cobysev

It’s so popular from Shrek […]

[…] it started in Mystery Men.

I was 15 years old in 1999 when Smash Mouth dropped their second album, “Astro Lounge.” All Star was the hit song released on that album and it was all over the radio for the next couple years.

It was an extremely popular single at the time. Everyone in my school would drop everything to sing along if it came on the radio. Most of my friends (myself included) owned the album on CD. And to think the song was written as an afterthought, when they were finished with the album but needed more songs to fill it out a bit.

And yes, Mystery Men (1999) was the first film to prominently feature the song. But that film was technically a flop at the time of release, so most people didn’t even see it. Which is why no one knows that All Star was in that movie.

Right as the song’s popularity was finally starting to die down, Shrek (2001) released and brought All Star back to life. And it’s become the anthem for Shrek movies ever since.

It was an incredibly popular song on its own back in the day. Shrek just ensured it lasted for several generations instead of dying out in the early 2000s.

I was stationed in Japan with the US military between 2002-2005 and every evening at 5 PM, the Japanese and American national anthems would play on speakers across our base, signaling the end of the work day.

We were required to stop what we were doing and listen quietly and respectfully for both anthems. If we were outside, we’d have to stand at parade rest and face the nearest country flags we could see, or face toward the music if there were no flags visible nearby. When the American national anthem played, we had to snap to attention and salute for the entire song.

The Japanese national anthem is probably not my favorite ever national anthem, but I heard it every day for over 3 years and the hauntingly beautiful anthem has forever planted itself in my brain. It’s so calm and smooth compared to the almost militaristic march of the American anthem.

In certain communities, some people are known for posting specific types of content regularly.

For example, I started a series of essay-style video game reviews in a games community and they were pretty popular for a while. But I’m not updating them nearly as much as I used to, so I’ve just become another anonymous member on Lemmy now. Which is fine, I’m doing it for me, not for any Internet accolades.

Which reminds me, I should probably make a new one of those. It’s been a while.

When I first moved to the Fediverse, I discovered that my comments didn’t actually delete. That is, I used to use the then-new Sync for Lemmy, and every time someone deleted their comment, it would still show the original comment, but flag it as “deleted by creator” or something like that.

I noticed some people got around that by editing their comment to just be a period or something and then deleting it. But I learned early on to be sure of my posts before posting, and not to bother arguing with people online as your comments might come back to haunt you if you were in the wrong. Once it’s posted online, it might as well be permanent. It’s much better to own up to your mistake in the comments than try to delete your comments.

I use Voyager for Lemmy now and I don’t see deleted comments anymore with this app. But I suspect they’re still in the system, recorded for posterity on someone’s instance.

I post based on what makes ME happy. And maybe based on some recommendations from whatever small audience enjoys my stuff. I don’t give a shit about algorithms. If my stuff doesn’t become popular overnight, oh well. If I lose followers because I don’t post regularly, whatever. I enjoyed making it anyway and I’ll continue posting whenever I personally feel motivated to do so.

Future archivists can find my various content and enjoy it all in one sitting, but I won’t be pressured by corporations to keep pumping out sub-par content just to keep an algorithm going so they can make ad money off me.

Europeans got it right; work when you want to, take a few months off in the summertime to go travel/fishing/relaxing, and your business will be open whenever you’re available. That’s the philosophy I live my life by.

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t like live concerts. They’re too loud, the crowd is too noisy and disruptive, and unless you pay top dollar, you’re not even going to see the band all that well. I don’t get the celebrity worship thing that most people have; celebrities are normal human beings just like the rest of us. The only difference is that a lot of people know who they are because of a thing they did/do.

So I don’t get excited over meeting celebrities in person. I’d much rather listen to their albums at home, where I can hear a high-quality studio recording and really enjoy every bit of sound, every instrument, every enunciation of lyrics. Plus, it’s way cheaper. I can’t believe people shell out hundreds of bucks for what I’d consider an inferior experience.

Regardless, my wife has dozens of bands on her “want to see live” list and she inevitably drags me along with her. And despite not having a good time for most of them, there are a few that stuck out to me as being pretty interesting.

I can’t remember the dates very well, but we saw Papa Roach as one of the openers for Shinedown (the other opener being Asking Alexandria). I think it was around 2016 or 2017 in Nebraska. The other two bands were meh. The music was fine, but they had no stage presence. They just stood there and performed their songs. I might as well have put in my headphones and listened to their albums on my phone.

But Papa Roach was spectacular! They had real stage presence, addressing the audience constantly, and dancing all over the place while jamming. Their visual performance was very entertaining to watch.

And then the lead singer just ran off into the crowd! In the middle of a song, while still singing, he just ran up and down the aisles, shaking hands and high-fiving people. He covered 90% of that stadium over the course of 2 or 3 songs, and it was a pretty big professional basketball court. Dude had some serious energy to burn.

At the end of the night, my wife, who went specifically to see Shinedown and Asking Alexandria, agreed that Papa Roach was the best band that night.

A close second would be The Hu. We saw them at a tiny venue in Maplewood, MN a few years ago (2023 I think?). My wife paid for VIP passes and we actually sat in a room with them for over an hour, listening to them talk about their history, music, and Mongolian culture. More specifically, listening to a translator talking, as they didn’t speak much English. We even got to ask a bunch of questions, which their translator relayed back and forth for us.

At the end of the VIP meet & greet, they did video recordings with everyone. It was a normal photo op, but instead of a photo, they did a quick video with your phone where they did a vocalized grunt along with you. It was pretty unique.

Their concert was fun. Being in a small venue, it was more like a dance club than a giant stadium performance, so it felt more personal. My wife and I claimed a couple seats on a couch and had a blast listening to Mongolian Folk Metal all night.

My wife likes to buy VIP tickets everywhere she can, and no other band has had such a personal meet & greet as The Hu. We’ve gone backstage before and done photo op’s with some bands. But almost none of them spent a whole hour just hanging out and chatting with us. Skillet did an hour-long pre-concert for VIP pass holders when my wife and I saw them around 2020 (right before COVID shut everything down), but it was mostly just them talking a bit on stage, then performing some new songs before doing a photo op.

Taking this in another direction, my wife and I enjoy the stand-up comedian Bert Kreischer. My wife, who escaped from a redneck family and white trailer trash upbringing, especially relates to his brand of comedy. So of course we needed to go to his live shows.

If you thought his Netflix comedy specials were raunchy, his live performances are extremely graphic. He doesn’t have Netflix breathing standards down his neck, so he can really let loose and tell some of the most unhinged and perverse stories to the crowd. And he’s drinking beers the whole time he’s doing his routine, so his stories get crazier the longer he stays up on stage. He even shared some very personal (and embarassing) stories about other celebrities he knows that I haven’t seen told anywhere else. It felt like bonus content that you can’t access unless you attend the live shows.

We’ve seen him live twice, and the second time, he dragged his wife out to the stage to help him re-tell a story because he couldn’t remember the details. Which you could tell was not planned because it took a couple minutes to track her down. He even called her on his phone when she wasn’t responding from backstage.

She was really awkward being on stage, too. She wasn’t used to being a part of his set. But once she got a little more comfortable, she practically took the mic from him because he was messing up all the details of the story. The crowd was rolling every time he started to tell the story and she’d be like, “That’s completely wrong, it went like this…” Then they would argue over telling the “funny story” versus the “real story.” Because his version of events was funnier, but the actual story was kind of boring. Married life, am I right?

He also asked the audience’s opinion on his set, because he prepared a bunch of new material for this tour, but people kept asking for some of his classic stories. He decided that after this event, he was going to try and mix old and new stories into the rest of his tour. So he’s not just working on a strict script; he’s pretty loose and willing to shake things up live.

He also didn’t seem to be tied to a strict timeline for his set. I think we saw him perform on stage for over 3 hours on that second show. He had kind of wrapped his planned material when he asked if we had any favorite stories we wanted to hear, then he went on for another hour or so, retelling classics.

Despite the lengthy show, the place stayed packed until the end. We were all having fun with him; it wasn’t just him talking to an audience, it felt like we were all just having a good time hanging out with a hilarious friend. And this was a massive stadium too, not a small venue! I’ll definitely buy tickets to any Bert Kreischer performances that pass through my area.

Aziz Ansari is incredible at improv humor. I remember the first time I noticed it was one of the Comedy Central Roasts (the James Franco one, I believe) where his set was just roasting things other comedians said during their time at the mic. Most people show up with practiced roasts ready to go. He just winged it on the spot, and I think he was better than most everyone else at that roast.