"way it goes" by Hippo Campus, Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Formed at the Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Hippo Campus consists of bandmates who studied Jazz, while lead vocalist Jake Luppen studied opera. Guitarist Nathan Stocker suggested the name Hippo Campus, after taking a psychology class, but separating the word hippocampus into two words because it sounded sexual. After working as an independent band and touring with acts like Modest Mouse and appearing at Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, the band recorded their first album landmark with BJ Burton who has worked with Bon Iver.

GRAB A GUITAR AND JUST MOAN AND SHIT.   The second single from landmark, “way it goes,” is a self-aware hipster anthem about “kids these days.” The setting of the song is Cumberland, Wisconsin in the early spring. The music video visualizes the setting—a party in a cabin of twenty-somethings hanging out, drinking beer, and playing music. There's also some suspicious Fruit-Loop looking cereal passed around and some trippy light effect on the tree at night. Is that a natural or drug induced phenomenon? The next day the snow starts to melt. The lyrics of the song spend most of the time describing the kids in the song, their fashion conscience--how they've got "the Doc Martens on" and their penchant for obscure '90s records, like the indie rock band Pavement. The kids of the Hippo Campus generation, late millennials in their early 20s when this song came out in 2017, prefer to listen to "easy going shit" in which the singer half-heartedly "grab[s] a guitar and / Just moan[s] and shit[s]." The differences in the music cultures between the pop-punk/emo early millennials and the chill-wave, EDM of late millennials felt drastic. I remember one day around 2013 listening to the Alternative Sirius XM station thinking I didn't know any of the groups that were playing. I felt old and irrelevant. 

WE'RE WEIRD, BUT LORD KNOWS WE'RE TRYING. I still think that there's an "older brother" appeal to music when we first start listening to the radio or finding bands we really like. The boys in the band are cool and we want to be like them. They dictate our sense of fashion, how we see the world. But then you get be 25 and your older brothers in the band have called it quits. They've gotten "real jobs" and so should you. And the last thing you want to do is listen to your younger brothers band. Discovering new music in high school and college felt effortless, but at some point, it starts to be hard work, and there's just too much of it. That was me from 25-30 something, which made me miss out on a lot of great music. It's also caused me to try to catch up, too. Believe me, there are some days when the last thing I want to do is listen to any music, let alone some of the new kids' stuff. But there is a reason I chose music out of all other subjects to blog about daily, mainly that a song can help me understand the world in a way that no other medium can. YouTube's algorithm knows what kind of music I will click on, so after watching a quarantine concert by COIN, I was recommended several full-length concerts by Hippo Campus. And that's how I started listening to Hippo Campus. There's plenty of other stories about how I started listening to younger artists, how I started respecting younger voices. Ultimately, isn't that life? Don't we have to stop living under our older siblings' shadows and start learning from those younger than us? 

Read “​way ​​it ​goes” by Hippo Campus on Genius