My Chemical Romance has their first single since 2014 yesterday. Kendrick Lamar just fell a new album† But did you know this morning, Owl City remixed Smash Mouth’s Groundbreaking Hit “All Star”?
You may be wondering why we cover this on todaybusinessupdates.com, which is not a music website. My editor is probably wondering the same thing. But here are the technical corner(s):
- “All Star” stands for Internet culture as “Jane Eyre” stands for Gothic literature. It’s a classic. Especially with the rise of TikTok, songs to be memes now – be honest with yourself, did you know who capone was before the song “oh no no no” went viral? How many Gen Zers have listened to Fleetwood Mac for the first time because of the Ocean Spray longboarding man? Smash Mouth would have lost relevance much sooner if “All Star” didn’t appear in the opening scene of “Shrek,” a film inextricably linked to its second life on the Internet.
- Let’s Owl City, the solo project of electronic (technical angle!) musician Adam Young. The dude knows he’s a one-hit wonder, and he’s in on the joke. He wrote the lyrics, “You wouldn’t believe your eyes / If ten million fireflies / lit up the world while I fell asleep”, then claims he “got a thousand hugs from ten thousand lightning bugs.” Listen. I may be a writer who posts shit about Smash Mouth on Fridays to distract myself from other things (uhh, Elon Musk), but I ben a writer, and I’ll tell you, that text doesn’t make any fucking sense. But Owl City did what every joke on the internet should do: he committed to the bit, cementing himself as a star† When a fan asked him what he meant by that text, “Do every firefly hug you 1000 times, or only 1/10th of the bugs give you a hug?” — Young wrote a long Facebook post (yes, Facebook, a technical company – tech corner!) affirming that he was “hugged 1,000 times by 10,000 luminescent insects.” Great stuff here.
- John and Hank Green have helped shape the creative economy as we know it – their company DFTBA Records handles merchandise purchases for a number of independent internet personalities, and they co-founded VidCon, an annual convention on online video. Not to mention that they run one of the longest-running, major internet communities through their YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers. Online video? Big deal. How many congressional letters have been written to TikTok recently? Technical angle:† But to bring things back to “All Star,” the two 40-year-old men spent several months over the course of 2020 uploading only YouTube videos that read “All Star.” It was kind of pretty project.
- Owl City’s remix of “All Star” is distributed digitally only. Is that a technical angle?
Anyway, if you want to distract yourself from the doom and gloom of technology, have you considered listening to Owl City’s remix of “All Star”? Did you read the very serious press release, in which Smash Mouth’s Paul Delisle calls the song “a wonderfully creative and unique reinvention,” noting that it’s an “honour” that Owl City remixed it? Did you know that Adam Young says that “All Star” is one of his all-time favorite songs, and does he mean it, or is that part of the joke? Did he really get 1000 hugs from 10,000 lightning bugs? each†
Okay, here’s the song:
