Review Summary: Somebody once told me... wait, this album's great?
When I was born in 1999, the internet seemed to be a passing fad; a boomtown that'd eventually bust and which had to have a 52 year old David Bowie defend its merits. The first time I gazed onto Internet Explorer 5.0, I was almost two years old, a baby in my father's lap, seeing it through a CRT display and on a Compaq with Windows 98. As I grew up in the 2000's, technology was all around me. I had my own computer for some reason. The music I listened to included The Beatles, Matchbox Twenty's "VH1 Storytellers" DVD, my mom's 128kbps LimeWire rips and that one Muse song I liked from Guitar Hero. Oh, and music I'd stumble upon that I'd listen to all the time on an embryonic YouTube, where videos of people becoming hysterical over Britney Spears and 20 year old #1 hits could become viral almost overnight.
Smash Mouth didn't know it, but they were a band of the internet.
Their music was insinuated into the media of the turn of the millennium, the movies that millenials would grow up watching. The most obvious would be Shrek, the fourth-highest grossing film of 2001 and the first to win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, which began and ended with a Smash Mouth song. Austin Powers, Inspector Gadget, Digimon and even Jim Carrey's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" fell victim to Smash Mouth. The ill-advised Tim Allen vehicle "Zoom" featured
six of their songs. They were the definition of omnipresent, odd corporate sellouts that everyone knew of but at the same time no one actually liked; and with that, they became the soundtrack to the weird, awkward transition from the nineties to the 2000's. They were destined to become forgotten.
Ask any high schooler if they've heard of Smash Mouth, and you might get vague responses. Start singing the opening lines to "All Star", and they'll know from the first syllable of the first word exactly what it is and maybe even start singing along. Maybe they'll even cut a few wisecracks about Shrek. Somehow, in the past few years, Smash Mouth rose from the ashes like a phoenix being revived wholly as a meme. They're perfect for it. "All Star" was already such an obviously cheesy song to begin with, and having been inseparably paired with the awkwardness and ready-baked meme material that Shrek became, it was unstoppable. Most of the comments on Smash Mouth's Facebook page have absolutely nothing at all to do with the band anymore. "I heard rumors about a re recorded Shrek II Soundtrack?", one Francis Beldmont wrote. Another had even said "If it's not the Shrek soundtrack, we don't know it!", and tagged along a few friends to share in the hilariousness.
Which is sad. Because before Shrek and before Smash Mouth had become a joke at everyone else's expense, they made a really, really wonderful debut album.
You may have heard some of it already. Their cover of War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”, which closed out the album with an everlasting chant of its chorus repeated over and over and over again with no stop in sight, was one of the first songs I discovered for myself on the internet at all. “Walkin’ On The Sun” was their only song on the album that even remotely sounded like their later work, and it hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts back when that actually meant something. “The Fonz”, a song which had as much to do with Happy Days as Weezer’s “Buddy Holly”, was released as a third single although it didn’t make a dent.
The Smash Mouth here wasn’t the same band that’d become the Family-Oriented Movie Hitmakers of 2001. Fush Yu Mang isn’t exactly family friendly material, even without judging it by the Parental Advisory sticker affixed to the cover. “Nervous in the Alley” is about the tale of a rich 15 year old who turns to living on the street and soliciting for sex. There’s even a song called “Beer Goggles”, which seems to be much less of a huge deal nowadays rather than if I asked my parents for the CD as a kid. In addition, for the lack of a better word, their sound here was much rawer than on their later albums, and it works absolutely to the band’s benefit - the guitars are crunchy, Steve Harwell’s voice is distinct while not overpowering the rest of the music, while the greatest part of the music is actually guitarist Greg Camp’s songwriting, which borders on the edge of pure genius. “Heave-Ho” is an entire diatribe in song, a deposition in exquisite detail about their trials and tribulations of dealing with their landlord, all the while turning their home into an absolute wreck in the process. “Pet Names” almost seems too direct, the lyrics feeling like a song you wrote in your bedroom at 14 when you thought you were the next Rivers Cuomo, but the band makes it work entirely in its favor. The music here works simply because it just doesn’t stop - it keeps pushing beyond its predetermined limits and you just keep wanting more and more.
Smash Mouth is a band entirely of a time long past, a time when mainstream rock music could entirely permeate pop culture without people even realizing it was there. And oddly, for some reason, even with them having much more exposure due to the same forces that made Donald Trump a president and that made a lowly pop song from South Korea the most viewed video clip of anything on the planet, their music itself hasn’t been reevaluated. It was just too easy to label them as a relic of another - at both odder and more stable - time before actually judging them on their merits. To be fair, I'm able to actually get that. I’ll admit that it was pretty much comic gold and incredibly sad at the same time when they walked out on a show just because of some idiot throwing bread on stage, all the while hearing the people in the audience shout out loud for them to just play All Star already. Their Twitter account’s constant fights with random people passively mentioning “All Star” to be a terrible song is hilarious, perhaps to all of us. When we see Smash Mouth, out of all bands, taking themselves that seriously, it’s really hard
not to laugh. However, looking back 20 years in the mirror, Fush Yu Mang has revealed itself to just be a pure, fun slab of ska-punk that ironically isn’t really to be taken too seriously.
