“Come Sail Away” – Eric Cartman
(Words/music: Dennis DeYoung, available on Chef Aid: The South Park Album, Columbia 1998)

Styx has an incredible amount of nerd appeal – between writing a futuristic song suite, being featured in almost every Adam Sandler movie, and their canonization by South Park, they’ve made fans out of a generation that wasn’t alive during their heyday.  I understand nerd appeal (and anyone who sees the number of Gizmodo posts I share in my Google Reader shared feed understands that too) but Styx never stuck with me.  Perhaps The Who covered my rock opera needs, I preferred Sandler’s goofier non-musical moments, and I always had a preference for South Park’s original songs.  Still, as a teenager when South Park first came on – old enough to remember when The Simpsons was taboo and still young enough to find Beavis and Butthead’s humor enchanting – I was instantly hooked.  Even now, a full decade later, I still enjoy South Park as a work of biting satire.  Even though they try their best to push the boundaries of taste, Trey Parker and Matt Stone tend to offer social commentary that relies on common sense rather than ideological beliefs.  I often find myself using situations from the show to explain certain ideas, and honestly I’m probably not as embarrassed of it as I should be.

Anyway, “Come Sail Away” works for two main reasons.  Primarily, it’s an exercise in absurdity.  Trey Parker, South Park’s musical mind, gets to sing in his most ridiculous character’s voice on a song that invites him to be even more ridiculous.  In the Cartman character, Parker gets to sing “Come Sail Away” as a self-absorbed egomaniac.  Cartman sounds a little too comfortable in the spotlight during the first half of the song as he exaggerates his annunciation and even speak-sings a couple lines.  Overall, the song pushes towards the limits of absurdity, especially when Cartman starts to squeal in frustration.  Thankfully, the second half of the song saves it from being entirely Cartman’s show, as Issac Hayes’ Chef character hijacks the song for a brief minute, turning the power ballad into a funky bounce that leaves Cartman bewildered.  If Parker plays to his absurdist strengths in his vocal performance, he’s also willing to take advantage of Hayes’ musical gift (an integral part of those early episodes).  Additionally, as with a lot of Parker and Stone’s parodies, an element of sincerity tempers the absurdity of the performance.  The song’s arrangement stays faithful to the original for most of the song aside from a couple deviations.  The bridge even borrows from “Mr. Roboto,” giving a silent nod to another Styx fan (and suggesting that Parker is either a fan or did his research).  It’s the appropriate vehicle for Cartman’s journey to the center of his ego, as it would take the right mix of fist-pumping rock and nerd charm to pull off a cartoon character’s signature single.  In that sense, Styx seems like the perfect choice.

More on South Park: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm