"All Star" by Smash Mouth
Somebody once told me — you know the rest. Smash Mouth's 1999 radio staple peaked at #4 on the Hot 100, but immortality arrived in 2001, when it played over Shrek's opening credits and fused itself permanently to a green ogre. The internet did the rest.
Released May 4, 1999 as a single from the album Astro Lounge, "All Star" was written by Smash Mouth guitarist Greg Camp and produced by Eric Valentine, with frontman Steve Harwell delivering the opening line everybody knows. It climbed through the summer to peak at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 that August, helped by a music video tied to the 1999 superhero comedy Mystery Men.
The real pivot came in 2001. During Shrek's production, "All Star" was dropped over the opening credits as a temporary placeholder — but DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg recommended keeping it, and the song became the ogre's permanent front door. For every kid who wore out that DVD, the first chords of "All Star" simply are Shrek.
That association gave the song a second life bigger than its first: in the 2010s the internet adopted it as one of its favorite memes, remixing and re-quoting it endlessly, and it ranked among the most-streamed rock songs from 2017 to 2021. A late-90s radio hit had become a permanent piece of shared vocabulary — the rare one-liner every generation after it still finishes automatically.
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