…in the center of the ring just like a– wait, oops, wrong song.
[Video]
[5.44]
Alex Clifton: I’ve spent the past six months trying to figure out how to write about this song. Before I watched Inside, I knew I’d get a few good laughs out of it; I’ve long admired Bo for his comedy and witty songwriting. I didn’t expect to keep thinking about it long after the credits rolled. Inside is on the surface a “comedy special,” but it’s also a very real examination of millennial anxiety and depression, magnified by the events of the past few years. When Bo sings “you say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did,” it’s delivered with the seriousness of a hymn, someone finally recognizing in an honest way just how fucked up many folks feel about the future. “All Eyes On Me” also acts as a mish-mash of feelings: it’s both a panic attack and a cry for help, the fear of everyone watching you and waiting to fail while also feeling so lonely because nobody is actually seeing how badly you’re doing. I never expected this song to haunt me so deeply, especially from a guy whose previous lyrics include “I’m a gay sea otter / I blow other guys out of the water.”
[10]
Katie Gill: I liked this song better when he released it four years ago and it was called “Can’t Handle This.”
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Sticky and somnolent, the aural equivalent of sticking your head inside a jar of honey Winnie-the-Pooh style.
[4]
Iain Mew: Father John Misty does Meduza turns out to be almost as unappealing in practice as in theory. Still, it could be worse. There could be jokes.
[3]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Yeah, I get why the Grammys didn’t consider this comedy. It’s not distinguishably anything else though, just a style-less meander through some vague ideas of fame and surveillance, loud and magisterial without much point.
[3]
Ian Mathers: Not sure whether I’ll be the only person here to hear “All Eyes on Me” for the first time without the context of the rest of Inside (the pandemic has been very good for lots of people getting through stuff they want to watch, but it’s had the opposite effect for me), and the biggest and nicest surprise here as someone who’s liked clips and Vines and etc. of Burnham but who’s never gotten around to actually watching one his specials, this is absolutely a song I would just listen to completely separate from any particular lyrics and context. Those lyrics and context bring even more to the table, sure, but if anything I had assumed this might be a case where I like the idea of the song more than the actual song and that is definitely not the case.
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: The whole Bo Burnham thing missed me entirely and I’m kinda sad it did. Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous sounds like the kind of show I would have really liked when I was young. I also missed Eighth Grade when it was in theater, still haven’t seen it. Do like his Beat Fetish bits when I see them, and I like them a lot more now since this song is the same damn thing he was parodying. The drums are appropriately heavy yet too light to come back down, the synths are flickering in the margins of the mix, just about to die until he blows into them. And he drops a joke right into the most gorgeous bass synth pad. Plus, he coats his voice in every Pentatonix he can until you have to check the credits to check he is still singing. All this beat fetishism about tuning out the decaying state of human existence to look at just him, just him. Well? You got any wool after all that hiding?
[5]
Alfred Soto: I’m not betting on Bo Burnham knowing the difference between pastiche and parody. Too many Weeknd songs sound like the first and third sections.
[4]
Tim de Reuse: I am not the first to point out that Bo Burnham’s fixation on dissecting the unhealthy relationships between audience and creator is in conflict with the fact that he makes millions of dollars developing those kinds of relationships; if I were to follow up with some kind of “Yet you participate in society? Curious!” meme I would not be the first to do that either. I will borrow the argument that Mark Fisher used to explain corporate anti-consumerism and posit that Burnham’s work, whatever his intention, functions as a way of “metabolizing” counter-cultural rhetoric, letting the audience play-act introspection as a form of entertainment without fear of actually having their minds changed. I say all this up front because I think “All Eyes On Me” might be the first song I’ve heard of his that isn’t so easy to digest (so to speak), and where I feel like some kind of façade has momentarily dropped. It’s lopsided, repetitive, awkward, and thrashes about in frustrated, powerless self-pity whereas much of his other work only gets as far as self-deprecation behind a protective veil of irony. This is all to say: I actually believe him for once.
[7]