Welcome To The Skip Button
When I say the phrase “All Star by Smash Mouth”, what comes to mind? If you’re a millennial like me, you might think of soul patches, Eddie Murphy’s iconic performance in Shrek, or predominantly-white bars with DJ’s who knew exactly when people were just drunk enough to fumble their way through the pre-chorus at the top of their lungs. If you’re a Gen Z-er, you might think of the endless memes that have, against all odds, kept this 1999 hit in the back of our collective minds to this day.
This generational distinction might be due to the simple fact that we millennials are getting older and wiser (after all, the years don’t stop coming, do they?). As I hurtle towards my late-20’s, I’ve noticed a phenomenon in the way my friends talk about songs like “All Star”. As teenagers growing up in a pre-post-irony world, my generation took the phrase “guilty pleasure song” and wrung it dry, deploying it whenever necessary for fear we were the only people who felt legitimately seen by the music we were listening to. Now, as adults, we’ve gone through enough humiliation and emotional trauma to begin asking ourselves: were the songs we used to feel so guilty for loving… actually good? Now that we’ve had the time to settle into our own skin and take pride in the music that made us, it seems we’re slowly realizing that perhaps not only are songs like “All Star” undeserving of mockery, but are in fact worth celebrating.
As someone who used to shield my iPod screen as I pretended not to be listening to The Cheetah Girls soundtrack, I’m pretty stoked about this shift. But I also can’t help but be a little mournful for all the years we wasted; all the eye-rolls we insisted on feigning as we swallowed the urge to sing along with whatever boy band, post-grunge group, or novelty record the Bar Mitzvah MC happened to be playing. Which got me thinking, how did we get here? How did a song like “All Star” simultaneously take over the charts and produce such self-loathing and shame? How did we spend years convincing ourselves that we shouldn’t like this song, even as we insisted on hearing it everywhere we went?
The era that birthed songs like “All Star” was characterized by much musical experimentation, with technology both in and out of the industry inspiring people to be as weird as possible. To be sure, this meant that for every classic, there were some clunkers. But as we hacked our way through all the music being thrown at us, what music got caught in the crossfire? Which artists received punishment simply for being a part of the wrong movement at the wrong time? Now that we’re all grown up, is it perhaps time to right some wrongs?
These are the questions I plan on answering on The Skip Button. Each episode, I’m going to take an artist, album, or moment in pop music history that we as a society have given our stamp of disapproval, and finally give them a fair shot. My goal is to keep my mind and heart as open as possible as I do a deep dive into some of music’s most hated entities. I’m pretty sure that not every episode will end in some cathartic revelation that this music low-key deserved critical acclaim. However, along the way, I’m going to talk with friends, musicians, and journalists to get some insights into how this music ended up being so widely ridiculed. I’m hoping that in doing so, I’ll find some diamonds in the rough, and maybe even encourage some people to approach music more open-mindedly than they did when they were in high school.
If not… then I’m about to listen to a whole lot of Nickelback for nothing.
— Ben Barzilai
ABOUT THE HOST
Ben Barzilai got a BA in Music with a 3.4 GPA and spent a couple years as a music publicist so now he thinks can host a music podcast.
