Years down the line, history will look back on this crazy time through a myriad of prisms. On the pop-cultural end, they won’t have to ponder for too long, either, when asking, “What artistic works best en-compassed what was going on, and how we reacted?”
“Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions” (2020) – Disney Plus
Released eight months into the ordeal, the epilogue complement to Taylor Swift’s acclaimed surprise album, Folklore, sent her and creative mates Jack Antonoff (Bleachers) and Aaron Dessner (The National) into the woodlands for a unique exercise.
With hindsight, the quaint adventure runs counter to the latest music documentary to take over the Disney streamer, The Beatles: Get Back. The Peter Jackson-assembled “seized from the vault” three-parter captures the Fab Four’s under-the-gun of deadline insecurities regarding tunes they simply hadn’t fine-tuned yet.
Swift and the boys, on the other hand, banded together to collaborate on tracks already long-polished and over with, for the sake of posterity incarnate.
Due to early COVID limitations, the trio first exclusively recorded the 16-track Grammy winner – which Swift notes (in-documentary) went beyond just her mythos, and what could be read in a tabloid – from their respective quarantine domains. Despite their album’s massive commercial and critical success, a sense of unfinished business shared among them brought forth the in-person meet-up called together for a stripped-down sendoff.
“When lockdown happened I just found myself completely listless and purposeless,” Swift shared at the top of her (non-music video) directorial debut. She initially thought, “I’m just putting out an album in the worst time you could put one out,” but then recognized, “it turned out that everybody needed a good cry, as well as us.”
Prefacing “Mirrorball,” Swift claimed Number 6 was the only true “Folklore” track to lyrically address the pandemic. She asserted that singing of a circus called off when “they sent home the horses and rodeo clowns” was a direct allusion to the indefinite suspension of her (and all) shows.
A silver-lined caveat of not taking the album on tour: the supremely intimate and introspective, “Flannel Taylor”-full sessions helped her reel back in lapsed fans convinced she’d grown too pop, or had sold out once she left the country for the city.
If loving the album leads you to believe you think you’ve seen this film before, then you are sadly mistaken.
“Inside” (2021) – Netflix
The irony of Bo Burnham’s stand-up (if you can call it that) return: the moment he overcame his stage-fright that spanned the latter half of his 20s, the world uncharacteristically billed itself every thing but a stage. Then he turned 30.
Civilians quickly reconvened, positively zooming with originality – making it apropos for the long-dormant clown prince of versatility to fully explode with last summer’s uttermost “year in reflection.”
The experimenter used four walls and star-crossed brain-sides to paint a repressed dais expressed instead. The man on the Inside – and Inside itself – wears the outer persona of a Judd Apatow manchild and the inner beast of a David Lynch sleep paralysis demon. He clothesline-tackles society. He lampoons a country that runs as much on intern-purchased Dunkin’ as it does on white women Instagram posts. He comments on “cancel culture” clouds looming over daring comedy construction.
Ultimately, he also oozes genuine depression, and grows his hair to intentionally Messianic lengths; all in the name of proudly unmasking the monster who retreated beneath the bed half a decade ago because of the since-erased blockage between politically savage Sesame Street spoofs and auto-tuned delusions of grandeur.
What’s more: Burnham makes that funny feeling recur for us, too, but arrives at every beat pitch-perfectly to offer the ample antidote of world-healing comedy – even past the credits, or on our umpteenth Inside rewatch.
Isolation obviously existed pre-Covid. But thanks to Swift, Burnham, the artists who inspire them and those they pass the baton to next, a whole period of time – warts and all – is songfully encapsulated for future eyes to see. All eyes on us, all eyes on us…
“This feels like Burnham achieving his ultimate form, as a parodist who proves again and again to be exceptionally original and wise. He’s the Millennial ”Weird Al” Yankovic – a title not lightly given.” – Nick Allen, RogerEbert.com
