Smash Mouth wrote “All Star” to warn about climate change & anti-intellectualism 20 years ago—and…
Medium · by Thom Dunn · August 24, 2018
It was the fall of 1998. Guy Fieri was preparing to open his second Johnny Garlic’s Restaurant, while his clone-twin, Steve Harwell, was in the studio with his bandmates wrapping up their sophomore album, “Astro Lounge.” Beyond the studio walls, military tensions were rising in North Korea, Pakistan, and Iraq, and a little company called Google had just opened up in Silicon Valley; but all anyone cared about were Bill Clinton’s blowjobs.
Smash Mouth had carefully curated the sonic landscape of their first hit single, “Walkin’ on the Sun,” to use as a musical weapon to avert the coming damages that would soon be caused by nuclear apocalypse and climate change. The dopeass organ riff was specifically designed to vibrate on a frequency that would deliver a message of peace, hope, and sustainability directly into the prefrontal cortex of anyone who heard it. Even the title of the song itself was a direct nod to threats of rising global temperatures largely caused by carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. Yet somehow, it failed to stop the dystopian vision of the future they had seen that one time after communing with too much California weed.
The members of Smash Mouth knew they had an obligation, as all pop-ska-rock groups do, to deliver a totally sick jam that would also save the world from its own impending doom.
And thus was born “All Star.”
Unfortunately, we were all too stupid to figure out the idyllic message hidden in its rhythms. Something did resonate about the song, however. That cleverly diminished chord in the chorus took root in our heads and found new life as a sonic meme, a viral idea that would spread from person to person and perpetuate its own existence.
Rather than heeding the foreboding prophecy that Hartwell and his bandmate, songwriter-guitarist Greg Camp, laid out for us in that little earworm, we just used it to make “Smashups” and other esoteric Internet jokes.
We should have listened more closely.
Like Moses parting waters with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, the truth was revealed in a tweeted photo of the original handwritten lyrics:
#TBThursday #tbt Original "All Star" Lyrics by: @GregCampMusic pic.twitter.com/65zzzT3caG
— Smash Mouth (@smashmouth) February 9, 2017
As you can see, the last line of the chorus was originally different. Perhaps if Smash Mouth had left that line “Wave bye-bye to your soul” intact, rather than replacing it with “Only shooting stars break the mouooohuould,” then perhaps we could understood the truth sooner, and avoided the predicaments of our current political climate, just as they had intended.
When you look at the song line-by-line in this new context, it all makes sense.
Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me
I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed
From the very opening of the song, Steve Harwell invokes the imagery of some kind of higher power, and a greater global purpose — and the fact that humans are a bunch of fucking idiots by contrast. He cleverly plays on the idea of the “world” and “rolling me” to allude back to the days when people thought the world was flat, and how they mocked and ridiculed the scientists who tried to tell them otherwise.
She was looking kind of dumb with her finger & her thumb
in the shape of an “L” on her forehead.
In every verse, the narrator stands in for humanity at large, and this case, humanity is largely a bunch of uneducated manual laborers who think that Galileo is the stupid one, standing there making the classic “loser” sign of the 90s. Except…what if he was actually measuring right angles, attempting to use the physical science to better understand the world?
But no; these anti-intellectual raptors go so far as to mock his masculinity, swapping out his gender pronouns like a trollish Twitter egg. “LOL what kinda loser believes in science?” they say with their French frog cartoon faces, willfully ignorant to the measurable truths of the natural world, and all of the potential it contains.
Well the years start coming and they don’t stop coming
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running
This couplet is revealed as a critique of the US education system, and how for-profit agendas collude with Creationist beliefs through misleading text books that spread mass disinformation across the generations. From an early age, children are told not to break the mold, but instead to fall in line and maintain some preconceived sense of “order” that follows them from school into adulthood, when they start to scold the individuals and revolutionaries for not breaking rules in the “right” way.
This also alludes to the passage of time on a grander scale, and how the anti-intellectualism and stubborn war between science and religion would repeat themselves in endless cycles, even as mankind continues to grow and evolve. Rather than look back and learn from our past mistakes, humanity is encouraged to hit the ground running, and never to question anything—including the fact that we’ve dealt with all these same conflicts before.
Didn’t make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb
This is where Smash Mouth predicts the rise of “snowflake” as a pejorative. Imagine Galileo’s anti-intellectual haters mocking his gender while they chant, “Can’t you take a joke?”
So much to do, so much to see
So what’s wrong with taking the back streets?
Now we start getting into issues of carbon emissions and sustainability. Our narrator-as-stand-in-for-humanity is clearly coming from a position of privilege, with no concern about temporal or financial obligations—or the damages that his gas-guzzling joyride does to the planet. It’s generally accepted among climate scientists and activists that ecological catastrophe will have a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups, since the rich and powerful can always afford to shield themselves from the brunt of it in their ivory towers.
You’ll never know if you don’t go
You’ll never shine if you don’t glow
These words are sung from the point-of-view of climate deniers, who seem to think that unless they, personally, can recognize the precise moment that a 2°C temperature change occurs, then there’s nothing to worry about. Worse, they think that something bad will happen if people stopped using carbon-based energy and greenhouse gases. Until the day that people start literally glowing in the aftermath of nuclear fallout, they’re not going to see a problem or care to prevent the seemingly inevitable.
Hey now, you’re an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you’re a rock star, get the show on, get paid
And all that glitters is gold
In true punk rock style, Smash Mouth invokes the anarchistic belief that Capitalism is a disease, and that overly-toxic economic competition is an impediment to peace and progress. It’s all about games and money.
The use of “gold” can also be read as a reference to oil as “liquid goal,” and the ways in which oil industry profits have steered most of the social, political, and technological progress of the last century, particularly in the form of Koch-sponsored legislation.
Wave bye-bye to your soul
This should be pretty self-explanatory.
It’s a cool place and they say it gets colder
You’re bundled up now, wait till you get older
Yet another direct jab at climate deniers who insist that the continued existence of winter and/or snow supports their belief that “the climate is always changing.”
The second part of this couplet plays on a double-entendre: it can be interpreted as the condescending voice of an older generation basking in their ignorance and the dismissive of when-I-was-your-age attitudes that reinforce the aforementioned rule establishment brainwashing of the for-profit school system; or, it’s yet-another intentionally ironic allusion to rising global temperatures, the idea being that there will be little need for us to bundle up by the time that 2099 comes around because we’ll all be dead from freak storms, flooding, or mosquito-borne illnesses.
But the meteor men beg to differ
Judging by the hole in the satellite picture.
Despite the fact that it was written 20 years ago, this is another example of how “All Star” predicted our current circumstances in which media, expertise, and evidence are no longer trusted.
This also alludes to the idea that “weather” and “climate” are two separate things — a distinction that continues to elude people—as well as the notion that scientific prediction is not 100% reliable. Climate scientists in particular use the available information to form models and calculations, and while the specifics have been incorrect at times, the larger idea that the climate is changing in disastrous ways still shines through. Climate Critics will always miss the forest for the trees, at least until naturally-occurring brush fires wipe out all the forests.
The ice we skate is getting pretty thin
The water’s getting warm so you might as well swim
Crumbling ice floes. Rising global temperatures. Rising water levels, caused by that melting ice. The struggle is real, my friends.
That’s right: by predicting our fiery doom, Smash Mouth also inspired the popular “This is fine” meme. This is an historical fact.
Somebody once asked could I spare some change for gas?
I need to get myself away from this place.
Income inequality has grown drastically in the 20 years since “All Star” first graced the airwaves—and Smash Mouth saw this coming, too, as evidenced in this vignette of a poverty-stricken person forced to beg for change in order to afford gasoline, despite knowing that their own contributions of carbon emissions will get them away from this place, that is, bring on their impending death.
I said yep, what a concept
I could use a little fuel myself
And we could all use a little change
This was clearly intended as an ironic juxtaposition, urging us to make a change from our fossil fuel-based energy system to one of more sustainable production—particularly if we are going to continue taking the back streets (once again, a double entendre both for gas-guzzling fuel waste, and the hope that we could extend human life using biotech advancements that now collide with the ecological damage that threatens to shorten our lives.
And then we return to begin, as we’re once again reminded that the years start coming and they don’t stop coming—because Smash Mouth the future was inevitable, unless we did something about it.
But all we did was make a bunch of stupid Smash Mouth memes, ignoring the clear warnings they placed before our ears.
It’s why the songs ends on that ringing chord, Steve Harwell’s warbling vocals fading off like the dying echo of our not-so-distant future. It’s why the song has persisted as a meme: because somewhere in the deepest, darkest recesses of our subconscious minds, we understood what Smash Mouth was trying to tell us.
“All Star” resonates with something primal and shared by all of mankind—but sadly, it was not a truth that we would find within until it was too late.
“Wave Bye-Bye to your soul” indeed.