I, Inside

ISSUE #200

Last night, I went to “Cowboy Night,” which is what we call the country two step and line dancing lessons every Thursday at a local gay bar called The Heretic. This time was an even bigger deal for my friends than it usually is, as it was Dolly Parton Night, featuring a special line dance and a Dolly costume contest (the crowd showed the hell up, let me tell you). I dig this reclamation of country heritage for any queer-identifying kid who grew up outside of our cruel country’s cultural hubs, those that were raised on the genre but were so violently excluded from it. It takes time and an open space, but all shit fades away, the good and—thank God—the bad.

Earlier this week, I walked a block to pick up beer at Hop City, my local good-shit spot, and the clerk was listening to Bo Burnham’s Inside front-to-back in an empty shop. I browsed from the end of “Sexting” through the beginning of “30.” The brief encounter made me listen to the album again, and there are two songs I hadn’t given the proper time to appreciate before. The first, “Look Who’s Inside Again,” contains my favorite joke of the special: a simple sigh, after “making silly sounds,” that I found myself naturally emitting in times of despair years before the special. The second, “Don’t Wanna Know,” is just a wonderful piece of pop confectionary, a hook repeated thrice in under a minute that would fit perfectly on a Tierra Whack album.

I understand what you might think of Bo—I’ve felt myself on every side in my many waves of change over ten years—but I can’t help but feel that these are essential pieces of songcraft. It’s the sign of a good album, in the most cliché way, to say that the B-sides eventually become better than the early hits (RE: “Bezos I,” “That Funny Feeling,” “30”). It’s a rewarding re-listen, as songs are always better than jokes, something that purist comedians have always tried to regulate in their industry.

People, on the internet, a few years ago loudly pleaded “No pandemic art!” to whomever would listen (everybody was). I never agreed with the sentiment, but I stayed out of it—I know trauma when I see it. But today, standing this distance from that initial quarantine, the more I thank God Inside documented it, much moreso than I felt at the time. “The most emotional and honest pandemic representation,” the raves would say. It felt too early to say back then, but now, I think they’re right.

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“It's hard to watch nothing change
It's impossible how slowly things fade”

That’s what Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy sings on their new double-album closer “The Plains.” I am floored by this new record, and for that—being someone who never really listened to them, but knew he was one of our best Jeffs, and also the #2 greatest rock band of the 21st Century after Radiohead (at least when I checked the website Digital Dream Door in 2006)—I am thoroughly grateful. The last album of theirs I heard in full was 2015’s Star Wars, which I found utterly boring at the time (though I’m willing to be proven wrong every day, about anything, ever). I’d never even given Yankee Hotel Foxtrot a proper spin until last year’s anniversary of its free online release! But as for this new album, Cruel Country: hell yes. These are essential pieces of songcraft, just like Bo’s—parcels of artistry so hard to deny that, no matter how weird you feel admitting it, you simply have to hand it to them.

I love the sounds of Americana more than most—or, at least, I thought I did, before this new spat of releases over the past five years from indie artists steeped in the genre (see: St. Cloud, the masterpiece; Clairo’s follow-up to Immunitiy; even this weekend’s latest from Angel Olsen)—and still, I find it easy to bore me. It’s hard to have your songs stand stark on their own. The other path for the folk artist to take is boundary pushing, as Bon Iver has obsessed over in his years since For Emma, Forever Ago. I still find i,i one of the most compelling and fresh releases of the past five years, his patented saxotronica and boundless technological tinkering bordering on the likes of Aphex Twin and Burial. Who’d have ever seen that coming? I listened to it in full just the other night—it fit seamlessly in with Flume’s latest, Palaces.

Another thing that happened last night: I was treated to a whiskey-tasting with Buffalo Trace’s Master Blender, as a gift from someone who doesn’t even like whiskey. The spirits are made with Kentucky limestone water—almost every single bottle of bourbon is. This is the limestone that made the Mammoth Caves, when the ancient glacier—the one that flattened the Midwest and made America the land where 75% of tornados occur—finally stopped, rested its icy paws, and melted through erosion’s favorite mineral. Jeff Tweedy and Justin Vernon are poets of the plains, glacial men. I posit that Bo is, too, in spirit. Only a year ago, less than a month into a fresh vaccination, I already felt like life had never stopped—only I was severely stunted. The mind is but limestone, crumbling from time’s glacier.

Yet it is still such a long time before things fade. Hearing Inside at the bottle shop, it was still providing solace. Thank God Bo didn’t wait to make it, or it would be rife with all those changes, those fading caves of the mind’s erosion.

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