Meltdown / SmashMouth /

neochina (re and de territorialization)

0-1
Meltdown.
Smash Mouth!
What mean?
One two.

1. According to urban dictionary entry 2, Smash Mouth refers to doing copious amounts of drugs - specifically coke - through your nose or mouth in one grand gesture.
2. It's the late 1990s band that wrote that Shrek song and that other song.

These two meanings seem unrelated. Luckily the internet, being the incredibly extensive entropic-permutation-repetition machine that it is, tends to cycle through codes in an arbitrary fashion to the extent that eventually all disparate things connect in some way. In other words, I stumbled upon a very neat blog by a woman named Alice Lee that synthesizes these two otherwise disconnected meanings (put another way, give the internet enough time and it will produce god...or it is god...).

One of Lee's articles "12 Hit Songs From The 90's Secretly About Crystal Meth" lists Walkin' on the Sun as a song that is - well - secretly about meth without elaborating at all on why this is the case.

Ok, meth isn't coke, but they'r both uppers that are often snorted or gummed. And this is consistent with other takes from other weird parts of the internet...

According to a poorly verified / evidenced (and that't not necessarily a bad thing...) Column for Audiofemme, Smash Mouth's 'Walkin' On the Sun' (their second well known song next to All Star, the Shrek song) is

"about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots...the chaos of the time...though he sees marijuana as a peace-maker [referencing 'toking'], he warns about the perils of harder drugs with a prescriptive in the last verse: “Put away the crack before the crack put you away.”

But we'll come back to the coke and meth later...

For now let's take a look at some of the lyrics here:

If you got the goods, they'll come and buy it just to stay in the clique (1
So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out (2
Allow if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive (3
And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow (4
But if the offer is shun, you might as well be walkin' on the sun (5

Twenty-five years ago, they spoke out and they broke out...(6
And fought back against the melt-down (7

So don't sit back, kick back and watch the world get bushwhacked (8
News at ten, your neighborhood is under attack (9
Put away the crack before the crack put you away (10
You need to be there when your baby's old enough to relate (11

Let's just extrapolate the important notions: desire and capitalism (1), a sense of urgency related to temporality and survival (2-3), and the possibility of there being no future due to some sort of heat death or sun related heat overload (4-5) with it's ultimate culmination in social o-/re- pression and meltdown (6-7) from which follows world destruction (8) narrated by the media. And finally,  territoriality associated wish Fisherian middle america and nuclear family aesthetics (9) which is ultimately de-territorialized by uppers/stimulant Drugs (10-11).

This was 1997. Shoot ahead 2 years to 99, prime Y2K territory.

In 99 we get their other hit All Star. Let's take a look at some lyrics:

Well the years start coming and they don't stop coming (1
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running (2
Didn't make sense not to live for fun (3
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb (4
So much to do, so much to see (5

It's a cool place and they say it gets colder (6
You're bundled up now, wait till you get older (7
But the meteor men beg to differ (8
Judging by the hole in the satellite picture (9
The ice we skate is getting pretty thin (10
The water's getting warm so you might as well swim (11
My world's on fire, how about yours? (12
That's the way I like it and I never get bored (13

Again, lets extrapolate the important notions: A sense of urgency (1 and 5) related to speed, motion, limits (2) and desire (3-4). Climate change and the conflict that arises between personal experience and abstract scientific notions handed down to us as consumers from authorities on high. That is, the world is cold and inhuman (6-7 and 10), but the "meteor" man asserts it is getting warmer (8, 11) - and here we should note that in the song it sounds like the word 'media' man, not meteor man, which links up nicely with the next line (9) which refers to media and communications technology with a paired association to the ozone layer burning up. And, again, the ultimate culmination of these events being a fiery end tied up with desire (11-13).

To synthesize both these hits - the 'natural' geological world and the social world alike are de-territorializing or accelerating towards a meltdown singularity and all we can do in the meanwhile is participate in the market and utilize the effects of the heat to enjoy ourselves.

It would be cringey to force a connection between accelerationism and Smash Mouth so lucky for us that the connections seem to make themselves. Resonances interlock and autoproduce.

As I pointed out elsewhere - Lemurian TV War: Teletubbies and the Lemurian Occult - the 90s leading up to the anticipated singularity of Y2K lent itself to a paranoiac and apocalyptic cultural (un)consciousness and associated resonances:

"On the one hand, mundanely, and as pointed out by the CCRU, the 90s, lurching each day closer towards the singularity of Y2k, was a time of techno-anxiety and accelerating culture, so its no surprise we see these themes reflected in...[media]. On the other, it could be the case that something hyperstitional occurred, and that random patterns in thematic content  autoproduced, gained resonance, and realized themselves. In other words, either the CCRU picked up on themes in the culture, or hyperstitioned these themes into being to begin with. Whichever way the temporal vector runs (and for templexive and hyperstitional phenomenon, it is precisely the point that it runs both ways...), we have the connections laid out bare..."

But enough of me quoting myself. It's time to get back to the coke and meth...

If the 90s were a time of accelerating culture it wasn't simply because of the technology and the social transitions, it was because people were taking uppers like crazy.

It's nothing new to say that the 90s were a big time for meth - also known as crank, crystal, or speed.

It's unclear if Smash Mouth were on meth. I read somewhere once that they were, but I can't find that article now. But what comes to mind for me first is Korn. These guys were methed out of their minds during most of their career (check out Hed's autobiography Save Me From Myself where he documents how he quit meth and found Jesus). Now, where Hed, guitarist of 90s nu metal act Korn, went from meth to God, 90s musician Scott Stapp (singer for 90s Christian hard work band Creed) went from God to Meth and suffered a severe psychotic break wherein he believed he was a CIA agent tasked with...well read the piece...(also, see this Ranker list of 90s songs about meth).

But it wasn't just musicians mixing meth and God. Nick Land, in what seems like a constant psychotic 90s jungle-techno-rave binge, met and killed God through meth.

In his book Thirst for Annihilation (pg. 75-76) which was written 'between deaths' in which Land states that he has been beyond and back again, Land writes

" 'Yeah, I 've killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I
got frenzied, it was an ecstasy, I never knew I could hate so much.'
'So God's dead?'
'If that's who he was. That fucking kid lied all the time. I just
hope it's true this time.'
' ... and we have killed him' writes Nietzsche, but - destituted of
community - I crave a little time with him on my own.
In perfect communion I lick the dagger foamed with God's blood. "