The Never-ending Life of Smash Mouth’s “All Star”

“‘All Star” but it’s a gentle piano ballad, ‘All Star’ but it’s spoken-word slam poetry, ‘All Star’ but it’s a TED Talk) and then the sorts of Dadaist musical experiments (‘All Star’ but every note is C, ‘All Star’ but every word with an ‘E’ is skipped, ‘All Star’ but the lyric ‘And they don’t stop coming’ repeats for 10 hours.”

I’m not sure exactly when I realized that “All Star” had become the Rickroll of the late twenty-teens (I think it was when I saw this video tweeted out), but this piece, and the many links of “All Star” scholarship contained within, is exactly the content I’ve been craving since.