How Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ Got a Second Wind From Memes

Long earlier than it turned a soundtrack nugget and an web meme, it was only a rock band’s try and land a radio hit.

But the lengthy path to evergreen standing for “All Star,” the 1999 observe by the California different band Smash Mouth, whose founding lead singer, Steve Harwell, died on Monday at age 56, is an illustration of how social media and fan-made content material have remodeled the music business.

The track took form whereas the group was engaged on its second album, “Astro Lounge,” after its first style of success with the track “Walkin’ on the Sun” (1997). The group submitted a batch of songs to its file firm and was advised: “You’re not done. We don’t hear a single, so keep working,” Robert Hayes, the band’s supervisor, advised Rolling Stone in 2019.

Greg Camp, Smash Mouth’s guitarist and first songwriter, mentioned the track’s lovable-loser theme (“I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”) emerged from fan mail. “About 85 to 90 percent of the mail was from these kids who were being bullied” for being Smash Mouth followers, he advised the web site Songfacts. “So we were like, ‘We should write a song for fans.’”

“All Star” was rapidly positioned on movie soundtracks, together with “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” in 1999. (The authentic music video had clips from “Mystery Men,” a superhero sendup starring Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo, amongst others.)

But the track’s immortality started with its placement in “Shrek,” the 2001 animated favourite starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, the place the track performs within the opening credit. The movie grossed a complete of $484 million all over the world, in response to the location Box Office Mojo.

A decade or so later, generational nostalgia kicked off one other stage of success for “All Star,” when the kids who grew up on “Shrek” started meme-ing on it relentlessly.

There was the model made up totally of samples of Bill O’Reilly saying his identify. And the one, from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” with lyrics stitched collectively from “Star Wars” clips.

Perhaps the preferred take was “Mario, You’re a Plumber,” a Mario Bros.-theme adaptation — with precise effort taken to put in writing new lyrics — that has garnered 1.6 million views on YouTube.

Those had been all iterations of what has turn out to be a key avenue for artists to seek out huge success in a fragmented media setting, with user-generated content material ricocheting by social media to propel a brand new track (see Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road”) or level youthful listeners to an outdated one (Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”).

In the case of “All Star,” this course of saved an outdated observe alive for years and led to gigs just like the band performing a snippet of the track on a Progressive insurance coverage advert in 2020. All of that exercise tends to drive listeners again to streaming providers, and “All Star” has garnered slightly below a billion streams on Spotify alone.

In an interview with the music website Stereogum in 2017, Harwell expressed the contrasting opinions artists generally have about such memes. On the one hand, it’s precious publicity, and that may result in cash of their pocket. On the opposite … it’s not all the time enjoyable to have one’s work flattened right into a joke.

“It’s entertaining, I get it,” Harwell mentioned. “It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it.”