Smash Mouth Retweets Lolicon by Shadman, Deletes It

In reaffirming the fact of reality that we are now living in one of the weirdest timelines in the multiverse, Smash Mouth is back in the social media spotlight after giving a shout-out to a lolicon illustration by the notorious Rule 34 artist, Shaddai Prejean (a.k.a. Shadman) via Twitter yesterday.

It all began last night when America's favorite has-beens of the early 2000s tweeted out an illustration of a young girl wearing a Smash Mouth tank top while holding an “L” hand gesture to her forehead, accompanied by a lyric from the band’s viral hit “All Star”. Completely unbeknownst to them, they were actually retweeting one of the web’s most infamous artists, Shadman, best known for his sexually explicit Rule 34 illustrations and offensive humor.

Inevitably, the Internet soon erupted with curiosity and bafflement over Smash Mouth's embrace of Shadman's art, with several fans and followers of the band asking whether they knew anything about the artist behind the illustration.

Shortly after the retweet began circulating, Gizmodo ran an article with the headline "Smash Mouth Retweeted an Anime Porn Nazi," which referred to Shadman as “one of the alt-right's favorite artists.” The article was subsequently posted to threads on 4chan's /mu/, /co/ and /pol/ boards, where it was widely mocked for claiming that Shadman was a Nazi member of the "alt-right." Meanwhile, Shadman responded by tweeting screenshots of the article, sarcastically referring to it as "top tier journalism" and calling out the "alt-right" claim as "WTF?"

In an attempt to diffuse the controversy with humor, Smash Mouth tweeted “Just checked out his other ‘work’. Yes,….he may have issues,” before deleting the entire thread altogether. 2017… what a time to be alive.