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Like Hanson, Hootie and the Blowfish represented everything I hated about the commercial music industry. Decades later, they strike me as exactly the sort of thing a Trained #MOLE would shit out if you asked it for some radio-friendly unit shifters.

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Hootie's one big album, Cracked Rear View, was shovelled into the world in the US summer of 1994. Back then, I was contrasting them with bands like Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Less than a year before, RHCP had released Soul to Squeeze, one of their quietest yet most powerful songs;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XcN12uVHeQ

A couple of months after that, Pearl Jam released their second album Vs. Perhaps my favourite of their dozen studio albums. Certainly in my top 3.

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Ironic that since then, both RHCP and Pearl Jam have gone on to release a bunch of records that sound more like Hootie than their own early 90s work.

RHCP began their slide into the middle of the road with the 1999 release of Californication. They arrived there in 2002 on By The Way, with songs like Universally Speaking;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K98svvF0P_M

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With Pearl Jam it was more of a gradual drift. Beginning with the 1996 release of No Code, the ratio of rocking to yawning on their albums slowly shifted towards the latter. By the time of the avacado-covered, self-titled one in 2006, they'd gone full Hootie.

But perhaps this is why I hated Dad rock like Hootie and the Blowfish and Nickelback with such a passion. For me, they were emblematic of how the corporate machine tries to grind down every group of musicians to sales powder.

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