Hey Wisecrack, Jared here. Through researching these Deep or Dumb? videos, we’ve managed
to find complexity in the corners of pop culture where you’d least expect it: in the work
of Nicholas Cage, for instance: "Yeah that mescaline, wow, that's strange stuff, whew."
or in films like Shrek, which seems shallow at first glance, but turns out to be surprisingly
deep. "Onions have layers, ogres have layers. Onions have layers, you get it! We both have
layers." We like to think we’ve gotten reasonably good at extracting meaning from sillycultural
artifacts.
Still, when intrepid Wisecrack writer Myles approached us wanting to cover Smash Mouth,
my eyes rolled so thoroughly, I think I lost them in the back of my head.
Who in the world would consider Smash Mouth’s oeuvre to be even remotely deep, much less
secretly super brilliant? If I were to suggest such a thing, you would eat me alive in the
comments, and, well... you’d be right to do so.
If you’ve heard even a handful of their songs, you likely think that Smash Mouth’s
music is pretty superficial. But Myles, pictured here after immersing himself in their entire
discography for three straight weeks, thinks he’s discovered something more in Smash
Mouth’s work than frat-rock whining about ex-girlfriends and swooning over current ones.
Now, we had our doubts, but when Myles locked the doors of the Wisecrack offices from the
outside and refused to let us leave without hearing his pitch, we literally could not
say no.
Here’s Myles’ angle: Against all odds, the band best-known for providing the background
music to Shrek’s morning shit, shower, ‘n shave (the 3 S’s) "Somebody once told me"
has also created songs that engage with ideas from Wisecrack-fan-favorite philosophers like
Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Don’t believe him? Well I Don’t blame you but
we’re going to dive in anyway, and maybe I’ll prove to you that this isn’t just
a case of my brain getting smart while my head gets dumb. So Welcome to this Wisecrack
Edition on Smash Mouth: Deep
or Dumb?
Allow me to take you back to the year...1997. It was a different time. A simpler time. Titanic
sparked a nationwide interest in larger doorframes; George Clooney answered questions about bat-nipples
we didn’t even know we had; and the recently released Star Wars Special Editions gave us
a sneak peak at what it would feel like to have our childhoods ruined. There was a Steve
Jobs in every Apple, a Tamagotchi on every belt, and Americans knew exactly what it was
that The Spice Girls a-really really REALLY wanted.
Enter Smash Mouth. Not young and blond enough to be N’Sync, not quite talented enough
to be Beck, the band occupied a murky place in pop culture. They wrote catchy pop songs
that gave you earworms for days. And that’s about it.
But according to Myles, From the band’s early days through the departure of main songwriter
and guitarist Greg Camp in 2008, Smash Mouth repeatedly explored some of the key themes
of existentialism in its lyrics.
But what is “existentialism”? Existentialism can sometimes be tricky to define with a diverse
set of thinkers taking up the label, but we’ll say, broadly, it’s a philosophy concerned
with the basic questions of human existence. There are two questions that perpetually rise
up for many existentialists that are relevant to our discussion here: authenticity, and
the search for meaning. Unlike philosophers from centuries past, thinkers like Sartre
couldn’t just turn to God for answers to these questions, because to him, God doesn’t
exist and so we’re on our own to find the answers. An existentialist like Camus sees
the universe as an essentially indifferent to humanity—it has no inherent meaning,
and is mostly the place where we hang out while we’re waiting to die. But for someone
like Sartre, this quandary offers the opportunity to make our own meaning.
Here’s where Smash Mouth comes in. Our world, according to their vast catalog of mediocrity,
is a wacky, out-of-control place, with little regard for the people in it. This is most
apparent in what is probably the band’s most famous song, “All Star.” If I may
read a passage:
“The ice we skate is getting pretty thin The water's getting warm so you might as well
swim My world's on fire, how about yours?
That's the way I like it and I never get bored.”
We’re not the first to suggest that these lyrics seem to be talking about climate change
- a fact actually confirmed by the songwriter. So sure, the song evokes global warming, but
this is also the first piece of evidence in Myles’ claim. On the surface, it’s simply
“if life gives you global climate change, make unseasonably warm pool parties.” But
this will be our first hint that Smash Mouth is speaking more broadly to the human condition.
And here we should look to existentialist Albert Camus, who proposed the philosophy
of “absurdism,” or the idea that the universe is a cruel joke that is indifferent to our
existence. We are conscious beings in an unconscious universe out of our control, and our job involves
skating on thin ice in a world that is (sometimes literally) on fire. So far, this comparison
seems like a stretch. But when considered with other band lyrics, the message starts
to come into focus… allegedly.
Take the song “Hang On,” which compares the human condition to that of being constantly
at the mercy of a wild, rampaging animal. Let’s look to the text:
“You'll never make everybody's day But while you're around you might as well
Catch the tiger by its tail and Hang on hang on hang on.”
Compare that to this monologue from another famous existentialist, Rick Sanchez:
“When you know nothing matters the universe is yours, and I've never met a universe that
was into it. The universe is basical an animal, it grazes on the ordinary. Creates infinite
idiots just to eat them, not unlike your freind, Timmy." "Tommy." Yeah hardly matters now,
sweetie. You know, smart people get a chance to climb on top and take reality for a ride
but it'll never stop trying to throw you. And eventually it will, there's no other way
off."
Now, I’m not going to say that Greg Camp and Steve Harwell are our very own universe’s
Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith, but I’m not not going to say that.
Importantly, though, Absurdism is not the same thing as hedonism, and there’s ample
evidence to suggest that the song is more hedonistic than absurdist. A hedonist posits
immediate pleasure as in sex, chocolate and puppies (but not all at once), as the ultimate
purpose of life, and we can say that the lyrics essentially amount to “things will never
be great, so might as well get wild.” - itself a form of meaning Camus would likely reject.
Alternative reading: to exist in our universe is akin to being eternally stuck in 2003’s
live Cat in the Hat remake, for which this song was a tie-in.
“I’ll get you, and it’ll look like a bloody accident.
Incidentally, ask Myles to explain the weird connections between Smash Mouth, Mike Meyers,
and the children’s film industry in the early 2000s. Anyway, back to Camus.
A little bit confusingly, Camus’ rejection of meaning did NOT translate to “saying
fuck it and becoming a couch potato.” The dude later wrote a book called The Rebel,
that encouraged others to rise up and revolt in the name of something larger than themselves.
We are not even going to try to suggest that Smash Mouth invokes Camus’ work in The Rebel
but... From their masterpiece “So Insane”:
“Have ya checked out the temperature lately There's a fever that's about to break
We got the hands to turn this around We got the plan to make it go down
We got the voice fillin' this room We got the minds, the minds that go boom
Get up, get out, get on that train It's becoming so insane
This tiny blue marble is rollin' away.”
Not convinced? Let’s try again. In the context of this wild universe, Smash Mouth perhaps
also plays with the existentialist idea of “bad faith,” as outlined by Jean Paul
Sartre. Rather than lol’ing at the universe’s indifference like Camus, Sartre claims that
the good existentialist life is one lived authentically, according to principles we
choose out of a pure act of free will, rather than what is convenient or fashionable at
any given time. The opposite of this is living in “bad faith,” or consciously mitigating
your responsibility to choose. In the song “Shoes ‘n Hats,” Smash Mouth offers
a critique of bad faith that’d give Sartre the warm-n-fuzzies:
“In my old chapeau Well it's full of holes but it's got more
soul That them, they, who are they anyway
They're just beating each other at being each other
With nothin' to say.”
Our narrator, who defies convention by wearing shabby clothes, has “more soul” than people
who spend lots of time and effort “beating each other at being each other,” rather
than unique, authentic individuals with particular likes and wants.
The aforementioned “Hang On” also upholds individual authenticity as more important
than conformity or people-pleasing: since you’ll “never make everybody’s day,”
it doesn’t make much sense from an existentialist standpoint to try. And of course, we can never
forget who it is that breaks the mow-oo-wold: “Only shooting stars"
This one seems like a stretch. As tempting as it is to say that Smash Mouth is condemning
people who don’t embrace their freedom by trying to be like others, it’s likely just
a generic call for authenticity that exists as much with goths who complain about “posers”
as it does with French philosophers who chain-smoked all day.
Ok, now before we get too deep into the song that probably brought, like, seventy-five
percent of you here— Let’s get back to Camus. You might have heard of a guy named
Sisyphus - a king condemned to spend eternity rolling a boulder up a hill (only to have
it roll down again). He’s a central figure for Camus, who argues in The Myth of Sisyphus
that we find ourselves in a situation very much like that faced by this mythological
character. If existentialists like Sartre wanted to assert some higher calling in the
world, like authenticity, Camus wanted to point out the utter pointlessness of that
effort, and suggest what he thought was a better way of dealing with our lot—namely,
facing up to it directly, and learning to appreciate it in spite of the suckiness.
According to Camus, one of the defining features of human existence is the conflict between
our need for meaning and the universe’s indifference to our goals and suffering. Like
Sisyphus, we put enormous amounts of effort into achieving particular goals—and like
him, we inevitably end up back where we started, without a sense of permanent accomplishment.
This is the essence of Camus’s“ absurd.” He argues that the best possible response
to it is to do what Sisyphus does—embrace the absurdity of our existence and be happy.
Smash Mouth allegedly encourages listeners to approach the absurdity of existence in
the same manner. While “So Insane” asks us to fix the world, “All Star” asks us
to learn to love our crumbling hellscape. To quote their magnum opus:
“Well the years start coming and they don't stop coming
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running Didn't make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb So much to do, so much to see
So what's wrong with taking the back streets?”
Now, this might be simply hedonism. Given that the years “don’t stop coming,”
making life a headlong dive toward the grave, it literally makes no sense to do anything
other than “live for fun”—that is, to spend one’s life finding and pursuing the
things that bring the greatest amount of subjective fulfilment. But, maybe, just maybe, it’s
a reminder that death will come for us all, and that, like Sisyphus, we should find happiness
in the absurdity of our world. In a sorta-similar way, “Holiday in My Head” conveys the
idea that meaning is arbitrary, rather than objective, and that this is a cause for celebration.
Without externally-imposed meanings to trap us in particular ways of being, we are free
to run our lives as we wish.
“You look around at your sleepy little town And think that this is as good as it gets
Well what you're looking at is heaven-sent I got a holiday in my head
I'm just looking for paradise in my living room.”
According to Myle’s existentialist reading, Smash Mouth argues that it doesn’t matter
what “sleepy little town” you find yourself stuck in, whether that be a dead-end job,
or your own barricaded office space, or any other situation that at first glance appears
boring and meaningless. We may create a “holiday in our head” any time we choose, regardless
of our external conditions. It’s a cheerier version of Camus’ protagonist Meursault
in The Stranger. After being sent to prison and sentenced to death for murder - he creates
his own holiday in his head as he opens his heart to the indifference of the universe
and cheerily imagines the spectators furiously denouncing him at his own execution. Or, less
bleakly, if Sisyphus can find enjoyment in pushing a rock up a hill forever, we can certainly
look around for the “paradise in our living room,” no matter how shitty your futon is.
But if you’re looking to find absurdism distilled in song form, it’d be hard to
beat “Story of My Life,” in which the narrator describes his endless run of bad
luck, and his affirmative response to it:
“It doesn't matter what I do, I just can't seem to win
But here I go again.”
Now, if this is just some self-help esque “when you get knocked down, get up again”
mumbo jumbo- it’s not Camus. But if this some acceptance of the incessant, often pointless,
effort of life - then it’s pretty Absurdist. Like Sisyphus rolling that boulder uphill,
watching it roll down, and rolling it back up again, the narrator keeps engaging with
life, no matter how many times it kicks him in the balls. Even when his attempts to socialize
and find love are thwarted by his own rotten luck and ineptitude, he decides he’ll “go
again.”
To quote Camus: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Steve Harwell happy.
Now, did the members of Smash Mouth read a truckload of Sartre and Camus back in the
early 90s and decide to create a band dedicated to spreading existentialist ideas? Probably
not. But the band’s emphasis on authenticity, positivity, and chinstrap beards in the face
of bad, or indifferent, circumstances definitely strikes a chord with those of us who have
a soft spot for a certain brand of depressing European philosophy. Nevertheless, it’s
really hard to say any of this is deep with a straight face, so sorry Myles. We’re going
to have to say “dumb.” Please let us out of the office.
But what do you think, Wisecrack? Was this hostage situation all for naught? Is Myles
reading meaning into these songs that isn’t quite there? Or have we barely begun to scratch
the surface of what Smash Mouth can tell us about this crazy adventure called life? Let
us know in the comments, god help us, and as always, thanks for watching. Peace.