Various Artists: Chef Aid: The South Park Album

Though there's a feature film and a coffee-table book coming out in early '99, the time is now for South Park cash-ins. The show is too uneven, and its core fan base too fickle, for Simpsons-style longevity, and everything creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have released to the mainstream public outside of South Park (the films BASEketball and Orgazmo, to be exact) has flopped miserably. But the star-packed, heavily cross-promoted, 77-minute Chef Aid CD arrives at just the right time, and it's hard to imagine most of the show's fans coming away disappointed. For starters, the album closes with a remixed catch-phrase reel, and is stuffed with crowd-pleasing songs by South Park characters including several tracks by Chef, of course, as well as Cartman's rendition of Styx's "Come Sail Away" and electronic-voice-boxed Ned's "Feel Like Makin' Love." But since Cartman's time in the spotlight is purely in audio form, distilled down to little more than Parker's silly voice, did "Come Sail Away" really need to run over five minutes And while the diversity of participants is impressive—Master P, Ozzy Osbourne, Ween, Meat Loaf, Devo, Elton John, Rancid, and Perry Farrell all make appearances—why are so many of the rappers' expletives excised There is, after all, a parental-advisory sticker on the cover, and a cute skit involving Parker and Stone doesn't receive the same treatment; blurring and chopping up the performances of the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard greatly reduces their impact. (Though, regardless of censorship, Master P's surreally mournful "Kenny's Dead" needs to be heard.) Chef Aid is a frustratingly uneven event album; Wyclef Jean's duet with the South Park kids, for example, recalls Alvin & The Chipmunks, missing only the backstage cry of, "Cart-MAN!" But when it hits, as on the dizzying "Nowhere To Run" (an all-star blowout with Osbourne, ODB, DMX, and The Crystal Method), it actually justifies the hype.