So I chose to write something about it.

Chorus: Yearning For Deeper Love

The song opens with the chorus. It sets its baseline and its themes. It’s about a man yearning for a woman, though he’s had her before, wishing deeply for something more.

	Come a little closer, baby, I know that times are crazy
	My love was never lazy, I need more of you
	One touch can set you free, you’re not the girl you used to be
	Come spend a little time with me, baby, I need more of you

We’re hinted that the more he wants of her isn’t only sexual, but tender, given the simplicity of the request: “Come spend a little time with me.” It’s supported by the line, “My love was never lazy,” suggesting hints that the love he wished to give, and wished to receive, was an active, more-consuming love.

I also love the reflection of “One touch can set you free.” It brings to my mind the Mumford and Sons song Sigh No More, inspired by Shakespeare’s original: “Love, it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you / It will set you free. Be more like the man you were made to be.”

Verse 1: Hope followed by Betrayal

But the tone of the song changes, from sad to hopeful, for a moment at its middle, as the speaker reflects the experience of finding hope for new love.

	But I stumbled up on some new shit, yeah, I found a new b*tch
	...
	Heavy on the eyes, I feel the highs
	Loving you is not a crime I’m paralyzed

I particularly like the image of feeling the high of love as something heavy on the eyes, akin to the calming feeling of smoking cannabis. Love is represented as a drug here, something that can deliver you a high sure, but also something that fundamentally shifts your perspective. Your eyes see things differently when you’re in love (and when you’re high).

But the song doesn’t allow us to feel this high for long. The verse quickly shifts gears to explain the melancholy of the chorus and why this is a song of heartbreak.

	Mouth lines on your neck, white lines on your dress
	I seen the bigger image and it’s never been clearer
	...
	If you ever feel cheated, n***a, put your shank up

The speaker discovers that his love has been with another.

The ending line here is what I think carries so much value. It says, “If you ever *feel* cheated,” not “If you’re ever cheated.” And I think, in doing so, it gets to the core of situationship blues: Are you feel allowed to feel cheated when no commitment of exclusivity was ever communicated?

In the midst of situationship blues, you begin asking yourself questions like: Am I the idiot for investing hope? Am I in the right to grieve a relationship that I never held and which was never really promised to me?

So many young people crash into together, not wanting to rush to asking the other for any promise of commitment. We hide our true feelings hoping not to scare the other away. Or perhaps (and this has been the case for me), we truly believe we can be endlessly intimate with someone without catching feelings for them.

And I think the second part of that line, “put your shank up” is even more heartbreaking in a way. In response to his heartbreak and disappointment, you see him building the instinct to detach whenever he begins to feel close enough to feel cheated: the exact kind of behaviour from another that he is reeling from throughout this song!

Verse 2: Texting, Dating Apps, and Falling Back Into Shallow Love

	Life’s testing, I’m upset
	[You're] On your phone but can’t check my texts
	...
	"Hey girl, did you get my text?" [in a sarcastic tone]
	No response, let me swipe to next,
	I put in bold, “Hey, who wants sex?!”

I think there’s so much here about how texting people over emotions this big makes everything feel like a farce. The sarcastic tone he embodies in “Hey girl, did you get my text?” is a reflection that texting, the very medium he needs to communicate in, forces him to speak in ways that are not his true reflection. It forces him to fit big feelings into few words and shallow templates. You can feel that he wishes there was a better way to express all his feelings but is trapped in the no-man’s land of sending meaningless follow-up texts like, “Hey girl, did you get my text?”.

And the themes of technology don’t go away here. In response to being ghosted, we see him choosing to simply “swipe to next.” It’s a reflection of how dating apps reduce love, and all its complexity and unwieldiness, to swipes on a screen. It shows how dating apps make a mockery of love, and a mockery of all of us in the process.

And that last line is also so insanely heartbreaking to me: “I put in bold, ‘Hey who wants sex?!’”. It’s an admission of defeat. He once wished to aspire to something greater, something more fulfilling than mundane, transactional, and primarily-sexual love. But he is beaten back down into it, just to numb himself again.

These two ending lines are heartbreaking as well, for the same reason as the last line from the previous verse. In reaction to feeling promised true lasting love and given only a shallow taste, he falls right back into the behaviour that hurt him, and may hurt others through him. In other words, he falls right back into the cycle.

Back to Verse 1: Circularity

To tee up the theme I wanted to end on, let me first discuss the recurring theme of God and the divine that we see bubble up throughout the song.

Towards the end of the song, we hear the speaker say, “Life’s testing, I’m upset.” And even though it’s in the zenith of the song’s sorrow, I find just its presence gives the entire song a base of hopefulness.

We find that, through religion, the speaker maintains belief though he suffers now, it might all be a test from the divine before it gives him the love he truly longs for. But it also shows him that his actions still matter, that he must still work to pass all of God’s tests.

And I think it allows us to come back to the first verse with clarity.

	Trippin about indecent times, is that my crime?
	Letting go of demon vibes, and God, I’m trying.

The speaker is dealing with guilt over previous times that he engaged in immoral love. Perhaps it was him being shallow or self-serving himself. Perhaps it was him being led to believe, as much of modern culture wants us to, that the measure of a man is in the number of women he can count as trophies.

And I think it’s beautiful that this that this is in the beginning, though we don’t have the context at first to internalize it. It’s almost like the song asking to be played on repeat, in full circularity.

Through this theme of circularity, the song makes clear that none of us are truly blameless. We are hurt and then hurt others, and so on and so on, until one of us chooses to see the bigger image and break the cycle.

Art—creating or consuming it—tends to really help you with that by the way: seeing the bigger image.

The song ends with the regular chorus.

	Come a little closer, baby, I know that times are crazy
	My love was never lazy, I need more of you
	One touch can set you free, you’re not the girl you used to be
	Come spend a little time with me, baby, I need more of you

I choose to see this as him trying to break the cycle.

It shows that that deep desire for true lasting love hasn’t gone. We can imagine that if his love comes back to him now, he might forgive her for all his pain, and take her in his arms. He is still willing, through taking in and processing his pain, to come back to the world with love and break the cycle with her, if she chooses.

How I Know Malcolm

I met Malcolm in the fall of 2024. He had just moved to NYC from Florida and was interviewing to find work at a restaurant in Midtown. I knew he was an artist and a model, and though I listened to his first EP, I hadn’t looked deeply into his work.

About two months ago, I began to post on TikTok, mainly to build a literary audience. The app found his profile by matching it against my contacts and showed it to me.

There I saw his content, mainly centered around plugging his music. Among his new songs, this one truly caught my attention. I’ve been listening to it now on repeat for about a week. Writing this is my way of introducing myself to him again.

Conclusion

Listen to Mally’s track.

Furthermore: We are deeply loving creatures who feel things profoundly. What a mockery it is of our brilliance to believe that all of us could always be satisfied by shallow, meaningless, fleeting love.

You have to repeatedly clarify which ‘he’ you’re referring to by stating the names of the characters (Person A or Person B) because our personal pronouns only encode gender. But notice how it’s not unclear which ‘this’ and which ‘that’ we’re referring to…

Now, I want to introduce you to Tamil, which encodes gender as well as distance in personal pronouns!

Proximate Pronouns

Like English, Tamil has two distances. For example: here vs. there / this vs. that.

• ‘Here’ in English is ‘Inga’ in Tamil

• ‘There’ in English is ‘Anga’ in Tamil

• ‘This’ in English is ‘Idu’ in Tamil

• ‘That’ in English is ‘Adu’ in Tamil

Note: The ‘A’ vowel here marks a neutral “uh” sound or a ‘schwa sound’

The ‘I’ vowel here marks the "short i" like the ‘i’s in ‘sit’ or ‘if’

However, Tamil retains these distance markers for personal pronouns!

The two pronouns for ‘he’ (male nominative) in Tamil is: Ivan and Avan.

Ivan is the ‘he’ that’s closer to me, and Avan is the ‘he’ that’s further from me.

‘Avan’ pronounced kinda like ‘oven.’

‘Ivan’ pronounced kinda like “If N” but with a v instead of an f.

So in English we might say, “He said this. He said that” and lose track of which “he” we’re talking about.

But in Tamil, we can say “Ivan said this. Avan said that,” and as long as we’re consistent about who ‘Ivan’ and ‘Avan’ are, we don’t have to keep repeating their names to clarify which is which!

I ended my tiktok on this subject by suggesting, in jest, that we could apply this to English.

Carrying over how distances are distinguished in ‘This’ and ‘That', I suggest a Him and a Ham!

(Har har har)

Other Notes (For Pedants and Linguistics Nerds)

• I’m going off this guidebook to colloquial Tamil by choosing to call “Ivan” and “Avan” “proximate” pronouns. I can’t find many references to other sources using this term. But I couldn’t really find any other name that described it as well either. I speak Tamil in the literary register too poorly to tell you if there’s a name for this feature in Tamil itself.

• I’ve often gotten the question, “What about if there are more than 2 people?” Sadly, Tamil, like English, only has only two distances. So we can only really track two people of the same gender using regular pronouns. Spanish has 3 distances (aquí, ahí and allí: here, there, and over there) but, like English, doesn’t apply distance markers to personal pronouns. Malgasey apparently has a whopping seven distances! I leave finding out if they apply distances to personal pronouns as an exercise for the reader.

• My attempts to transliterate Tamil to the English script are based on the guidebook mentioned above but also simply on my personal vibes (my lifelong experience reading texts from my family written in Tam-lish.) There’s no formal, pinyin-like, or even more generally agreed-upon Arabizi-like system for it in Tamil (that I’m aware of!).

And I’ve found that this act itself brings you closer to a work: that when you have to put work into deciphering meaning, and when that meaning is profound and beautiful, it registers deeper because of the labor you’ve put in to decipher it.

Extra Thoughts

1. Recently I’ve been reading this book Osweald Bera: A Guide to Old English. It’s an Old English language textbook that works through immersion. Every chapter is written in Old English, but the first few chapter starts with sentences that Modern English language speakers can understand easily and then slowly ramps up the difficulty until, by the end of the book, you’re reading full literary Old English.

   And I have found it intensely pleasurable; in a way literature hasn’t made me feel for a while. And it’s precisely because you’re learning how to read the book as you read it. It’s almost like an ongoing puzzle book (with the benefit that, by the end of it, you might just be able to read Beowulf in the original language!).

2. A lot of my long fiction projects play a lot with language, which doesn’t make for easy reads. And one thing I’ve had to reflect on is that, with works like that, I don’t have the luxury of breezy prose and slow openings. When every sentence is a challenge to the reader, they are going to expect a reward for each sentence: every sentence needs to be made all the more meaningful; the prose needs to get a lot tighter.

   In short, the pacing of a work needs to correspond to the difficulty of your style. You don’t have the luxury of writing difficult, wordy, and attention-intensive prose if you don’t have much to say.

This Substack post is a companion to these reels.

Please let me know what you think. I love you.

However, there have been a lot of strong reactions in recent years to the increasing tendency for both consumers and producers of fiction to speak in the language of popular tropes. Here I want to engage with what I think is the primary argument against “tropification.”

The argument goes something like this: If people engage through fiction only through the tropes they know they prefer, it will reduce their ability to engage with art that challenges them or expands their circle of appreciation.

I’d start with asking someone making this claim if they believe that the same argument can be levied against genres. Because it demonstrates how easily this argument can be flipped on its head. Science fiction, for example, is more likely to deals with questions about progress, the future, and its uncertainties. Westerns tend more to deal with the past and questioning historical narratives. Some genres are simply better geared to handle certain themes than others. I could make the argument then that people who engage primarily with a certain genre are isolating themselves to art that asks a limited set of questions. I can then say that the trope lover, however, is someone who can engage freely with all genres, as long as the plot stays true to their preferred trope. They’re therefore free to move between genres and absorb all the themes that different genres have to offer.

I think, from here, someone could make the leap to say that both, genres and tropes, dampen the dynamism we can find in art by limiting the content we engage with. And I would consider this a sound argument. Ideally, we would always and only ever engage with art that tries to expand our horizons and shows us ways of imagining beauty in ways we haven’t considered before. You could call this “high art” or “experimental art.” I think the category that corresponds to that in the fiction space would be “literary fiction.” This is my favorite kind of art, the kind of art that I try to engage with the most and which I attempt to create. This is art that tries to reset the boundaries of what art can be and continually expand the medium.

But in order for art to be effective, it also needs to be accessible. While novelty is essential to art, engaging with novelty continually is difficult. It’s why I consider literary fiction more rewarding than other forms of fiction but also the most demanding. And the reason tropes are popular now and why genres have been popular for so long is because it allows people a familiar stepping point to engage with novelty. With genres and with tropes, readers can expand their horizons to the extent that it’s pleasurable for them without having to toss themselves into a new world of meaning and questions with every new work. To take issue with this method of engaging with art, of expanding one’s horizons slowly, would be to take issue with how art has been practiced and consumed for, what I can discern to be, all of human history. And if that’s your mission, good luck.