Looking back at the ’90s through a cracked rear view…
[Video]
[4.14]
Ian Mathers: I know Hootie, sir, and you are no Hootie. Good day!
[1]
Thomas Inskeep: Shut the fuck up and step away from the Hootie & the Blowfish classic, Posty.
[0]
Frank Falisi: But like, Post Malone covers Hootie and the Blowfish for a virtual concert celebrating the 25th anniversary of Pokémon is an actual Simpsons joke???
[1]
Samson Savill de Jong: This is the best song Post Malone has ever made. Thank you Pokémon (?) for making Post Malone (??) cover Hootie & the Blowfish (???) because even though this song doesn’t sound like any of these things (including a Post Malone song), I also think all three of the elements were necessary to produce it, like some sort of alchemy where you’d never see the ingredients in the final product. My advice is to forget its confusing creation and enjoy the song.
[9]
Alfred Soto: Better whey-voiced ’90s earnestness in the middle of my journey than the lit-like-an-airport space of someone’s idea of ’80s pop.
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Only Wanna Be With You” should run on cheap nostalgia, but there’s something in Post Malone’s unpretentious delivery, combined with the synth line approximating a Pokémon center, that elevates the whole track inexplicably into something warm and delightful. I doesn’t hurt that I was born the same year that the first Pokémon game was released, and I’ve played every game since.
[7]
David Moore: Inexplicable, maybe, but no more inexplicable than anything else. Like in 1994, Hootie and the Blowfish put out Cracked Rear View, which was the first cassette I ever bought and I have no idea why, since I have no memory of knowing anything about them, let alone liking them enough to make it my first album purchase, which you’d think would be a big deal? And then in 2000, the Pokémon franchise, which I was too old for by about two or three years, decides to put out a movie, with an accompanying soundtrack that launches the Norwegian duo M2M, who in 2006 become a formative cobblestone in my path to whatever it is my current critical sensibility is. But why? The midpoint of those two years I guess is when Pokémon first came out, but I remember being aware of it as a sensation in high school. I heard about Pokémon for the first time in 1997, because of the strobe controversy, and clearly it wasn’t that popular yet because I also remember all news accounts awkwardly clarifying that “Pokémon” was a portmanteau for pocket monsters, which is something I literally haven’t thought about since 1997, although it’s right there in the first sentence of the Pokémon Wikipedia so maybe this isn’t that weird to most people? That “Pokemon” is short for “pocket monsters“? Anyway, what I’m saying is, it doesn’t seem that inexplicable, given everything else that is and will be instead of other things that are not and will not be, that Post Malone, who I’ve never really had the time of day for, except for that one song I used to play at the graduations for my alternative high school — and to my knowledge is the only Post Malone song I’ve ever heard in its entirety until now and is certainly the only Post Malone song I have in my iTunes, since, I mean, who even uses iTunes anymore, I feel like if I update the software it will self-destruct, I’m surprised this computer has even survived so long, that must have been four years ago? … Where was I? Oh yeah, damn, he connected a lot of dots on this one, bless his heart.
[6]