You can’t call us haters here because we’ve been of the utmost supporters of “Pineapple Express,” having blogged incessantly about its every move and are genuinely excited to see the film (we generally love David Gordon Green and Judd Apatow, so it’s like a two-birds with one stone kind of sweet deal).
However, we really loathe this original Huey Lewis & The News song, “Pineapple Express” we must admit (with apologies to all the soundtrack people; we’re surely not going to change the legion of people who already adore it). The track sounds like a bad parody of Huey Lewis, intentional or not. It makes us sea-sick, but then we’re predisposed to get ill every time a smooth saxophone stars playing on the unswabbed decks of anything vaguely resembling yacht rock.
No amount of retroactive irony is going to change this. And we admit the whole, “hey dude, high five, it’s Huey Lewis!,” blinding frat-like nostalgia that everyone is espousing over this track is herdist, annoying and just delusional. No hate on the film, and the soundtrack itself (which is very decent and you should buy it and all), but seriously? Those sick, insipid horns and guitar slides at the beginning? At least, classic Huey Lewis still stands up (even though we generally don’t like that sort of thing), this song sounds incredibly corny and cheesy and not in a good way. Maybe it’s further evidence that the track is purposely banal, but that’s missing the point. “The Power Of Love” from “Back To The Future” was a good song because it was a good song, not because it intentionally tried to be bad…in a good way? We don’t get that ideology at all and frankly, we don’t want to. Listen to “Paper Planes” and wash the bad taste out of your brain instead. The film’s first misstep in an otherwise unimpeachable campaign.