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Music

Smash Mouth wrote a song called “Justin Bieber”

Considering our efforts to stay firmly on top of everything Justin Bieber-related, we were a little shocked to realize that we’d somehow missed reporting on a Justin Bieber-themed song written/recorded by Smash Mouth, those almost-bygone All Stars of joke-rock. Then again, given the generally accepted irrelevance of Smash Mouth – last seen inking a cookbook deal with Guy Fieri earlier this year and before that making headlines when frontman Steve Harwell agreed to eat two dozen eggs for charity and before that, uh, swaying around in billowy windbreakers over the end credits of Rat Race – maybe you’ll give us some leeway.

The fourth track on Magic, Smash Mouth’s newest album – yes, Smash Mouth has a new album it even hit #22 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart – “Justin Bieber” uses the Canadian pop prince as a stand-in for everything Harwell thinks is wrong-headed and fickle about contemporary pop culture. The song imagines an unthinkable near future where people are asking, “Whatever happened to Justin Bieber / Was he all that or was he left behind?”

Given The Mouth’s own two-hit wonder status, they’d know from fickle, and maybe see the public fascination with pro-tooled popstars, which has been a thing as long as pop music has existed, as a condensed, fun house mirror reflection of their own overnight rise and fall. (Magic also includes a cover of Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” which is a bit on-the-nose, even by Smash Mouth standards.) Even more likely, Smash Mouth is beating back against the tides of insignificance lapping against their adult contempo surf-rock sound by bogusly driving up their Google searchability by titling a song “Justin Bieber.” You’re welcome, boys!

If you hate your ears, you can listen to the song below. It’s mercifully short, though also an eternity when compared to the preferable option of listening to absolutely nothing at all.

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