All eloquence aside, being genuine is just — hard. People deemed “successful influencers” usually need to exist within a nuanced gray area space— an odd intersection between entertainment and impact. And of course, with most things in life, that influence that one holds can be a positive or a negative. For instance, an influencer can promote brands who are only trying to commodify social justice movements by using their stances to virtue signal and gain public support, which in the end encourages people buy their products. Or an influencer can use their platform to simply spread information without the guise of trying to sell anything. Despite the intentions—the action, as Bo would say, gives us this “funny feeling”.
However, I do believe one can you can exist positively within that intersection of entertainment and impact, as that is essentially what Bo Burnham does. He entertains us with witty recreations of real life phenomena but the impact doesn’t come from what he’s trying to sell us, per-say. In the end, while watching his specials, we have the choice to realize issues & try and change, or we can simply take in the content, let go, and laugh for a while.
In Bo’s outtakes, he talks about sharing dumplings, being too spooked to squish spiders, and other mundane everyday things. His songs made me smile and reminds me that there can be music in everything. It’s corny to say, and I mildly cringe and laugh at myself as I see the words type across the page, but the outtakes, mundane as they were, made me genuinely feel warm that Bo valued the little things in life enough to perform them. Seeing the celebration of the mundane gave me a hope and a reminder that not everything in art has to be so romanticized. Artistic representation is usually reserved for either traumatic moments, or grandiose showcases of love or affection, but Bo’s outtakes remind us life can also just be simple, and there is beauty in that too.
What We Discuss:
- The difficulties of fame. The dark side of being a public figure with your past on display. Although you may grow and change as a person, your past permanently follows you.
- Bo’s celebration of the beautiful mundane things in life, showing us there can be music in everything.
-The difficulties of performing for the camera. Modern day performance via social media & other forms of self expression (the sharing of vlogs, memes, etc.) is more often a representation of the performer and their own performative intentions rather than a representation of a character as a performer for the audience.
- An analysis of Bo Burnham’s “Chicken song”.
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