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“Montage” – Trey Parker
(Words/music: Trey Parker, available on Team America: World Police OST, Atlantic 2004)

Team America: World Police took what South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone do on their TV show and made it bigger.  They created a work of biting, often brilliant satire and did their best to hide it behind an antiquated Saturday morning medium (in this case, marionettes) and a ton of crude humor.  It works for a few reasons – like all good satire, it works both at face value and reading deeper.  It also works because it doesn’t target one single group.  Parker and Stone value common sense above all (and seem to lean towards libertarianism, but I digress) and dig in against anyone regardless of affiliation, fame, or social standing.  It makes it hard to stay hurt when they mock your ideology and immediately move on to target someone else. 

Team America worked as well as it did (or as well as it did when I saw it five years ago) because it tossed out darts in every conceivable connection – regardless of your personal stance, the film was bound to hit on something to laugh at sooner or later.  Much of the focus was on the film’s characters and Parker and Stone’s lampooning of extreme American patriotism (and also the equally zealous America left), but Team America also works as a parody of action movies in general.  Like the best satirists, Parker and Stone lampoon action movies by playing by the genre’s rules.  This is where the music, Parker’s specialty, comes into play – the songs in the movie hit on all the familiar themes – the jingoistic country ballad, the over-the-top theme song (and subsequent “bummer” remix), and a heartbreakingly hilarious ballad Kim Jong-Il sings about being lonely.  “Montage” is the most self-conscious song in a movie that tries its best to hide all of the winks and nods behind loud explosions.  Appropriately enough, it’s the perfect montage song (so perfect that Parker recycled it from the skiing episode of South Park) – if you block out the montage-by-numbers instructions Parker sings about, it sounds exactly like a 1980s action movie montage, complete with pulsing synthesizer, a chorus of backup singers, and Parker’s vocal tics for emphasis.  Personally, the “fade out” bit at the end captures the song’s spirit perfectly – it flawlessly executes the cliché as it describes why every montage ends with a fade out.  By doing so, Parker makes us simultaneously laugh at the joke and marvel at what might be the perfect montage song.

More on Trey Parker: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm