It has graced such compilations as Now That’s What I Call Music! 3, Hockey Anthems, Skiing Workout Mix, and 101 Kids Songs. Smash Mouth has been closing concerts with it ever since, including for the troops in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, and at New York’s Irving Plaza, eight days after September 11. A track that is guaranteed to elicit cheers (or groans), and feelings of nostalgia, whether it’s played at a dive bar, a sports arena, or a child care center. A maddeningly irresistible earworm, a party starter, a karaoke classic, a soundtrack staple, a sporting anthem, a corporate jingle, a monster meme.
Twenty years later, the strange and specific legacy of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” blazes blindingly on.
In a review of the song’s parent album, Astro Lounge, Rolling Stone singled out the track for its “just-add-water radio jolt.” The AV Club predicted that the band’s “winning summer fluff” would end up nostalgia fodder many years later, while critic Stephen Thompson wrote that the album “may or may not spawn hits.” It was nominated for Best Pop Performance at the Grammys, but lost out to Santana. “All Star”-three minutes and 20 seconds, and four chords, more or less, of sunny pop with trace elements of rap, punk, and ska-was released on May 4, 1999. “We worked so hard to make it perfect,” Mahaffey said recently.įinally, the day came to show the completed opening sequence to Jeffrey Katzenberg, then the CEO of DreamWorks Animation. But Mahaffey was excited: His song was shaping up to be the only original number in the movie.
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The cut of the movie kept changing, and the music had to be adjusted to fit. Mahaffey was flown from Los Angeles to meet the animation team in Palo Alto, and paired with “All Star” producer Eric Valentine to lay down the master. He was shown a rough cut of the movie, then wrote and demoed a song that day. So Matt Mahaffey, a young artist signed to DreamWorks’ records division, was enlisted to come up with a replacement: a song that was like “All Star,” but not “All Star.” As Mahaffey saw it, it was his task to beat it. Surely, they should use something fresher. It also had been featured in two recent movies, Mystery Men and Inspector Gadget, and licensed for Rat Race, which would be out later in the year. But the song, by the band Smash Mouth, had been all over radio and television since its release two years prior. It had the feeling they wanted: fun, and edgy yet not too edgy. It was 2001, and the creators of Shrek, an upcoming animated film about a foul-tempered ogre, had slotted it in as a placeholder track over the opening sequence.
They really didn’t want to use “All Star.”
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