Isaac Hayes: the soul sensation who turned his back on ‘South Park’ for one very specific reason
It is often said that every actor wants to be a musician and every musician yearns to appear on the silver screen, and to those people, Isaac Hayes’ extensive career must be the cause of some envy. Not only did the songwriter define the golden age of Stax soul, but he also appeared as an actor in everything from Escape from New York to South Park.
Hayes’ casting in South Park is notable for multiple reasons. For starters, the long-running animated show is famed for its unwavering and non-discriminatory criticism and parody of virtually every celebrity under the sun, and even the few who have remained on the show’s good side – Robert Smith being one example – only tend to appear as fleeting cameos. Isaac Hayes, on the other hand, began playing the character of Chef from the very first season of the show and stayed put for multiple years.
That fact is all the more surprising when you look back at the history of the soul sensation. It is near-impossible to overstate the importance of Hayes in the history of the style, bringing Stax back from the ashes following the tragic loss of Otis Redding and carrying that torch through the era of Black Power funk, the Civil Rights Movement, and doing so all while creating a litany of utterly groundbreaking soul stormers. Then, all of a sudden, he was presented as the chef of a school canteen in a predominantly white, animated Colorado town.
Seemingly, though, that juxtaposition was all part of the fun for the veteran songwriter, with South Park co-creator Matt Stone telling Pitchfork, “He was game right off the bat. Look, Isaac had been through the real shit – racial stuff [in] the 1960s, the Black Power movement, Stax Records. That character just doesn’t fit in a white Colorado town, and we were having fun with that.”
Despite the show’s often controversial nature, Hayes never seemed deterred from appearing in the show. After all, it did enough to revive his image, even earning him his only UK number-one with ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’. Then, after one legendary episode, the story turned sour. “He was never offended by anything we ever did in the slightest,” Stone recalled, “Until we did the thing about Scientology.”
In the iconic ‘Trapped In A Closet’ episode, which first aired in November 2005, the show satirises Scientology, with Stan joining the religion and crossing paths with noted Scientologists like Tom Cruise. Hayes, who was himself a Scientologist at the time, did not appear in the episode and, following its broadcast, he spoke to Trey Parker and Matt Stone about the episode, unhappy with its presentation of the belief system.
“He came over and asked us to take it off the air,” Stone remembered. “We had this very direct but not uncivil conversation about it. We always got along fine.” However, shortly after that episode aired, a statement was published, purporting to be from Hayes, criticising the show and its handling of religion, without explicitly mentioning Scientology, and announcing the musician’s departure from the show.
For a number of years, the situation was presented as Hayes having left the show over its satire of Scientology, but the case wasn’t quite as clear-cut as that. After all, Hayes had suffered a stroke around the same time as the episode aired and was largely unable to communicate for himself. Years later, after the songwriter’s ultimate death in 2008, his son claimed that the statement was actually made by Hayes’ team, all of whom were ardent Scientologists.
Whether or not Isaac Hayes left South Park in anger over their dealing with Scientology, or was forced to do so by his team, Chef remains a beloved part of the show’s history, and Hayes’ musical repertoire remains largely unmatched. Perhaps, if he had fully recovered from his stroke in time, the legendary performer might have returned to our screens in animated form before his untimely passing.
