All My CDs, pt 55: Ellen Hardcastle

Ellen Hardcastle - Hank Green

Back when I reviewed Still Got Legs, I warned you I have others in my collection that I mainly own because I'm a fan of something else. The next three albums qualify, since I first became familiar with Hank Green through Vlogbrothers, the youtube channel he runs with his brother and my favorite author John Green. But I do genuinely enjoy most of his songs.

This album has a confusing cover. The musician's name is Hank Green. The portrait on the front is of a man named Phineas Gage. And the title is the name of a fan, unrelated to the album's cover or any of its content. But despite the unrelatedness of the album title to anything relevant, I can't help but find it refreshing. I'm sick of albums named after songs, yet it seems rare to the point of near-nonexistence that an album is not. Not only is this unoriginal, it makes review-writing awkward, since I end up saying "the title track" more times than I would prefer. If an album is not named after a song, it is often named after the band, which is equally awkward; more often than not it ends up simply being called their "self-titled album." I wonder what would happen if a band named one album after themselves, and named another "Self-titled Album." What would reviewers do then?

I digress. And so, too, does Ellen Hardcastle, much of the time. Hank Green's musical career is not trivial (he's made four albums so far), but it's overshadowed by his parallel careers as a vlogger, entrepreneur, community organizer, educator, and activist. His music seems to exist mainly as an extension and expression of these other interests and identities. As a result his songs are usually quite niche, refering to inside jokes from online communities, dated popculture references, or oddities of science. An example of the latter is Phineas Gage, the man pictured on the cover and whose story is expounded in one song. Another example is track one, Strange Charm, which catchily summarizes the science of quarks.

Of the songs inspired by pop culture, it's unfortunate that they often end up sounding dated and inane. Songs like Farmville, A Bad Day on Chat Roulette, and Worst News of 2009 seem almost designed to evoke this effect, and though they're catchy and enjoyable. Farmville is especially prone to getting stuck in my head, and I'm not sure why, since I never played the game that inspired it.

But What Would Captain Picard Do and This is Not Harry Potter somehow do not seem to fall into the same category as these other popcultural songs. Maybe it's because they're about older works of media whose popularity and relevance has a proven longevity. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Harry Potter have both inspired multiple generations with profound themes and lessons, and that's what those songs are about, not the fleeting and shallow interest of faddish games and celebrity gossip.

Some of my favorite Hank Green songs, however, are just about normal human experiences as seen through his particularly intellectual perspective. Adult Female is one of those - a love song, and a very simple one at that, which also criticizes the common cliches of pop love songs (such as infantilizing nicknames like "baby").

Adult Female is a slow song, but most of Hank Green's music is very fast-paced and jaunty, with lyrics delivered at near-superhuman rapidity. This makes it uniquely helpful in any running playlist, and indeed, many of my best runs have been to songs like Fermi Paradox, which is almost dizzyingly frenetic. Plus on long runs I sometimes find myself pondering the mystery of whether life exists outside of Earth, among other pressing questions. But the best running song on the album is Shake a Booty, the "dance song with a good message", demonstrating another principle I have discovered: dance songs are usually good running songs.

Next: This Machine Pwns Noobs.