Les Claypool records a new theme song for the renamed South Park

Les Claypool has gone back to the shortest and most lucrative piece of music he ever wrote. The bassist has recorded a new theme song for the cartoon that began as South Park in 1997 and is now airing under the name South America, currently in its 29th season.

The original was 30 seconds long and recorded by Primus. It has run in front of every episode of one of the longest-lived shows on American television, which makes it one of the most heard pieces of music in the band's catalogue by an enormous margin, whatever anybody thinks of it.

Stereogum's coverage is mostly a shrug at how much money that half-minute must have generated across nearly three decades of residuals. The point underneath the joke is real enough: a theme song that runs for 29 seasons is a different kind of asset from an album, and very few musicians ever own one.

What the new version sounds like, and when it airs, was not reported. Stereogum did not say whether the rest of Primus play on the recording or whether Claypool cut it alone, and the show's producers have not published a date for its first use.

The rename itself is the odd part. A series that has spent nearly thirty years under one title changing to South America is a production decision the show has not explained, and re-recording the theme rather than simply re-editing the old one suggests the change is meant to stick.

Claypool has kept a long sideline in music written for screen and stage alongside Primus, and this is a return to the first piece of that work rather than a new commission. Our rock coverage of soundtrack work this year includes a Metallica song on Gears of War: E-Day and Ice Nine Kills scoring the Terror Tram at Halloween Horror Nights. Anything that gets a release date will appear on the release calendar.