Smash Mouth has long been, as its guitarist, Greg Camp, once said, “a band that you can make fun of.” The pop-rock group’s signature hit, 1999’s “All Star,” combines the sounds of DJ scratches, glockenspiel, and a white dude rapping that he “ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.” Fashionwise, the band tended to dress for a funky night at the bowling alley. And over nearly three decades, Smash Mouth has remained famous partly because of the flatulent cartoon ogre Shrek.
But the affection Smash Mouth commands is serious—the result of music so simultaneously pleasing and odd that it could rewire a young listener’s brain. In fact, the sad news of the death of original front man Steve Harwell at age 56 has me wondering if the band’s 1999 album, Astro Lounge, is the reason I’m a music critic. Most people can point to songs that hit them in early adolescence, when their ears were impressionable but their interest in other people’s judgment was still, blessedly, undeveloped. Smash Mouth’s second album, the one with “All Star,” came out when I was 11. Every goofy organ melody is still engraved in my mind, and today, the album holds up as an ingeniously crafted pleasure capsule.
Smash Mouth formed in California in the mid-1990s, and its music coalesced motley phenomena of the era: ska, hip-hop, surf culture, 1950s nostalgia, aliens. Harwell, the son of a UPS truck driver, had first pursued a career as a rapper. But when watching a performance by MC Hammer—a hitmaker whom many people considered to be a punch line—something inside him told him to move toward rock. He joined up with Camp, the drummer Kevin Coleman, and the bassist Paul De Lisle, and picked a band name from a football term for making an all-out charge to victory.
Smash Mouth’s creative dynamic was shaped by the dichotomy between Harwell and Camp, the band’s primary songwriter. Harwell wielded an abrasive charisma: His voice contained gravel and rasp, but also the sassiness of a schoolyard troublemaker. Camp was a pop-and-punk historian, gifted at fusing the classic and the modern. Smash Mouth’s breakout 1997 hit, “Walkin’ on the Sun,” from its debut album, Fush Yu Mang, revived garage-rock noisiness and mod cool while Harwell asked, in a spoke-sung patter, where the peace-and-love ideals of the 1960s had gone. This misfit track worked nicely on pop-rock radio next to Third Eye Blind, Barenaked Ladies, and Chumbawamba: It was a golden age for catchy, wordy songs whose bright exterior belied angst and social commentary.
For the follow-up LP, Astro Lounge, Interscope Records wanted surefire hits, and Smash Mouth obliged with anthemic songwriting and crisp, punchy production. But polish didn’t dilute the band’s point of view—it sharpened it. The arrangements were eclectic: chunky riffs, sci-fi sound effects, flamenco guitars, tight yet woozy reggae rhythms (as well as some unfortunate Jamaican-accent work). Camp’s wry lyrics and Harwell’s ornery voice conjured the persona of lovably sleazy slacker poet. “I’m getting stoned, and what’s wrong with that?” one song asked. “The president seems to be just fine.”
[Read: Why did we all have the same childhood?]
As a kid, I was drawn to the candied sound of Astro Lounge, but I also distinctly remember feeling a sense of mystery about it: I listened and relistened to decode what the heck was going on. The explosive opener, “Who’s There,” had a herky-jerky drum pattern (I now know it’s called the “Be My Baby” rhythm, derived from the Ronettes song) and a spooky synth (I would now identify that as a theremin). The album’s lyrics about dangerous chicks and relaxation almost made sense, but they were littered with words I didn’t understand (“tragedian,” from “Then the Morning Comes”). Today, I still want this combination from music: accessibility with weirdness, inviting obsession and love.
“All Star” epitomized that combo. It was both dumb and complex, cycling through disparate cadences and instrumental tones while maintaining puppylike bounce and extroversion. The lyrics were unwieldy—what does it mean to be “fed to the rules”?—but the message was clear. Here was a song about believing in yourself, but also believing in global warming, which means you should try to maximize pleasure while you can, including by unapologetically enjoying “All Star.”
This was a saleable message: The song, an immediate success, was in the soundtrack to two Hollywood films, Inspector Gadget and the superhero satire Mystery Men. A few years later, DreamWorks Animation wanted to reuse it in the opening scene of its slapstick fantasy movie Shrek. The band said no, but the studio hounded it for approval: No other song the filmmakers tried to use worked as well with test audiences. “It’s just irresistible to kids,” the track’s producer, Eric Valentine, told Rolling Stone in an oral history about the song. “They freak out for it.”
More recently, “All Star” has become an all-purpose meme. The song has been rendered in the voices of Bill O’Reilly and various Star Wars characters. The YouTube user Jon Sudano became a sensation by singing the words to “All Star” over other songs—the Village People’s “YMCA,” John Lennon’s “Imagine”—to bizarre yet listenable effect. The punch line of “All Star” memes is mostly about how deeply this song has imprinted on all of us, like some chaotic Lord’s Prayer. “Steve just walks out on stage and says the word ‘Some,’ and the crowd will finish the song for you,” Camp told Rolling Stone. “My hair still stands up when that happens.”
After Astro Lounge, the band landed a smattering of hits in the form of cover songs, while Harwell struggled with personal tragedy (the death of his son, in 2001) as well as alcoholism. He was mostly proud of his music’s resurgence in the internet era—though he did sometimes feel disrespected by the joking about “All Star.” But when people covered the song in earnest, treating it as music in addition to comedy, it felt like “a really cool thank you,” he told Rolling Stone. He understood, it seemed, the gratitude listeners can have for that which breaks the mold.
