayer are probably better bedfellows. Their most recognisable (and arguably, iconic) works, ‘Baby Got Back’ and ‘Reign in Blood’ were both produced by the same person, Rick Rubin, and released on his Def American label.

It may be hard to believe now without having lived through it, but the turn of the millennium was such a crazy time for pop culture. South Park was one part of a wider tapestry of things being pushed to extremes with the likes of WWE pushing the boundaries of taste and Limp Bizkit blowing up boats.

The fledgling internet was connecting people across the world and turbocharging pop culture in a way that just doesn’t happen any more. The sheer mass of culture - films, music, TV shows etc - being discussed at the time eventually collapsed under its own weight and left us with the atomised cultural spaces that we now have where we can be more discerning in what we consume.

The other side to that is that we’ve ended up endlessly scrolling through streaming menus while our dinners get cold on our laps, where previously pop culture phenomena dominated while co-existing with the new ways of dissemination.

When a crudely animated cartoon about swearing kids came onto TV in the second half of 1997 it was all of a sudden everywhere. Discussions on TV about whether it was appropriate, discussions in schoolyards about whether or not you’d seen it, merchandise in shops and bootleg merchandise on market stalls. Oh God, the merchandise! Did anybody in the UK not own some sort of South Park plushie or keyring by the end of 1999?

In the seminal wrestling documentary ‘Beyond the Mat’, there’s a scene from this time where the now-disgraced Vince McMahon is being told that his company is #2 in sales behind South Park.

Into this environment of mass-produced merchandise came another licensing venture from South Park - ‘Chef Aid: The South Park Album’. Conceptually, it’s a live concert with an all-star cast that’s loosely based on an episode in their second season. Based on the first season’s success, record labels wanted to cash in so Trey Parker and Matt Stone wrote an episode to go along with the album.

The line-up is genuinely incredible, and with the exception of Rancid they’re all performing original songs recorded for this album.

Who better to bring together such diverse artists as DMX and Ozzy Osbourne than Rick Rubin? The man who was responsible for producing Slayer and Ice-T’s collaboration on the ‘Judgement Night’ soundtrack, for getting Johnny Cash to listen to Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden.

If you include Rubin’s numbers, the performers on ‘Chef Aid’ have accumulated a total of three Oscars, 44 Grammys and an insane 176 Grammy nominations.

The quarter of the tracks which were composed by Trey Parker showcase the songwriting talent which lead to an Oscar nomination, four Tony awards and his own Grammy.

It’s not surprising that this album would go platinum in the UK - CD sales were pretty much at their peak, this particular album was tied to a global phenomenon, and the tracklisting was original songs by some pretty big names. From a label’s perspective, it marketed itself.

Nearly half a million UK sales of ‘Chef Aid’ have been recorded by the Official Charts Company. For perspective, that’s roughly twice the sales recorded for the seemingly-as-ubiquitous Encanto soundtrack. Despite a UK number 1 single (‘Chocolate Salty Balls’, of course), the album has seemingly vanished without a trace in the public consciousness. 

No forum discussions exist online, no cult following. Nothing, besides the occasional tweet of “Hey, who remembers this album?”.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the album isn’t on streaming services, most likely the victim of the complicated licensing agreements needed between dozens of stakeholders for a one-off release in 1998 needing to be duplicated to get it online today.

Tie-in music releases weren’t uncommon in the 90s, Simon Cowell made his name releasing singles from TV shows. Could something like ‘Chef Aid’ happen again today? 

It definitely wouldn’t open with a track that includes homophobic slurs, it’s unlikely to have a song where Serj Tankian repeats the N-word in backing vocals, and I hope we won’t ever again see a compilation being used to rehabilitate a musician who had just spent three years in prison for two separate cases of kidnapping and sexual assault during a crack binge. Although given the music industry’s tendencies if there’s money to be made, I wouldn’t be so sure about the last one.

Whether it would be made today or not, does the album still sound good?

On reflection, no, not really. But for a young person at the start of his musical journey it was the first time I’d heard Ween, Primus, Devo and more. Maybe it wasn’t a landmark in its own right, but it was a junction in my life that set me on the path to more weird and brilliant music since then, and what else could you want from a CD that you got as a Christmas present?

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Here’s the full tracklisting:

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