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Ruin your weekend with Smash Mouth's All-Star as performed by Windows XP system sounds

Ruin your weekend with Smash Mouth's All-Star as performed by Windows XP system sounds

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It has now been more than 15 years since Windows XP was released, and no one is less surprised by this than Smash Mouth. “Well the years start coming and they don’t stop coming,” frontman Steve Harwell prophetically sang on the band’s 1999 hit “All Star.” And indeed just two years later, Windows XP arrived, dazzling the world with a two-column Start menu, fast user switching, and a now-iconic landscape photo of Sonoma County, California.

It also introduced us to a new world of system error message sounds, including a range of angry tones that, when assembled together in just the right way, reproduce “All Star” in all of its majesty. YouTuber James Nielssen, who has something of a side business in Smash Mouth-related video content, posted the Windows XP version of “All Star” to his channel on Friday.

It follows a version of “All Star” in which every word is changed to the opening “somebody,” a version of Nickelback’s “Photograph” in which every word is replaced by the “All Star” “somebody,“All-Star” with every other word reversed, “All Star” with the words ordered by Scrabble score, and perhaps most ambitiously, “All Star” but every other word is "bee" from Bee Movie and the instrumental is Seinfeld.

And just like that, your weekend is ruined. It was looking like such a good weekend, too. For additional Smash Mouth content, we strongly endorse the 56-minute Neil Cicierega remix project, “Mouth Sounds.”

Now get your game on. Go play.