The Consistency Of Their Genius
In praise of two extraordinary duos: South Park and Pet Shop Boys
There was a verdict in a trial in New York City yesterday — the latest twist in the slow but quickening death of our liberal democracy. I’ve been poring through the reactions this morning, and I could predict every single one. But rather than add one more grim reflection (yes, we’re fucked), I thought I’d take a moment this summer to appreciate what isn’t yet fucked. In fact, I want to celebrate what still rocks my world: the staggeringly consistent, supremely intelligent, and self-assured genius of two unique duos still powering forward in two different worlds: South Park and Pet Shop Boys.
That those brand names are more recognizable than their creators — Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe — tells you something of what they have in common: a commitment to their own unique creativity, rather than their fame, and the discipline and grit to explore it for decades. Anti-celebrities, in their time but never of it, perfectionist but unafraid of failure, these two duos are proof, it seems to me, that a democratic culture, even one as decadent as ours, can still spawn excellence and intelligence, spanning high and low, and generating what I can only call joy.
South Park is going into its 27th season. And it has rarely been better. (I simply can’t believe so many people I meet say they haven’t watched in years. You’ve been missing out!) The new special on obesity — a deft masterclass of social commentary — has a brutal takedown of suburban white women jonesing for doses of Ozempic like meth-heads; a definitive — and musical! — digression into the insanity of the American healthcare system; pure, character-driven humor in a figure like Randy Marsh — a far subtler parody of the average American male than Homer Simpson; and, of course, Eric Cartman — the “big-boned” fat-ass kid whose capacity for pure evil was first truly captured in the epic “Scott Tenorman Must Die.”
You can read books on Ozempic, scan op-eds, absorb TikToks, and even listen to the Dishcast! — but nothing out there captures every single possible social and medical and psychological wrinkle of this new drug than this hour of crude cartoons. Yes, there are fart jokes. There are always fart jokes. But fart jokes amid a sophisticated and deeply informed parody of insurance companies? Or, in other episodes, toilet humor guiding us through the cowardice of Disney, the dopey vanity of Kanye, the wokification of Hollywood, the exploitation of black college athletes, the evil of cable companies, the hollowness of hate-crime laws, the creepiness of Christian rock, or the money-making behind legal weed? Only South Park pulls this off. Only South Park gets away with all of it.
It’s a 1990s high-low formula at root, sophisticated cultural and political knowingness married to crude cartoons, silly accents, m’kay, and a talking Christmas turd, Mr Hankey. Generationally, it really marked a moment when merging these two worlds seemed the most creative option — not an abandonment of seriousness, but the attachment of a humane levity to it. South Park can be brutal, but it is never cruel. Unless you’re Barbra Streisand or Bono. And virtually every character (even Eric) is redeemable. Except Meghan Markle.
Yes, Matt and Trey have tried other things. To wit: just one of the best and most successful musicals of the 21st century, The Book of Mormon. They’ve pioneered deep-fakes. They also just renovated and relaunched a huge Denver restaurant they loved as kids, Casa Bonita, memorialized in a classic Cartman-is-evil episode. Twenty years ago, they actually created an entirely puppet-acted movie with epic sex and vomit scenes as a commentary on the war on terror, Team America; and are now teaming up with Kendrick Lamar to shoot a live-action comedy about a biracial couple where the black boyfriend interns as a slave re-enactor only to discover that his ancestors were owned by his girlfriend’s. No landmines there.
But they always return to South Park and evince no desire to transcend it — partly because it has become an entire world that can expand and contract at will: a world where Mel Gibson tweaks his nipples and smears his feces, Mickey Mouse acts like a mafia don, Michael Jackson’s nose falls off, Meghan Markle is a literal empty vessel, Christopher Reeve eats fetuses for their stem-cells, and Tom Cruise works in a fudge factory where, yes, he does a lot of the packing.
And in two decades of an acutely polarized and politicized culture, what team is South Park on? Precisely. You can’t tell, can you? — which is a staggering achievement in its own right. And it’s not about risk-aversion: the duo was targeted by Islamist terror and didn’t blink. They also took on the censors at the MPAA — savor this memo — and obliterated one of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV” by saying “shit” 162 times in one episode.
They’ve shown Martha Stewart putting a whole turkey up her back-hole, Paris Hilton putting a whole pineapple up her front-hole, Caitlyn Jenner running over innocent pedestrians, and Jesse Jackson demanding that his big black ass be ceremoniously kissed. They’ve tackled Scientology and Mormonism; they’ve shown intergalactic Catholic priests astonished at the idea they have to stop raping young boys; and they beat Dave Chappelle by two decades with “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” — their take on sex reassignment.
They have done all this, taken no prisoners, and remain uncancellable. Why? Because their mockery is genuinely universal (including themselves), their courage is real, and because they remain humane.
By humane, I mean they show how you can skewer and yet still love. As a young gay man, I often winced at the careful, all-too-sensitive depictions of gay men in most movies and television, the elaborate ways in which the subculture was homogenized and prettified for straight audiences. But in South Park, I could see the gay reality as I had already witnessed it in all its bewildering variety: the right-wing, elementary school teacher Mr Garrison … dating Mr Slave — a leather-daddy with a gerbil called Lemmiwinks living in his upper colon; I could see Big Gay Al get expelled from the Boy Scouts — and defend their right to do so; I could see Butters’ dad on the DL at the White Swallow bathhouse; in time, I could see Satan having a gay love affair with Saddam Hussein, because his other boyfriend was so lame. They even made AIDS funny. The offense worked because it always conveyed an actual truth about gay men, while also obviously mocking us with love. (Mr Slave was portrayed as a moral paragon next to Paris Hilton, for example, and Mr Garrison eventually ends up with Rick, a total normie.) South Park’s role in helping America grow up on the topic of homosexuality, especially the young male demographic who followed them, is deeply under-rated.
Matt and Trey are also huge sell-outs who haven’t actually sold out: incredibly shrewd from the get-go in controlling and owning their creation, they have massively monetized it since without ever compromising an iota. Paramount paid them $900 million for their latest contract. And they’ve done all this without ever parroting the piety of some mega-stars and by doggedly retaining their personal privacy.
And it’s that combination that also defines the Pet Shop Boys: massive pop-stars everywhere except America, whose private lives remain hermetically sealed, and whose dedication to their own invented, creative universe is total. You may well know the PSBs from their epic first single, “West End Girls,” and a few pop bangers since — “It’s a Sin,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” — from their first two albums. What you may well not know is that they just released their 15th album, Nonetheless, and have been churning out global hits for the last four decades.
As with Matt and Trey, the work ethic, consistent quality and marathon discipline sets them apart. Like South Park, the core idea of the PSBs was present from the very start — and is still completely recognizable today, even as it has evolved and grown. And like South Park, there is no real off-era, no period when they lost their way, or split up, or faded.
What is that “core idea”? A lyric in their greatest single song, “Left to My Own Devices” puts it in Neil’s own words: “Che Guevara and Debussy / to a disco beat.” The marriage of high-energy synth-pop disco music with sophisticated, often sad, reflections on life, love, geopolitics, media, history and literature was the unique formula. The high was expressed through the low; and there was thereby a permanent inner tension in the music: you can only feel euphoria absorbing Lowe’s ambient, synthesized ascending chords and beats; and then feel the edge of tragedy as Tennant’s lyrics slowly penetrate.
It was why their music became so enmeshed with the gay rights breakthrough of the 1980s and 1990s — a period of unprecedented cultural energy and political liberation, framed by terrifying, young, mass death, as AIDS wiped out the generation that Neil and Chris belonged to. That was the happy/sad era, and theirs was the quintessential happy/sad sound. You can chart the entire epidemic through their songs — from the shock of “It Couldn’t Happen Here” to the agony of “Your Funny Uncle” through “Being Boring,” “Dreaming of the Queen” and “The Survivors.” Through all this, nonetheless, the PSBs were never a gay band. Most of the lyrics encompass straight and gay love and loss; the most common pronoun is “you.”
It helps that Tennant made an early choice to sing all the songs he wrote in a restrained, affect-less voice-instrument, cutting against the pathos of some of the lyrics. The songs, moreover, are rarely about their own lives, as so much pop now is, but about the world at large: the mistress actually grateful for her married lover, the politician grappling with late-career irrelevance, the dictator who secretly wants to resign, neoliberalism writ large as shopping, Putin singing a love song to Stalin.
In all this high-energy pop, you find allusions to a Gerhard Richter painting and a Rossetti frieze, F Scott Fitzgerald and Rebecca West, Oscar Wilde’s peregrinations and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s courage, the death of Princess Diana, the Bush-Blair love-in, and the delusions of grandeur of Bono and Sting. (Bono’s awfulness is the planet around which both South Park and Pet Shop Boys revolve). They wrote an entire techno-orchestral score for Eisenstein’s Soviet cinematic masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, and projected the silent film with a live orchestra in Trafalgar Square. They play to packed stadiums from Brazil to Japan, but also at the Royal Opera House, where they have an occasional residency.
For pop-stars, they are getting on a bit — Chris is now in his mid 60s and Neil is approaching 70, and they revel in their longevity and relative obscurity. Among their funnier songs — and several are hilarious — there’s a lyric from a cab driver who once drove them in London: “You’ve been around / But you don’t look too rough / And I still quite like / Some of your early stuff.” Oof. Years earlier they had a song about bitchy comments after a show: “Darling, you were fabulous / You really were quite good / I enjoyed it though of course / No one understood / A word of what was going on / They didn’t have a clue / They didn’t understand / Your sense of humor like I do.” Or a later song on aging as a gay man: “Look at me, the absentee / Disappearing finally / Goodbye. Is it magic or the truth? / Strange psychology? / Or justified by the end of youth?” There’s always a catch in Tennant’s lyrics, and often a catch in the throat.
Chris has kept the same pose on stage and in every photo-shoot from the beginning: behind Neil, in sunglasses, and some kind of hat or cap, and with an utterly expressionless face. He plays the keyboard as if he were absent-mindedly stroking a cat. A music critic once noted that Chris was “possibly more famous for not doing anything than almost anyone else in the history of popular entertainment.” An early video director put it better: “We realised there was something about somebody singing and somebody else doing nothing — just looking, then looking away — that adds a hideous tension.” Except, of course, Lowe is a master of melodic euphoria.
And in exactly the same way as Matt and Trey, you never, ever feel that what Chris and Neil are doing isn’t completely their own project, following their own internal rules, and never caving to outside pressure. The longer I’ve lived, the more I have come to appreciate this: the nerve to stick to what you do regardless of the wider culture, and the simple hard work of doing it, regularly, often, and always tweaking it to remain interesting — if only to themselves.
Genius just happens. Consistency and integrity are always work. Perhaps it’s the unique mixture of two individuals that sustains a body of work better than single artists or larger groups over so much time — but those relationships are also work. They require a sublimation of the self to the greater project, and that doesn’t always come easy for the truly brilliant. The work is the creation of worlds in which, for decades now, I’ve been able to lose myself in. And find myself as well.
I owe these men, as so many do. They have kept me sane and amused and energized and reflective in ways they will never know. They have given my life more meaning and more pleasure — almost every day. They have their prizes, and their fortunes, and they deserve them all. But every now and again, I feel the compulsion just to send them my thanks. And undying respect.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a pod debate with Noah Smith on China and immigration; a ton of dissent and assent over Bill Maher’s appearance; reader dissent over my piece on the Morehouse speech; a handful of notable quotes from the week in news; 20 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a serene window from Scotland; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a particularly tough new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience! And for this week’s MHB, see the whole column above.)
A subscriber writes:
I loved your episodes with Bill Maher and Oren Cass. I feel like the Dishcast is helping to create a healthy vital center at a time of fever-pitch polarization.
Between those conversations, and going back to the episodes with John Judis & Ruy Teixeira and David Leonhardt, I am hoping one of the two parties can become a vital center for Eisenhower Republicans/JFK Democrats for those who support a New Deal version of democratic capitalism; are somewhat more conservative on issues like patriotism and immigration; are tough on crime (including guns), support “safe, legal, and rare” abortion; and oppose the attempts of both the woke left and the MAGA right to make a religion out of politics.
We need to keep helping these conversations to turn down the temperature and grow “The New Center” of American politics.
New On The Dishcast: Noah Smith
Noah is a journalist who covers economics and geopolitics. A former assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University and an old-school blogger, he became an opinion columnist at Bloomberg in 2014. He left after seven years to focus on his own substack, Noahpinion, which you should definitely check out.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on why we should fear a military strike from China, and the good news about tech and the economy we don’t pay enough attention to. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s hit episode with Bill Maher, as well as recent ones with Richard Dawkins and Eli Lake. There’s also reader commentary on “non-binary” autistic kids, the culture clash of migrants, and more.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, Tim Shipman on the UK elections, Erick Erickson on the left’s spiritual crisis, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty, and the great Van Jones! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. A listener writes:
I just absorbed your conversation with Johann Hari on Ozempic, and it’s probably one of the best you’ve sent me. I’ve watched this new class of drugs with interest and amazement. They have definitely revolutionized things. It also helps me understand why people allow themselves to get so fat. The role of processed foods in overriding the normal human satiety mechanism is eye-opening. They took over our Western world during the exact same period that the obesity epidemic exploded, starting in the 1970s.
During my career as a health advisor, the role of obesity in driving terrible health consequences was the most difficult problem I dealt with — and probably the most common problem. I’d marvel that people seemed powerless to take control of their own bodies. The consequences are well laid out in your podcast, and are devastating. This certainly helps me understand why that might be, and to be more sympathetic to the plight of heavy people. Getting them to do what was obviously the right thing was so difficult and unsuccessful.
From a new subscriber:
Of all the many podcasts I listen to, yours is the one which elicits the most emphatic ‘FUCK’ when the conversation continues behind the paywall but I can’t hear it. I’ve finally concluded that £40 is a small price to pay to hear the entire conversations for a year. THANK YOU for what I consider properly excellent work.
Dissents Of The Week
A reader responds to my latest column, “The Psychology of Being in a Minority”:
Every time I read your criticism of the left, I am perplexed as to why you would support Biden for re-election instead of Trump. While I find Trump to be personally repugnant and morally bankrupt, he is the lesser of two evils.
Trump, as president, will do whatever he can to stop the transgender madness for minors. He will also take steps to stem the flood of illegal aliens coming across our southern border. While Trump has previously said some terrible things about minorities, could there be anything more despicable and divisive than Biden’s speech at Morehouse? Trump seems to feel the pain of the average voter at the gas pump and in the grocery store, and at least says he will do something about it all.
As far as the 90 felony counts, the only case that has merit is the documents case in Florida. Even in that case, however, there is selective prosecution: Clinton, Pence, and Biden each should have been charged.
So, why not hold your nose and vote for Trump like I and many others will do?
Because he is an unhinged, malignant, sociopathic criminal who is a one-man solvent for any kind of liberal democracy.
A few more dissents here, along with my response, and many more here — on Israel, religion, free speech and more. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers topics such as Trump’s conviction, the looming landslide against the Tories, and Mexican democracy under threat. Below are a few examples:
What’s the most powerful syllable in the world?
Freya India sighs, “Your boyfriend isn’t your camera man.”
If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From the sleuth who calls himself “the wine geek in San Francisco”:
Undoubtedly true for you and many other people, my life is driven by deadlines. A lot of deadlines are a curse. I wake up in the middle of the night before a deadline sweating and fretting and swearing and turning off my alarm and thinking this sucks … and then I push all that aside to get the work done … only to do it again a few days later. What have I learned from this? Deadlines can kill you.
Sometimes, however, as crazy as it may seem, a deadline is a pleasure. Like the one for this contest. When I realize the deadline to respond to the VFYW is upon me, I actually relish it. I can cast aside everything else that may be pressing on me and spend a few hours (as the case may be) roaming around the internet/world trying to find the one location in all of Earthdom where a certain photo was taken. It typically generates frustration, surprise, anger, joy, elation, confusion, satisfaction, knowledge, and a whole lot of other feelings all in a relatively short period of time. As it has once again. And it feels great.
So that’s my intro. For this week’s location, I had no clue where to start, which usually leads me to conclude that I have no hope to solve the window and give up. But, I persisted.
And he nailed the right location this week. From a sleuth who’s won the contest already:
I’ve always enjoyed the View from Your Window, long before it became a game for sleuths to demonstrate their detective abilities. But now I love it even more, since it’s become something I can enjoy from a distance with my son who is away in college. It’s exciting to find new common interests with your kids after they have moved out. Right now, the whole family is on a vacation together, so my son and I could work alongside each other on this one — an experience that brings me great joy.
See you next Friday.