Turning Inside Out Inside Out
For as long as anyone can remember, hermeneutics has been man’s way of understanding the text in front of them. It’s usually applied to famous or religious texts, but even seemingly straightforward songs have meaning beyond that which is on the surface. For example, Inside Out, performed by Eve 6, is graced with the simple charm of rhyme and storytelling, further enhanced by the musical decisions the band makes and, often, rhyme within a line. Music is often an enhancer itself, if done right, for what is a song if not poetry with music attached to it? If the song is perceived as an artistic work and is broken down into pieces, one can decide its true meaning—to an extent, of course.
When the song was written in 1998, the author kept the transgression so fitting of alternative music in mind, especially with the image of the speaker “[wanting to] put [his] tender heart in a blender” in a “beautiful oblivion,” and heavily suggesting that the speaker’s partner has some sort of mental problem (Collins). Such gruesome imagery of a blended heart is only softened by its relatability: most people have experienced the pain of a breakup, and a song is a perfect way to cope. If it wasn’t, many of the popular 90’s breakup songs wouldn’t be known today—and heaven knows there are a lot of them (Nerve).
With Inside Out, the story seems to tell itself: the speaker feels a need to break up with his significant other, who may be unstable in their desires. The speaker realizes the breakup will hurt but decides by the song’s end that it’s for the best. The most prominent meaning of the song is easy to piece together: from the first line, “I would swallow my pride, I would choke on the rinds, but the lack thereof would leave me empty inside,” we can see that something’s amiss with the speaker and that he’s evidently lost his sense of pride (Collins). As the first chorus progresses, the speaker realizes he is nothing but a husk, and the only thing he can do is to go back to what had substance in the past: a relationship that he knows will have to end. The first verse says that even the passage of time, which is structured and rigid in his chaotic state, hurts him simply because he’s so full of raw emotion, hence “the tick-tock of the clock is painful, all sane and logical, I want to tear it off the wall (Collins).” Different people have different reactions to the same stressor, in this case, a need for a breakup, but most of them feel the same way and want to destroy things (Villanova University). This is a trend that hasn’t fully gone away, and is only too appropriate for the 90’s, where alternative music and grunge ran rampant.