BASEketball

(Mojo)
by Scott Hefflon

Those South Park guys have hip taste, ya gotta give ’em that. If you don’t think they’re funny and cool, the problem is you, not them. This slippery soundtrack may be seen as gimmicky and exploitative, mixing obvious hotshots with dogs from the Mojo label that have no place here, and’ll probably increase sales of doomed, completely ignorable records, but that’s just knee-jerk elitism. And even if you thought the Zucker-directed movie not even close to classic Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker films like Airplane, Naked Gun, Top Secret, etc. (hey, I have a word limit), we’ve all seen worse.

Reel Big Fish cover A-Ha’s “Take on Me,” and pour an original, “Beer,” (the team’s called the Beers); Nerf Herder contribute the gem “Don’t Hate Me (Because I’m Beautiful),” which heavily hints of Blondie’s “Atomic” (you know, “Ah, oh your hair is beautiful/Ah, tonight/Atomic”), which is kinda ironic cuz the next track is “Tonight” by Deep Blue Something which is neither a Blondie cover nor a Cheap Trick cover (I can’t believe my copies of The Best of Blondie and Cheap Trick’s Greatest Hits have been stolen. I either have to stop having parties or frisk what passes for my friends before they leave.). Next up are Supersuckers, Plasticscene, and Soul Asylum. Then Cherry Poppin’ Daddies cover Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in Line,” a song corrupted by images of dancing beach chairs and umbrellas, yet it still makes you “Shake, shake, shake!” and “Rock your body in time.” Then Louchie Lou and Michie One kick in a dancehall track, “The Hollymoon is Over,” and The Ernies and Goldfinger stop in for a track apiece. Then the ultimate punk rock cover band, The Dickies, cover “Nobody But Me,” a great song most of us can never remember who wrote (The Isley Brothers, make popular by The Human Beingz, see Jon Sarre’s review elsewhere this issue), and Smashmouth close with WAR’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends.”
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