Smash Mouth are the masters of their time. When is their "time"? With the whole retro-future aesthetic, sometimes it's hard to tell. Do they live in the future? The first sound on the album—squiggly synths that sound like a robot booting up—suggests so. Do they live in the past? The second sound on the album—Hal Blaine's drum riff from the Ronettes' "Be My Baby"—suggests this too. Or are they firmly in our present, in this late-stage capitalistic hellscape in which we measure our worth based on the memes that we send to our peers?
I don't know how typical this was at the time, but I was extremely impressed by the whole '90s-ness of the personnel list, and how it featured a xylophone player, a trombone player, and two different turntable players (one is named "DJ Homicide"!!!) (wait, is "turntable player" a phrase? should it be "turntablist" or something?). This should give you an idea about how eclectic the album is. I haven't decided, though, whether I mean this to be a compliment or not. Something about the '90s, when CDs were in fashion, when bands had 80 minutes to fill with whatever bullshit they wanted to throw against the wall, something about it always rubbed me the wrong way.
Do something right or don't do it at all, right? (He says, writing a shitty review for an album that came out in 1999 early on a Monday morning.) Do we need the bossa nova track ("Satellite")? Do we need the terrible faux-reggae track ("Road Man")? No, and no. But they are here, because bands in the '90s were under the impression that more is more.
Still, I lived through the '90s. I was ages one through ten, but I was there, man. I loved this shit back in the day. I never owned the album (thank fucking god, because can you imagine the trajectory my life would've taken if this was my first album?!), but I knew the hits. Even now, decades later, I'm nodding my head along with "Then the Morning Comes" and "Can't Get Enough of You Baby." I don't necessarily think they are good songs, but they have an air of nostalgia for an era of my life I rarely hold nostalgia for (pre-pre-teen). Remember that NSYNC video from 2000? There was a video from 1999 of the same duo singing "All Star." Why couldn't that have been the home video to make it into the archives?
Oh, right, never mind, that would've been even worse, because... well, you know the story of "All Star." You are here on a niche blog, reading a Smash Mouth album review. You are familiar with "the internet." You know that "All Star" has taken an ogre-sized life of its own in the years since its late-'90s release.
Memes are the fucking worst. It's all recycled garbage. Everything is something we've seen before. The returns diminish. Nothing is fresh and creative. It's one big game of pass the rotten banana. No one has ever done anything exciting with "All Star." Never. Not even the one time that one of your pals got you kicked out of a karaoke bar for mashing it up with "Imagine"—no, not even that! Nothing is real, life is meaningless, fucking make a mashup of "All Star" and a noose and then hang me with it.
"Radio" and "Stoned" are the best songs here and it's not even close.
The rest is kiddie bullshit that we're only still talking about because of Mike Myers (again!!!). For real, this was pop music in the guise of "rock" and ingested by every kid from your grade school who wore the fifth-grade flip. And it's not weird that this is the thing that boarded the rocket ship out of the '90s and crash landed in the late-'10s and burned in the meme crucible—it was already dumb, and being "funny" these days means making things even dumber.
So that makes it a success, I guess. Past, present, future, it doesn't really matter. Fuck Smash Mouth forever, and fuck anyone who thinks that they are going to pick this fucking trash for Record Club. It is now ineligible. It's been fun, jumping on the bomb today to save you all. Now let's never talk about this again.
GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5
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