The Alternative Number Ones: Smash Mouth’s “Walkin’ On The Sun”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.

Hey look, it's the other Smash Mouth song! The one that's pretty good! For at least the past quarter century, Smash Mouth have been known primarily as the "All Star" band, and they will probably be known as the "All Star" band until the universe collapses in on itself. "All Star," the band's 1999 single, was basically a meme when it first came out. It was an empty brainworm that would set up shop inside your skull and then never leave. The term "meme" didn't really exist then, at least in its current form, but that's what it was.

In the time since its release, "All Star" has returned in meme form again and again, thanks in part to a prominent placement in the rancid 2001 motion picture Shrek. The members of Smash Mouth have not always been happy about the meme status that the song, and by extension the band, has achieved. In 2017, the late Smash Mouth frontman Steve Harwell told Stereogum, "It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it." What could he say, though? When you make a song that obnoxiously, insistently meaningless, you can't complain when the song attains obnoxiously, insistently meaningless immortality. You did this to yourself. It's your fault.