Was Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ the ultimate millennium wraparound hit?

Smash Mouth became more kid-friendly while going all-out to inoculate itself against the one-hit wonder label.

Before too long, the Bay Area band was a regular in the music-video portions of the TEENick programming block. Before blossoming into a standalone offshoot of Nickelodeon spelled TeenNick, the block started occupying Sunday evenings in 2001. Touting its appeal, an up-and-coming host named Nick Cannon would say, “Technically, Sunday night is still the weekend, right?”

Yes, it is. Likewise, 1999 was still the ’90s, and still the 20th century. For that matter, the latter was also true of the year 2000.

This despite the overeager, saccharine speculation of great change in Y2K that began no later than New Year’s 1998-99. For its part, the self-proclaimed “first kids network” was letting young voices envision the transformative future through its Nickellenium campaign.

But in mid-spring, 20 years ago Saturday, Smash Mouth released a single that would uniquely bridge 1999, 2000, 2001 and arguably beyond. To that point, in December 2017, GQ’s Joya Saxena penned a piece titled “The Internet’s Endless Obsession with Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star.’”

“All Star” wasted negligible time annihilating its band’s concerns over premature obscurity. Through its second album, Astro Lounge, released in full in June 1999, Smash Mouth proved much more than “Walkin’ on the Sun.”

With some newer songs, it became more mainstream, in no small part, due to its newfound appropriateness for younger demographics. That alteration could not have been timelier.

With “All Star,” in particular, you can say the group “hit the ground running” amidst a period of ample anticipation. The single opened itself to inspiring interpretation in copious contexts while addressing outlooks on the future.

For this author, the song was the gateway to any knowledge of or interest in the band. Concomitant with the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which culminated in a dramatic Team USA victory in Smash Mouth’s home state, “All Star” found natural hospitality in a Gatorade commercial.

 

The company’s trademark marketing tactic of modern-looking black-and-white montages accentuating its beverage’s color highlighted young female soccer players. To embolden the empowerment behind the onscreen grit and oomph, the soundtrack went something like this:

Well…so much to do, so much to see, so what’s wrong with taking the backstreets

You’ll never know if you don’t go, you’ll never shine if you don’t glow

Hey now, you’re an all-star, get your game on, go play

Hey now, you’re a rockstar, get the show on, get paid

(And all that glitters is gold)

Only shooting stars break the mo-old!

The montage closed with a superimposed tagline tag team of “Yes we can” and the unmistakable “Is it in you?”

To any unabashed sports-music junkie, this was perfect. The hook/chorus sounded perfectly suited for filling brief breaks in the action at a given game. Its tempo alone was pulsating enough, and that is generally all that matters for canned arena music.

But the emphasis on the title was the syrup on the sundae, and it worked in athletic and non-athletic arenas. Just as sports are said to teach life lessons, songs appropriated by athletic cultures can transcend competitive fields. All they need are a listener in need of bright motivation, and the band itself has blessed this interpretation.

Smash Mouth’s members, particularly head songwriter Greg Camp, have long admitted they did not intend “All Star” as a sports anthem. But when it inevitably caught on as one, they embraced the byproduct.

In July 1999, they played it live at the Home Run Derby on the eve of the MLB All-Star Game. The next winter, they clearly did not mind ABC using it to promote its coverage of the NHL’s midseason constellation. For the league, the network and the time, that was basically an obligatory tactic.

Through that game’s January build-up to and first-weekend-of-February arrival, the times still felt like the ’90s. Meanwhile, the third installment of Now That’s What I Call Music!, for which “All Star” batted lead-off, was still being hawked on TV following its December 1999 release. (Last October, in a retrospective ranking, The Ringer declared “All Star” that compilation’s “most essential song.”)

On the other side of the official millennium switch, the single kept striking media gold. Tellingly, the timing of its noteworthy 2001 silver-screen spots underscore Saxena’s point about “the ultimate in pre-9/11 fluff pop.”

 

“All Star” opened Shrek, which had its wide release on May 18, 2001. It then closed out Rat Race, which opened in mid-August that year.

By that point, the world was implicitly ready to join Smash Mouth in immersing itself in a new era. The group’s third album, whose production was marred by the tragic July passing of lead singer Steve Harwell’s infant son, was to cap off with their cover of “I’m a Believer,” which gave the band its bookend in Shrek.

From there, mainstream recognition was all but restricted to more overlaps with Mike Myers movies. During the 2000s, Smash Mouth songs saw action in such middling performers as Austin Powers in Goldmember and critical flops as The Cat in the Hat.

“I’m a Believer” and a smattering of original tunes from the third and fourth album (2003’s Get the Picture) kept the band in TEENick’s rotation for a time. But after 2001’s Volume 8, it did not make the cut for any more installments of Now. That is except for 2007’s Now That’s What I Call Shrek, which began with, what else?

Two years before that, while churning out new material in comparative oblivion, the group made “All Star” the leadoff and partial title track to All Star Smash Hits. That was the only breach of chronology in Smash Mouth’s best-of collection from its first four albums and contributions to film soundtracks.

But Shrek has not singlehandedly kept Camp’s magnum opus glowing online. As recently as March 2019, “All Star” and its meaning have been a subject of academic dissection. Within the past year, it has formed the basis for a stage musical and a hotline that perpetually plays the song when you dial it up.

Based on that, to millennials nostalgic for the turn of the millennium, “All Star” might be what “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is to Marshall Eriksen. It could be their answer to the 2000 Homer Simpson’s “Takin’ Care of Business.” Can’t you picture someone demanding, “No new crap! ‘All Star!’ Now!” and “Get to the ‘shooting stars break the mold’ part!”?

When you make like Ethan Dixon or Thom Dunn by analyzing the lyrics (both from the rough and final draft) and the song’s initial cultural impact, you can understand why. Back in 1999, you could not escape the ad nauseam future and new-millennium talk if you tried. (Oops, wrong Smash Mouth song.)

When 2000 hit and people finally admitted there was another year in the century, discussion leaders pushed the reset button. (There I go again, this time with “Satellite,” which followed “All Star” on the Astro Lounge track listing.)

But as it happened, the optimism and manufactured mystique typified Lewis Black’s later assessment of Anticipation. In his 2007 stand-up album of that title, the top-notch comedian contrasted the absence and presence of 20/20 hindsight before and after an awaited event. (Caution: NSFW language.)

Not long after the new millennium took hold, disenchanted people, especially in younger age groups, were emotionally hungover and vomiting. If we believed the hype, we had gone in thinking these would be the greatest times of change ever. Those who felt any apprehension on the side of excitement during the anticipation were proven right.

Now we wanted to recreate or recapture our last bastions of innocence. For that, 1999 was our best bet, since it was the best time of change. It was also when Smash Mouth cemented its stint in the mainstream with a largely optimistic take on unpleasant developments. It all begins by defying an imagined naysayer.

At the time, elders were stereotypically telling the youth that anything was possible and we were all exuding potential. Conversely, Camp wrote and Harwell sang, “Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me, I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”

On the other hand, they subsequently question this Debbie Downer’s lack of credibility based on her lowbrow “loser” gesture. They then offer a neutral reality that “The years start coming and they don’t stop coming.”

As plain and inescapable as that fact may be, it was a lot to take in when all four digits were about to change at the next Times Square ball drop. And when news and sports tickers started noting contracts and agreements stretching into the late 2000s or even the 2010s, one wondered how years of those numbers could possibly arrive. It felt so much more foreign and distant than it was.

But those years did lie ahead. They were (or are) to come and go like all of their predecessors. Smash Mouth was therefore right when it went on to sing that there is “so much to do, so much to see.” At the time, one could have taken part of the song’s message to mean that the dawn of a new millennium need not be a beginning or an end of anything. It can be a continuation.

Naturally, the reality proved a monumental mixed bag of all three. But fittingly, “All Star” bolstered Smash Mouth’s prominence through each of the next two years. It did so through the unique quadruple-digit overhaul to the calendar, then through the bona fide change in century.

That stretch proved crucial amidst the wait for their third album, Smash Mouth, which was produced before 9/11 but hit the shelves two months afterward. Virtually everything from the band’s post-Astro Lounge era was inevitably synonymous with a new age. The ’90s had already died by every definition of the word.

The band followed its own example by glowing and shining as best it could while it could. Still, the sunset and midday down-on-Earth backdrops to Smash Mouth and Get the Picture were no match for Astro Lounge’s dark-blue space skies.

That, in turn, had been a marked improvement on the pitch-black imagery and content of Fush Yu Mang. The second album and signature song’s broad outreach and approving reception confirm as much.

 

Smash Mouth had produced its definitive output, and that was never to be redefined. To that point, a cover of “All Star” was the soundtrack to overseas TV commercials as late as 2004.

That should come as no surprise given how far and wide the band aimed with the song. As Camp told Carl Wiser of Songfacts in January 2017, “It applies to anyone who’s trying to make it while all those people are saying, ‘Oh, you want to be a professional basketball player? Haha. Good luck. That’s going to be really tough. It’s like the chances are two million to one.’ And it’s like, ‘No, no, don’t listen to them. Just go do it.’”

By writing, producing and performing that message, they followed their own example in the name of challenging L-forming skeptics. Looking back, they might as well have also been giving themselves their own pep talk to savor their peak.

Even when that was over, and times were comparatively trying, they would need a reference point to make the most of what they still had. If possible, they could even adapt, as they did between Fush Yu Mang and Astro Lounge.

The ice we skate is getting pretty thin

The water’s getting warm so you might as well swim
My world’s on fire, how ’bout yours
That’s the way I like it and I never get bored

Two decades into this millennium, things have a way of getting jading. But for better or worse, they are not exactly boring, for many are aggravating, infuriating or worrisome. Some may be all of the above.

For the resultant ailments, the best reliever on the ’90s nostalgia shelf is from the era’s tail end. In an April 2017 chat with VICE’s Sarah Emerson, Camp granted a few heavy streaks in the lyrics. Part of the message, he told her is, “to enjoy your youth because life continues to get harder with age.”

But he went on to conclude, “I guess the sentiment is: life is short, see the world, enjoy the action, get involved, be extraordinary, and don't let haters get you down.”

With that, “All Star” kept one foot in the ever-brief present while daringly setting the other into the not-too-distant, yet ostensibly upside-down future. That gamble paid off to the tune of continued peak popularity deep into 2001.

And now its shelf life is still sufficient for independent individuals to evoke it on athletic all-star occasions. It remains the subject of retrospectives even in the song’s non-milestone months and years. It is even worth having in handy via hotline.

As Saxena concluded in her 2017 GQ write-up, through their signature song and accompanying music video, Harwell and company “remain earnest and hopeful in the face of change.”

The face of change may never have been bigger, or at least more magnified, than when Y2K loomed and arrived. It made sense that “All Star” fit so effortessly into the middle of 1999.

But like the years, the change never stops coming. By the same token, the song’s appeal ought to last as long as our central celestial ball.

Visions of giant and endless clean slates did not hurt when the future inflated its image. They can come in handy for anyone at any time now or later too.