Review Summary: Inside (The Songs (Only)) is a collection of clever, catchy, intermittently funny songs by and about a self-obsessed comedian
Inside, the special: Bo Burnham is a court jester performing aboard the Titanic, asking you to keep watching til the end while panic creeps in.
Inside (The Songs): Bo Burnham is an intermittently funny, sometimes grating comic with some solid songwriting chops
Full disclosure, I *loved* Bo Burnham’s Netflix special, “Inside.” It’s got all the elements of the Burnham formula: wit, meta-comedy, absurdism, cultural cynicism, with a sprinkling of sincerity. But, beneath the song-and-sketch veneer, “Inside” is, at its core, a piece of cinema, and an expertly crafted one at that. It contains a multi-part structure built around the story of a creator slowly succumbing to despair and escalating dissociation, fueled by a complicated and multidimensional relationship with the Internet.
As elegantly explained by notkanyewest in the main review, Inside (The Songs) is a uniquely bad way to experience this special. By divorcing the songs from the film’s visuals, and by leaving out the interstitials, this album robs the songs of crucial emotional and narrative context. None of the songs here are untouched - it’s just a matter of degree. At one end, very few of the jokes and hooks in (Emmy-nominated) “Comedy” require visual or narrative context - it’s just an A+ comedy song in its own right. At the other end, “30,” a song about Bo’s anxiety about turning 30, is robbed of the emotional context of Bo sitting alone, in the dark, on camera while watching the clock strike midnight on the eve of his 30th birthday. “White Woman’s Instagram” is an ok song, but in the album it’s robbed of the film’s obsessively staged visuals. And, while “All Eyes on Me” definitely works as a song, in the film it’s an absolutely crushing crescendo to the protagonist’s downward spiral.
I could go on and on about the cinematic and thematic aspects of the special, but at the end of the day, Sputnik is a music website. So, while I feel a bit dirty about doing it, I’m gonna review Inside (The Songs) as presented here: an album composed of 20 separate pieces of music, disembodied from the film that gives them so much meaning.
Musically, what immediately jumps out from this album are the vocal hooks - they’re written as if to say “just TRY keeping this out of your head.” This applies regardless of tone: “White Woman’s Instagram” (silly), “That Funny Feeling” (reflective), and “All Eyes on Me” (despondent) cover vastly different emotional terrain, but all feature choruses with simple, repetitive vocals that draw the listener into the song’s mood. Both “Bezos” cuts are wildly catchy and instantly meme-able: if the “CEO, entrepreneur, born in 1964” ever deigns to return to Earth and walk among us mere mortals again, both songs should immediately be chanted in his direction. “Goodbye” revisits several of the special’s most memorable hooks in its second half, and weaves them together seamlessly into an emotionally rewarding conclusion.
As well-crafted as some of these vocals are, though, Bo often overestimates their impact and/or staying power. “FaceTime with My Mom (Tonight),” “Sexting,” and “Problematic” all feature bridges with repetitive hooks that don’t quite click, musically or comically. “Welcome to the Internet” features an effective hook: “Could I interest you in everything, all of the time? / Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime.” In the film, it’s worthy of repetition because it distills a major theme. As a song, though, it’s just a moderately clever line repeated to the point of bloat.
From a more general songwriting standpoint, the quality is a bit hit-or-miss. “How the World Works” is an out-and-out “miss” for me, as it (a) isn’t really a “song,” and (b) leans into Bo’s at-times-grating tendency to overexplain jokes. “Problematic,” “FaceTime with My Mom” and “Sexting” are written as formulaic pop songs that, musically speaking, are also a bit boring. From a comedic standpoint, “Sexting” has some decent jokes, but even that doesn’t really hold a candle to Bo’s better comedic material. “White Woman’s Instagram” and “That Funny Feeling” are tracks that bombard the listener with silly or ironic imagery in their verses before transitioning to repetitive choruses. “That Funny Feeling” is the stronger of the two, with its folk aesthetic allowing for a more complex and sincere emotional experience as the lyrics turn inward. Still, at five minutes, the song drags a bit and is one of many that exhausts the listener through repetition.
When the songs hit, though, they can really hit. “Bezos I,” “Unpaid Intern,” and “Sh*t” are quick and energetic cuts that are irresistible, with “Sh*t,” in particular, contrasting a delectable beat with despondent lyrics. “All Eyes on Me” is an immersive, atmospheric dub track that pulls the listener into Bo’s lowest point, and features the album’s most chilling lyric: “You say the ocean’s rising like I give a sh*t / You say the whole world’s ending, honey it already did / You’re not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried / Got it? Good, now get inside.” Viral hit “Welcome to the Internet” is stuffed with clever chord and tempo changes, multilayered instrumentality, and lyrics describing the slow process of Gen Z’s overexposure to and dependency on the Internet. It’s also Bo’s best vocal performance on the album, showing off impressive range and a variety of deliveries.
From a purely musical standpoint, though, the highlight here is “Comedy.” Revisiting similar lyrical territory as “Sad,” the song takes a meta, mostly-ironic, self-deprecating journey through Bo’s relationship with his comedy. The song adopts an operatic structure, cycling through nine distinct sections ranging in genre from piano balladry, to angelic chants, to upbeat electro-pop. The ADD-addled midsection is, tonally speaking, the lightest section on the album, and features some genuinely fun and funny jokes (“The world is so f***ed up. Systematic oppression, income inequality……. The other stuff” or “The wait is over / I’m white and I’m here to save the day / Lord help me channel Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side (Sandra Bullock!)). Each section could be dissected for its various turns, chord changes, layering, and vocal delivery, but it all coheres into a fun, classically-Bo-Burnham track. The Emmy nom is well-deserved for this song, and it’s one of the very few on this album I would recommend as a standalone piece of music.
All "Comedy" aside, though, I feel a bit dirty listening to, and reviewing, “Inside (The Songs)” as a set of standalone tracks. In “Inside,” Bo criticizes the Internet as distilling meaningful experience into meaningless commodities, easily consumable in a nonstop stream of "content" to the direct detriment of the most psychologically vulnerable. To that end, Bo (the producer) and/or Netflix splicing these songs from the film and chopping them into digestible commodities for circulation in streaming platforms just feels… eh. At the end of the day, though, this is a music review, and the songwriting, lyricism, and performances here are, independently of any association with the special, enough to carry a solid album.
…… But seriously, just watch the special.
