on bo burnham's "problematic"

father, please forgive me
for i did not realize what i did
or that i'd live to regret it

i've been on a bit of a bo burnham kick recently; and by "bo burnham kick," i mean i've listened to the entirety of his discography for the past three nights in a row. i've been listening to his music for well over eight years--a fact only verified by the roblox "booga booga" wiki page (i remember learning the lyrics to "oh bo" while grinding gold in that game on my mother's shitty laptop, seated at the head of the dining room table).

suffice it to say, i grew up on bo's older, raunchier, more offensive songs, especially the ones i'm sure he'd rather bury and leave to die: "h-o-a-r" and "klan kookout," to name two of many. somewhat shamefully, i can still recite most lines word for word.

when inside was released, i may have been one of the first to watch it. and watch it, i did. over and over and over and over again. that was three years ago (did it come out when i was 15??? what????), but it's only recently i've begun to notice people calling "problematic" from the special his apology.

apology? i find myself thinking, did we listen to the same song?

maybe this is my growing disdain for internet culture, but the longer i listen, the deeper i think about the lyrics, the more certain i grow on one fact: "problematic" is not an apology.

i don't fault anyone for thinking otherwise. if you don't think critically, like, at all (which is fine! that's how a lot of people consume music!), i get how you'd come to that conclusion. the song ends with "and i'm really fucking sorry." the problem lies in the fact that you cannot discuss any of bo's work without actually thinking your own thoughts about it. his whole thing is comedy songs about things that aren't comedy--imho, it's incredibly naive to think inside songs would be dissimilar in any way.

holy shit, thistle! you aren't explaining yourself at all! why are you just making claims without backing them up at all?

good point, me from the past! however, it's 2:00 am and i'm not going to do a line by line analysis, argument integrity be damned. maybe someday in the future, when i inevitably get myself worked up over this nothingburger of a topic again a year from now.

anyway, i am dead serious when i say it baffles me that people think bo is genuinely apologizing for his old bits--at least, apologizing for them in the way people on the internet seem to think is the only way to apologize, anymore. i do think he is actually acknowledging it. "i've been doing comedy since i was just a sheltered kid," he says, "i wrote offensive shit, and i said it."

but that's... the only reference to it we get in the entire song, outside of the ending's vague gestures at past wrongdoings ("my closet is chock-full of stuff that is vaguely shitty"). but in no way do those two lines constitute an apology, not when 3 notes app pages (dark mode, screenshotted and meticulously cropped) is the bare minimum. not when people get ripped to shreds for word choices that should only matter to pedants and linguists studying semantics.

it's not like that's even the point, anyway! if that was the extent of a formal apology, bo would have been thrown to the wolves within the hour of inside's release, but's so clearly not an apology in the first place; the entire rest of the song after the one-off mention of shit he's said in the past focuses on an absurd, exaggerated scenario of wearing an aladdin costume for halloween as a 17-year-old.

"i did not darken my skin, but still it feels weird in hindsight"

and directly into a clear mockery of public figures with flimsy morals:

"i feel i must address the lyrics from the previous verse / i tried to hide behind my childhood, and that's not okay"
"i've done a lot of self-reflecting since i started singing this song"

and finally, ending the saga with excessive worry:

"i'm gonna go home and burn it / or not burn it, is burning it bad? / what should i do with it?"

that's what the song is! that's pretty much it! in no universe is such a clear caricature of modern peer pressure-driven guilt (i will NOT call it cancel culture, lest i feel like my father wins a one-sided war) a sincere, 100% serious apology.

people (youtube comment sections) compare "problematic" to colleen ballinger's infamous "toxic gossip train," but as something more honest. don't misunderstand me when i say that's an insane stance--no, i do not think colleen ballinger should have ever posted that video, and no, i do not think it was by any metric a "good" apology, but it's like apples and oranges.

you simply cannot take a satiric commentary and put it against that dumpster fire of a real (albeit really poor) attempt at an apology. they're just not the same thing.

there's more i could get into regarding his word choices (as a linguist into semantics), but i don't have the energy for that, so you're not getting it.

okay, maybe a little bit. speedrun.

"feels weird in hindsight" -> this is the most negative adjective he assigns to the aladdin costume the entire song. it's for a reason; what actual harm has he caused? what actual harm have so many deplatformed people actually caused beyond doing kinda weird things?
"and i'm really fucking sorry / bitch, i'm tryna listen / shit, i've been complicit" -> profanity here (especially it's dense repetition) indicates dismissal, indifference, manufactured emotion.
repeated "he's problematic," "aren't you gonna hold me accountable?" "shit, i've been complicit" -> a few more examples through the song, but if you were on the internet at all in 2020/2021, all three of those words (problematic, accountable, complicit) were big buzz words just as the purging of all things not ideal (again, will NOT call it cancel culture) was reaching its peak. this is mimicking/referencing the wild overuse of words that actually Meal Things during that time

i want to be clear on my stance in this dumb little opinion thought piece: i like this song, it's one of my favorites from inside. i do not give a shit if bo burnham actually cares about apologizing for his old comedy. i think "problematic" not being an apology is a GOOD THING.

Published by thistle

on bo burnham's "problematic"

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