Welcome To The Internet: Every Song From Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’, Ranked
Number one may (not) surprise you.
Inside, the new special by Bo Burnham, is that rare piece of content with a long tail.
In our oversaturated internet culture, even the most acclaimed piece of art is done with by the time that the dust takes to settle. One masterpiece comes along; within days, there’s another to take its place.
Not so with Inside. A genuinely ground-breaking deconstruction of the stand-up comedy format, recorded and edited by Burnham alone during lockdown, the special continues to inspire controversies, conversations, and yes, rankings.
So here for your reading pleasure are our rankings of the songs off Inside, delivered with the proviso that the whole thing is pretty bloody good.
#18. ‘FaceTime With My Mom (Tonight)’
For a comedian known for his complexity and wild tonal left-turns, ‘FaceTime With My Mom (Tonight)’ is something of a surprise: it’s one joke, told reasonably well, and that’s about it. Relatable stuff, of course — everyone knows the peculiar joys of FaceTiming with a boomer who isn’t quite sure how to hold the camera — but there are deeper, stranger pleasures on Inside.
#17. ‘Bezos I’
Jeff Bezos’s shadow hangs heavy over Inside. He inspired not one but two songs on the record, and he is obliquely referenced in the multitude of bits about underpaid staff members and the blood that oils the capitalist machine. ‘Bezos I’ is slight in its criticisms — the whole joke is that it’s written like a Wikipedia entry, referring to the entrepreneur and magnate as though he’s a kindly old fellow, rather than a lizard person capitalist behemoth — but how to deny that beat?
#16. ‘White Woman’s Instagram’
Since Inside dropped, ‘White Woman’s Instagram’ has become a meme in and of itself, as white women the world over have taken to their TikTok feeds to prove just how accurate Burnham was in describing their social media selves. So the song wins points for accuracy, but loses them for being so one note — this is a single punchline, cleverly if a little excessively made.
#15. ‘Sexting’
For the most part, Inside is a work made through the prism of the pandemic, rather than a work about it; the isolation that Burnham refers to throughout the piece is just as common when we’re not all locked down in our houses. ‘Sexting’ is the one song that takes on social distancing head-on, and is slightly the worse for it — these jokes are funnier when they’re glancing against subjectm matter side on.
#14. ‘Unpaid Intern’
Inside is scattered with anti-capitalist scribes, ‘Unpaid Intern’ being the shortest. At a mere 34 seconds long, it provides a David Foster Wallace-indebted look at what it’s like to exist within a company in which you absolutely do not for a second matter. It’s brief, it’s funny, and for anyone who’s actually had to do one of those extensive coffee orders, it’s far too real.
#13. ‘Goodbye’
‘Goodbye’ isn’t really a farewell, nor is it a closer — there’s another song after its done, after all. It’s more of a reflection of everything that has come before, a medley of sorts, in which Burnham runs through his greatest hits: isolation, self-reflexivity, disassociation. “How ’bout I sit on the couch and I watch you next time?” he winks.
#12. ‘Don’t Wanna Know’
Burnham has spent his entire career eating his own tail, throwing meta-jokes on top of meta-jokes, forever going down rabbit holes of the self. And so ‘Don’t Wanna Know’ is only one of Inside‘s fourth-wall breaking moments, a brief interlude in which the comedian wonders whether his audience is enjoying what he is presenting them. It’s short, but it works, placing a mirror in front of the camera and begging the audience to describe what they see.
#11. ‘Bezos II’
Same joke as ‘Bezos I’, delivered this time with a much punchier beat. I’ve had “Jeffrey Bezos” sung in Burnham’s antic falsetto stuck in my head for over a week now.
#10. ‘Shit’
Burnham is a musical chameleon, able to adopt whatever genre he needs to in order to get his point across. On ‘Shit’, that’s electro-funk, as Burnham pairs funky bass parts with lyrics about feeling like your entire life is falling apart. That contrast is the whole joke, but hey, when something works like this, why overcomplicate things?
#9. ‘Look Who’s Inside Again’
‘Look Who’s Inside Again’ is a song that wishes that it didn’t exist, Burnham trying desperately to entertain himself while locked down in a kind of purgatory at least partially of his own making. The joke, then, is the song’s utter lack of purpose; even before the first chorus is over, Burnham is already throwing up his hands. “There isn’t much more to say about it,” he sings, his voice twinkling.
#8. ‘Problematic’
Exist on the internet as long as Bo Burnham and you’re bound to have a lot of ghosts in your closet. ‘Problematic’ is an attempt to clear those ghosts out, Burnham noting that he grew up as a sheltered young man with an unfortunately unfettered access to the internet. But rather than attempting to excuse or explain away the controversies in his past, Burnham instead urges his audience to continue to hold him and comedians like him accountable; to never give up on the tireless work of advocating for true social change.
#7. ’30’
I turned 30 last year, and I’m just saying, it would have been much easier to do so if I had this song to help me along.
#6. ‘Content’
Can you destroy the machine while feeding it? Can you create a piece of content about the endless churn of content without yourself contributing to that churn? Burnham doesn’t particularly seem interested in finding the answers. He’s happy to just sit in the mess of our world, one where everyone’s entertainment’s needs are met — there’s more to watch than any of us could possibly get through in our lives — but none of their spiritual needs are.
#5. ‘Comedy’
Like Nanette before it, Inside deconstructs the very purpose of comedy, questioning the drive that leads performers to get up onstage while the world is in the process of dismantling itself around them. On ‘Comedy’, Burnham doesn’t have anything resembling an explanation for his intentions beyond mere arrogance and self-satisfaction. What difference does comedy make? It stops comedians from wanting to kill themselves, Burnham says. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less.
#4. ‘That Funny Feeling’
Imagine Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ written for the modern age but way, way sadder. ‘That Funny Feeling’ is a laundry list of horrors, each more absurd than the last — “The livе-action Lion King“, “a female Colonel Sanders”, “the backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun” — and its aim is to overload the audience into a kind of numbness, to inure them to the horrors of a world that seems to get more and more horrific each and every day. As the old saying goes, it’s just one thing after the other all the way to the end, folks.
#3. ‘All Eyes On Me’
Burnham has publicly spoken about his performance anxiety many times before, but rarely has he expressed his alternating cycles of attention-seeking and attention-spurning as clearly as he does on ‘All Eyes On Me’. It’s an anthemic celebration of the self dragged across ten miles of bad road and then spat upon, full of vicious put-downs and backed by a thrumming chorus that eventually comes to sound like a desperate plea for an authenticity that doesn’t exist. There’s no song quite so broken and honest in the Burnham back catalogue.
#2. ‘How The World Works’
All welcome Comrade Bo Burnham, who has condensed years of Marxist theory into one faux-innocent ditty that doesn’t so much dovetail into hard truths as much as it handbrake turns into them. It’s Richard Cheese meets China Mieville, and every single second of it rules, albeit in a sickening sort of way.
#1. ‘Welcome To The Internet’
The internet is a treasure trove of information, a revolutionary piece of technology that has allowed access to everything, all of the time. It’s also an absolute hellscape, filled with unimaginable horrors that brush up against ads for teeth-whitening gels. On ‘Welcome To The Internet’, the best song on Inside, Burnham takes on it all, staring both the beauty and the tragedy and the face, and doing it with a knowing wink in his eye. After all, where else are you going to listen to ‘Welcome To The Internet’ but on the internet itself?
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Music Junkee. He Tweets @JosephOEarp.