Alternative rock spent the decade teaching outsiders they belonged. Smash Mouth told them they might win.

David, why Smash Mouth?

Why not Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag”? Or The Cardigans’ “Lovefool”? Or New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give”?

That New Radicals one always bothered me. Gregg Alexander clearly wanted to write an inspirational anthem about rejecting phoniness and choosing your own life, which is a fine idea. Then, at the end, he starts calling out Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love, and Marilyn Manson for doing fashion shoots and running to their mansions. Their biggest crime was fashion shoots? What fashion shoots was Hanson doing? And Beck? Hanson? Beck Hansen? It is a clunky idea, ending a song meant to inspire people to be better with a specific kiss-off to four beloved pop underdogs of the moment.

He only listed those four because they were famous at the time and completely different from each other. The rhythm worked. The names scanned. It did not matter who they were. That is the problem. If you write a song about sincerity and end it by naming random celebrities because they fit the rhyme scheme, you have not committed to your own theme.

“Lovefool” is awesome, and The Cardigans are awesome, but it exists largely as an alternative-rock anomaly. It sounds like nothing else from the era, and it does not sound like anything in the many years since either. It got airplay, and it has only grown more beloved over time, but no one ever wrote a song and said, “This is what I’m going for.” It is a perfect little object floating in space.

“Teenage Dirtbag,” meanwhile, seemed to luck into a million-dollar song without much else to follow it up with. The song is now loved because it is unabashedly cheesy: a strange little anthem about Iron Maiden fandom sung by a guy who sounds like Alanis Morissette. The music video helps. No one saw Loser, but Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari are people everyone still likes, and they actually showed up for the video shoot.

So just being a song that became famous later does not mean it was important. Cultural afterlife alone is not enough. That is how you get every half-ironic karaoke song being retroactively promoted to masterpiece status.

So why “All Star”? What does it have that those other songs do not?

For starters, Smash Mouth understood the assignment better than almost anyone else in this corner of late-’90s rock. The song is not merely catchy. It is not merely a nostalgic meme. It is a fully committed underdog anthem from a band that somehow made optimism sound sarcastic enough to be tolerated by alternative radio.

Alternative rock spent most of the 1990s teaching outsiders that they were allowed to exist. “All Star” went further and suggested they might actually become the hero of the story.

That was a bigger shift than people give it credit for.

Let’s start with the sound. When looking for a playlist of songs by ’90s one-hit wonders—though Smash Mouth are technically not one-hit wonders, but try explaining that to anyone at a party—Smash Mouth might be the most enjoyable band to revisit. They did not seem revolutionary at the time, but their sun-soaked sound felt legitimate. There was brightness, but also detachment. They were positive without sounding like they had fallen for positivity. That is a difficult balance. Katrina and the Waves made “Walking on Sunshine” sound like someone winning a free vacation on a game show. Smash Mouth sounded like someone who knew the vacation package had hidden fees but went anyway.

That is why “Walkin’ on the Sun” is important to understanding “All Star.” Songwriter Greg Camp seemed fascinated by sunshine as both image and trap. “Walkin’ on the Sun” feels like a rebuttal to sun-drenched naivete. If you like walking on sunshine so much, you might as well try walking on the actual sun. Enjoy the optimism. Try not to die.

“All Star” takes that same brightness and removes just enough of the sneer to make it sincere. It is still slightly amused with itself. It still has that late-’90s layer of sunglasses-at-night irony. But underneath all of that, the song believes what it is saying.

That is the key.

The lyrics are much smarter than their reputation suggests. Greg Camp writes in compact little bursts, like he is trying to smuggle actual thoughts into a children’s cereal commercial. The second verse moves from weather talk into environmental anxiety using the bizarre phrase “meteor men,” which probably means meteorologists, or at least how a normal person might refer to scientists talking about the weather on TV. I always liked the phrase because it sounds like a mock-superhero team from Mystery Men, which is probably not why the song ended up on that soundtrack, but it could not have hurt. “Meteor men” sounds like the name of a group of failed crime fighters who show up in matching bowling shirts and immediately get knocked unconscious.

My favorite moment is the gas money verse. A stranger asks for help getting away from his current situation, and Steve Harwell responds as if he has been handed philosophical advice rather than a request for cash. That is what makes the lyric so funny. The narrator adopts a sort of Mr. Magoo-like obliviousness, mistaking a panhandler’s plea for gas money as a profound life lesson about personal growth. Harwell sells the line with perfect purposeful ignorance. There is no way this guy actually gave the bum any money, but he was inspired enough to write an anthemic ode to self-improvement. In Smash Mouth’s world, every inconvenience is a teachable moment.

That is the joke of “All Star,” and a reason it works. The song is about uplift delivered by a narrator who sounds like he barely understands uplift. He is not a motivational speaker. He is not a Disney prince. He is a guy in wraparound sunglasses who has accidentally discovered the central idea of modern pop culture: being weird is not a liability if you can sell it with confidence.

The arrangement is just as important. Greg Camp uses a standard pop foundation, but he keeps adding little wrinkles so the song never becomes as simple as it seems. The verse progression has a familiar, almost nursery-rhyme clarity. Then the hook starts pulling in stranger colors, including a diminished movement that gives the chorus a crooked smile. The syncopated phrasing of the “so much to do” run gives the song its forward shove. From there, the arrangement keeps tossing new ideas at the listener: faux-record scratches, percussive accents, handclaps, organ textures, bright keyboard stabs, and that whistling synth-and-glockenspiel lead that sounds like it escaped from a toy store. This is one of the few rock songs of the era where something interesting happens almost every second. A strange rhythm, a new texture, a clever lyric, an unexpected chord change—there is very little dead air in “All Star.”

This could only have been produced in 1999. I do not mean that as an insult. There are songs that sound dated because the production choices aged badly, and there are songs that sound dated because they perfectly captured the moment right before the future arrived. “All Star” is the second kind. It sounds like the late ’90s discovering the early 2000s in real time: part ska-pop, part power pop, part novelty single, part sports-arena chant, part children’s-movie anthem, part internet meme before internet memes fully knew what they were.

The funny thing is that it was not originally the Shrek song. It was first tied to Mystery Men, which makes much more sense. Mystery Men is a movie about losers with ridiculous powers trying to become real heroes. That is basically the song’s thesis with costumes. Shrek made it immortal, but Mystery Men understood it first.

The association with kids’ media damaged the song’s critical reputation for years. Once a song becomes beloved by children, adults often start treating it like it cannot possibly be serious. This is vaguely stupid. Children are often better than critics at identifying melody, energy, and emotional clarity. They do not need a song to be cool. They need it to work. “All Star” worked so well that it eventually became almost impossible to hear clearly.

But before it became shorthand for Shrek, memes, and ironic karaoke, it was a late-’90s alternative single doing something surprisingly rare: telling the outsider that triumph was possible.

There have always been more movies about outcasts getting the girl than songs about it. John Hughes practically lived in that genre. Teen comedies had been telling nerds for years that the right haircut, the right party, the right accidental public performance, or the right romantic misunderstanding could turn them into winners. Rock music was much more reluctant to touch that fantasy. “You are cool because you are a nerd” was a little too on the nose for most nerdy bands to attempt. The idea of the awkward kid becoming an all star would have been considered very L for Lame.

Then Nirvana happened, and the rules changed. Being an outcast became one of the coolest things a person could be. Alternative music moved from college radio and hip record stores to nationwide radio formats. Bands that once sounded like secret handshakes became arena acts. Suddenly, part of the promise of alternative music was that anyone could break through.

But much of that music still treated outsider status as a wound. You were alienated. You were misunderstood. You were damaged. You were authentic because you suffered. “All Star” kept the outsider and removed the misery.

That is why the song matters.

It is not that there had never been inspirational songs before. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” had already become the default American anthem for people who want encouragement without having to define exactly what they are being encouraged to do. Madonna’s “Express Yourself” became an anthem of empowerment too, even though the lyrics are basically about making a man communicate better. A useful message, sure, but it would probably fail the Bechdel test.

Those earlier songs may have influenced “All Star” in the same way Pong influenced Diablo III. Technically, yes. Spiritually, not really.

The difference is that “All Star” is not just about endurance, self-expression, or vague belief. It is about the weird kid winning. Not surviving. Not being understood someday. Winning. Getting the fireworks at the end. That was easy for movies, sports stories, and teen comedies to understand, but rock songwriting rarely embraced it directly. Rock preferred rebellion, alienation, lust, despair, swagger, or revenge. It was much less comfortable with “the weird kid wins.”

“All Star” is the weird kid wins.

That is also why it makes sense that “Teenage Dirtbag” arrived right afterward. I would not claim direct influence unless Brendan B. Brown said so, but the emotional territory is similar. A heavy-metal-loving nerd should not get the girl, but does. A loser becomes the romantic lead. It is the same turn-of-the-millennium wish fulfillment. The difference is that “Teenage Dirtbag” still sounds like an awkward confession. “All Star” sounds like the victory parade.

The song’s influence on later pop is probably more thematic than musical, but that still counts. You can hear its emotional descendants in the big, bright, kid-friendly optimism of songs like Pharrell’s “Happy” and Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” You can see its fingerprints on the way internet culture learned to treat sincerity and irony as the same thing wearing different sunglasses. You can trace similar melodic density and bright synthetic textures through later Weezer, fun., Owl City, Passion Pit, and many other artists who understood that modern pop listeners like songs that keep throwing new objects at their heads.

That helps explain why it has aged better than many songs people took more seriously. Modern pop is built for hyperactive listening. Gen X listeners often complain that contemporary music is too erratic, but younger audiences seem comfortable with songs that shift texture constantly. Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, Post Malone, and modern Beyoncé all work in a landscape where surprise is not a garnish. It is part of the arrangement. “All Star” is not hyperpop, obviously. Let’s not get anyone arrested. But it does share a belief that pop songs should keep producing little jolts of novelty.

Steve Harwell was not the songwriter, but he was essential to why the song worked. Greg Camp wrote the thing, but Harwell sold it. His voice had a deep, cutting, almost cartoonishly confident quality. He sounded like the cool uncle at a barbecue who might give terrible advice but somehow knows everyone’s name. A more polished singer might have ruined the song by making it too earnest. Harwell made it feel like sincerity wearing a bowling shirt.

His performance is also why the song survived its own overexposure. “All Star” became a children’s movie anthem, a meme, a sports-stadium chant, a commercial cue, a punchline, and an all-purpose nostalgia button. Most songs would collapse under that much usage. This one somehow absorbed all of it. The more ridiculous the context, the more the song seemed to belong there.

That is not usually how important songs work. “Jeremy” became too heavy to casually use. “Closer” became too charged. “Break Stuff” became shorthand for tantrum rage. “Enter Sandman” became sports intimidation. “Sabotage” became chase-scene adrenaline. “All Star” became something stranger: a reusable cultural battery. Drop it into almost any setting, and it instantly produces energy, irony, and recognition.

The band paid a price for that. Smash Mouth became easy to dismiss because their biggest song became too available. Anything that children love, advertisers use, and the internet jokes about will eventually be treated as if it has no real value. Steve Harwell’s later years made the story sadder. He left the band in 2021 after health struggles and an erratic performance in Bethel, New York, and he died in 2023 at only 56. For a singer often reduced to a meme, he gave one of the most recognizable vocal performances of the decade.

The song itself remains weirdly undefeated.

That is the thing about “All Star.” It should have worn out its welcome. It should have disappeared into late-’90s novelty bins with swing revival singles and songs from soundtracks no one watches anymore. It should have become a trivia answer. Instead, it keeps coming back. Not always with dignity, but dignity was never the point.

The point was possibility.

Alternative rock spent the 1990s telling outsiders they were not alone. That mattered. But “All Star” did something that was almost embarrassing in its directness: it told them the world might actually make room for them. Not just as loners, not just as victims, not just as misunderstood geniuses, but as stars.

Critics laughed. Kids understood. The internet understood even better.

A joke can last a summer. A novelty can last a year. “All Star” has lasted because underneath the bright production, the goofy delivery, the whistling synth, the Shrek jokes, and the layers of irony, there is a real idea: being different is not merely survivable. It might be the thing that gets you through the door.

Perhaps no song is more emblematic of the early 2000s, but that is only part of the story. “All Star” belongs on a list of essential ’90s rock songs because it caught alternative music at the exact moment outsider culture stopped asking for sympathy and started asking for applause.

Smash Mouth did not invent the underdog anthem. They just made it safe for the weird kid to win.