Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge

Not in ages have nine words been such an endless source of amusement to me. That lyric is economical and dense. Let’s unpack it.

“I Like You (A Happier Song)”, featuring Doja Cat, is the third single off Post Malone’s fourth studio album, Twelve Carat Toothache (2022). Its feel-good vibes and its standard lyrical subject of admiration for you, the listener, have propelled this soft trap-pop confection in a slow burn to the higher echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 charts, where it currently sits comfortably in the No. 5 spot. Unless I’m reading Twelve Carat Toothache wrong, the message of “I Like You (A Happier Song)” is as anodyne as its sound.

Then, in the bridge, Post Malone croons, “I just want you, I just want you. Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge.”

And when I hear this, I’m like, what?

On the surface, yes, both clauses, “Your heart’s so big” and “That ass is huge”, are compliments. This is a love song, or at least an “I like you” song, and appropriately, Post Malone is speaking favourably of his song-recipient, in both the metrics of heart-size (bigger is better) and ass-size (also, bigger is better). As far as I can tell, this is all that Post Malone and/or his songwriters were thinking when they wrote this lyric. It has rhyme (or rather, no pun intended, assonance), and it has parallelism in the twin complements to heart and ass, and that’s enough to make a songwriter nod to herself and think, yeah, that’ll do for now.

But.

“Your heart’s so big” is a deep compliment, and “That ass is huge” is very shallow. “Your heart’s so big” is a statement to the effect of “You’re beautiful on the inside.” Somehow, following it with a statement about appearances, particularly “That ass is huge”, kind of undercuts that message.

Okay, fairly standard lyrical infelicity for a pop song. Lots of pop songs do that. What tips this further into full-on hilarity?

In the Lyttle Lytton contest, run by Adam Cadre, contestants compete to craft the worst opening line to a novel. One of the fantasy finalists in the 2017 iteration of the contest, penned by one Lilly Bolton, ran as follows:

Thornmill Greyeyes was a proud elf. His ears stood proud, his cock stood proud, but most of all his heart stood proud as he watched his bride mince down the isle with her ravishingly good looks.

In admiration of this entry’s wrongness, Cadre comments:

A full read reveals that every item on the list is funny in its own way: the first for being dweeby, the second for being crass, and the third both for being sentimental and for being shoehorned in there to fit the pattern even though hearts can’t really “stand” as such. And ending on “heart” means that we’re meant to take the entire sentence as romantic—that we’re supposed to retroactively read the “ears” and “cock” as earnest, which may be the funniest thing of all.

Arranging “Your heart’s so big” and “that ass is huge” in parallel sequence gives me unmistakable echoes of Lilly Bolton’s 2017 Lyttle Lytton entry. Following “Your heart’s so big” with “That ass is huge” suggests that we’re supposed to take that entire line as … as what? It was earnest, until it wasn’t. The sentimentality of “Your heart’s so big” is retroactively layered with the vulgarity of “That ass is huge”. Crass sentimentality. Strange and unusual flavours of emotion, indeed.

And that’s all before we come to the most crucial bit of the sentence, the one word doing more comedic legwork than the rest of the sentence put together: the “but”.

What does the “but” do? Grammatically, “but” is the same as “and”; it conjoins two thoughts together. You can take any sentence with the conjunction “but”, replace the “but” with an “and”, and it will mean the same thing. Denotationally speaking.

But somehow, “Your heart’s so big, and that ass is huge” doesn’t seem to pack quite the comedic punch. Why is that?

Contrast the following sentences:

A.   Gracie is a smart kid, and she has trouble paying attention in class.

B.   Gracie is a smart kid, but she has trouble paying attention in class.

Sentences A and B convey the exact same information. Gracie is a smart kid. She has trouble paying attention in class. It strikes me that the difference between “but” and “and” is purely connotational. Subtextual.

“But” implies that there’s an inherent contrast between the conjoined elements. Sentence A presents just the facts, ma’am. Gracie is a smart kid. She has trouble paying attention in class. Sentence B has more of a point to push. It’s like, Don’t let the fact that Gracie is a smart kid distract you from the fact that she has trouble paying attention in class.

So when a lyricist forgoes an “and” for a “but”, it’s a marked decision. It doesn’t happen by default. Whoever was writing “Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge” clearly meant “but” and clearly meant to draw a contrast between “Your heart’s so big” and “That ass is huge”.

This isn’t a particularly inspired choice of conjunction if “Your heart’s so big” and “That ass is huge” are meant to be generic compliments. When you deploy the “but”, you set the listener up for a contrast. What comes after a compliment and a “but” ought naturally to be a criticism.

“Your heart’s so big, but you can’t take care of yourself independently.”

“Your heart’s so big, but your breath smells distinctly of onion rings.”

But instead, we get “That ass is huge”! So are we reading Post Malone wrong? Is “That ass is huge” meant to be an insult? Is Posty unintentionally fat-shaming the listener? Intentionally?

It’s possible—not every culture celebrates voluptuosity in the glutes. Perhaps Mr. Malone grew up in and assimilated the values of an environment where desirable mates bear less callipygian sculpture. Is this what we’re meant to be concluding from these nine words?

And what of the ordering of the clauses? Ooh, this gets fun.

Gracie is a smart kid, but she has trouble paying attention in class foregrounds Gracie’s attention problems. Perhaps the speaker of this utterance is Gracie’s exasperated third-grade teacher, who is making clear that Gracie’s current behaviour is not to be encouraged.

Gracie has trouble paying attention in class, but she is a smart kid foregrounds Gracie’s smarts. Now the speaker here is a Gracie advocate, saying she’s fine the way she is. The problem lies not with Gracie but with the class, which is not serving her needs.

In a “but” sentence, the before clause is subjugated by the after clause. The after clause is the point, the before clause is a fig leaf.

And so we could have had “That ass is huge, but your heart’s so big”, which would at least have been more affirming of the value of inner beauty. But instead we got “Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge”, which affirms … precisely the opposite!

Aie.

I concede that there is a structural reason to prefer “Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge,” and that reason is that it rhymes better with “I just want you, I just want you”.

But (and notice my point is coming after the “but”), dear songwriter, are you hearing what you’re saying?

Stray observations:

There’s a contrast between “big” and “huge”, namely that “huge” is an intensified version of “big”. Which does suggest that the line could be rephrased, more nonsensically, as “Your ass is bigger than your heart.” Which, fine, I suppose that is literally, non-figuratively true.

And let’s not underestimate the weight pulled by the “that”.

Your heart’s so big, but your ass is huge.

Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge.

Replacing the possessive “your” with the curiously dissociative “that” does convey a sense of greater physical distance. Which I suppose is also appropriate, given that the ass is described as huge and probably thus requires a healthy distance in order to behold properly.

So evidently the songwriters know what they’re doing. They know their word-craft. And still they end up with “Your heart’s so big, but your ass is huge”. Thus am I endlessly amused.

I just spun a thousand words of analysis out of nine words of lyric. Was this the best use of my time? Perhaps the last laugh’s on me.