Making fun of Smash Mouth, the spiky-haired San Jose quintet who briefly lorded over rock radio in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is one of the internet’s favorite preoccupations. Hell, Neil Cicierega alone has practically turned it into a religion. The members of Smash Mouth have heard it all by now. Lead singer Steve Harwell looks like Guy Fieri. They’re one-hit wonders. They owe their careers to Shrek.
Do they take these gibes sitting down? Not hardly. As reported by Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg, the official Smash Mouth Twitter account is here to remind the world that, hey now, they were rock stars. Most celebrity-based social media accounts wisely try to stay above the fray. Keeping it classy? That’s not how @smashmouth rolls. Whoever runs the account fights a never-ending battle to defend the band who gave the world “All Star,” “Walkin’ On The Sun,” “Then The Morning Comes,” and that remake of “I’m A Believer.”
Here’s how the Twitter account responds to that “one-hit wonder” charge:
Ha! Someone got told. And what about the Shrek thing? Whenever this issue is raised, @smashsmouth is ready to handle it. That’s good, because it comes up again:
And again:
And (sigh) again:
The Smash Mouth Twitter account is like a cross between The Myth Of Sisyphus and an endless game of Whack-A-Mole. As long as knuckleheads keep posting falsehoods about Smash Mouth on social media, @smashmouth will be there to set the record straight. No matter how many times it takes. Incidentally, Feinberg claims that Smash Mouth only had “three lonely hits.” But she’s using the Billboard Hot 100 as her barometer. By that standard, “Walkin’ On The Sun” technically doesn’t qualify as a hit even though the video has been viewed 20 million times on YouTube.