There are few purer things online than the YouTube comments to Smash Mouth's "All Star."

The splashy, hook-stuffed, puppyish earworm rocketed into most of our hippocampi via 2001's Shrek, and it never left. Chances are it's playing in your head right now. No "-body" ever followed a "Some-" like this. And when lead singer Steve Harwell tragically passed in 2023, folks of all backgrounds flooded the video in droves to pay their respects.

"You really were an 'All Star,'" declared one commenter. "One of the coolest guys to ever live," opined another. "As a wise man once said, only shootin' stars break the mold." "He may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed," a third commenter said, "but now he's the brightest star in the sky."

They don't stop coming: "All Star" really galvanized a generation of kids to go for it, and chase their dreams. And 25 years since its release on May 4, 1999, the maddeningly catchy single from 1999's Astro Lounge, continues to hurtle forth. Millennials know it from "Shrek." Gen Z knows it for the memes (oh, somanymemes). But it's also just a bulletproof — and totally unforgettable — pop song.

Written by founding guitarist and vocalist Greg Camp, "All Star" seemed to take the best parts of Y2K-era hits and Frankenstein them together. Which arose from necessity: Smash Mouth had just had a smash with "Walkin' on the Sun," from their 1997 debut Fush Yu Mang, and the pressure was on to follow it up.

"One night I sat Greg down, opened up a Billboard magazine, and said, 'Dude, let's just go through this. I want a little piece of each one of these songs," Smash Mouth's manager, Robert Hayes, told Rolling Stone. As he explained, the top 50 contained the likes of Sugar Ray, Third Eye Blind, Barenaked Ladies, and Chumbawumba — as well as Smash Mouth themselves.

"He left, and two days later, he walks into my office with a cassette tape. I popped it in and there was 'All Star' on this cassette," Hayes continued. "I stopped, and I looked at him. He goes, "What? You don't like it?" I said, "Are you friggin' kidding me? This is a smash!"

As bassist Paul DeLisle put it, "All Star" was a response to letters Harwell would receive from the youth. The lyrics "were just sort of like a pep talk, almost," he explained in the same piece. The song was [for] these kids: "Hang in there. You are the master of your own domain. You control your own ship."

"All Star" was a head-turning song, and best of all, it was beamed to the right act for the job. Not for nothing was it nominated for Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal at the 2000 GRAMMYs. "I'm not going to toot my own horn, but nobody else could have sang that song," Harwell rightly declared. "It would have never been what it is now. I could've pitched that song to a million bands and they would have tried to do it, and it would've never been what it is."

The band and record company both flipped for "All Star" — and what helped tremendously was its licensability. "I licensed the crap outta that song," Hayes said. "You could not walk into a grocery store or turn on the television without hearing 'All Star.' It was very, very saturated."

As impossible as it seems today, Smash Mouth initially turned down use of "All Star" in Shrek. But Dreamworks kept knocking, and eventually flew a rep to play the film for them. When the band beheld the quality of Shrek, they caved. The result was a phenomenon — partly because it nailed the character of the titular ogre.

As the co-director of Shrek, Vicky Jenson, put it, "All Star" was a really fun, upbeat way to really understand Shrek right from the get-go." Which could apply to kids the world over as well — their boundless energy, their limitless senses of possibility.

"Only shooting stars break the mold," the late Harwell trumpeted with dizzying enthusiasm — and today, that mold lies shattered at our feet. We may never see the likes of Smash Mouth, or "All Star," again.

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