Shawn Mendes, the Canadian singer behind “Stitches” who looks eerily like the Flash, has a bone to pick with James Corden.
Watch: Shawn Mendes and James Corden mash up TLC’s “No Scrubs” with Mendes’s “Stitches”
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
Corden won’t stop singing hits from the ‘90s on The Late Late Show, which Mendes, a singer in 2016, takes as an insult.
It’s nothing personal, Corden told Mendes during Wednesday’s episode. It’s just that music was better in the ‘90s than it is today.
To prove him wrong, Mendes challenged Corden to a Better Then/Better Now riff-off, a.k.a. a rip-off of that one scene from Pitch Perfect.
Accompanied by the a cappella group The Filharmonic, the two prepared to do battle.
“I should warn you,” Corden said, “I’ve got hits from before you were born.”
“You’re older than me, we get it,” replied literal infant Shawn Mendes, born in 1998.
Mendes started things off with the Calvin Harris/Rihanna/Nils Sjoberg collaboration “This Is What You Came For,“ but Corden more than matched him with the Spice Girls classic “Wannabe.“
But then Corden squandered his win, beginning the next round with Kris Kross’s “Jump” — a major tactical error that forced him into awkward British white guy rapping. Mendes was easily able to defeat him with Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.“
With the score at one to one, Corden and Mendes decided to put aside their differences and unite the music of the ‘90s and the music of today into a single sound, mashing up TLC’s “No Scrubs” — a perfect song if ever there was one — with Mendes’s signature hit, “Stitches.“
Trying to prove that one decade’s music is better than another’s is a fool’s game, but at least this round gave us a late-night musical segment that doesn’t involve driving around in cars. In that, don’t we all win?
See More:
