All Star (Shrek)

Everything about this song is deliberately excessive, and that's the point. The production is thick and sugary, the guitar riff is enormous in the way arena rock always tried to be enormous, and the drums hit with the confidence of a band that assumes you already know their name. Smash Mouth arrived in the late nineties on the back of ska-punk's commercial wave, but what they were really selling was a particular brand of post-ironic enthusiasm — music that sounded like it was winking without ever fully committing to the wink. Steve Harwell's vocals are smooth and radio-ready, delivered with a casual bravado that doesn't leave much room for doubt or nuance. "All Star" became inescapable in 1999 and then became a meme and then became a genuine artifact — a song so thoroughly embedded in collective memory that it has outlasted every critical dismissal. The Shrek soundtrack used it cannily: it's the sound of the late nineties wearing its cultural confidence without irony, which is exactly the right energy for an ogre who refuses to be what the world expects. Lyrically it's about not fitting in, not in a sad way, in a triumphant and slightly unhinged way. You don't reach for this song so much as it reaches for you — it arrives at parties, in malls, in the memory of a specific year, and your only job is to decide how much you're going to resist.