Gaming

Post Malone Covered A Hootie And The Blowfish Classic For His ‘Pokémon’ Partnership

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The Pokémon franchise is commemorating its 25th anniversary this year; While Pokémon Red and Blue, the first games released in the US, came out stateside in 1998, the original Japanese games, Red and Green, were released in 1996. Anyway, part of the celebration has included collaborating with Post Malone on a couple things. Malone is performing a virtual concert for Pokémon Day this weekend, but ahead of that, he has released a new cover tied to the partnership: a rendition of the Hootie And The Blowfish classic “Only Wanna Be With You.”

Malone keeps the cover mostly stylistically faithful to the original version, and even though the song doesn’t have any clear preexisting connection to Pokémon, Malone has turned in a fun recording nonetheless. He slightly tweaked the lyrics, shifting the focus of one line from the Miami Dolphins to his favorite NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys, as he sings, “I’m such a baby ’cause the Cowboys make me cry.” Longtime Pokémon fans may have also noticed that the song has a sample from the second-generation Game Boy/Game Boy Color games Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal, specifically the music that plays in Ecruteak City.

Darius Rucker, who of course sang and co-wrote the ’90s classic, is over the moon about Malone’s rendition, tweeting of it this morning, “The smile in my face will not leave for a long time. This is awesome. My bro @PostMalone bringing it. Hell yes man!!!!!!!!!”

Listen to Malone’s rendition of “Only Wanna Be With You” above.

Metallica’s Twitch Concert Audio Was Apparently Replaced With 8-Bit Music To Avoid Copyright Issues

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Metallica played a concert to kick off BlizzCon on Twitch, but apparently not everyone got to actually hear the music they were playing at the online event. The first day of the annual Blizzard event streamed on Twitch on Friday night, and with it came a special performance by Metallica. But the actual audio that played on some channels got caught up in one of the music issues that often plagues streaming content.

On Friday, Twitter lit up with videos from the performance where, instead of Metallica classics, nondescript 8-bit music seemed to be playing instead.

And it wasn’t a dub; multiple people shared clips of varying length where Metallica is clearly on the Twitch channel but some other music is playing. Though that moment spread online like wildfire, it apparently wasn’t what happened on the main Blizzard Twitch page. Rather, it was the front page of Twitch Gaming which had to replace the music.

Still, it’s an interesting bit of irony at the complicated state of Twitch and the music copyright issues that often plague the platform. And as many people pointed out, DCMA takedowns are an issue in internet content creation that came directly from Metallica’s decades-old fight with Napster that set the tone for music copyrights.

No one seemed to have any sympathy for Metallica here, mostly because they’ve dealt with these sorts of issues in the past. Anyone who has streamed a video game that has original music in it has likely encountered takedown or muting issues, and game makers have had to introduce music elimination options to help streamers prevent their content from getting taken down.

It’s unlikely the moment will change much of anything, but it certainly felt like things came full circle on Friday night.