When Zayn Malik realized he was not bound by contractual obligation to be in One Direction, he probably assumed he could get away with breaking any rules — so he chose to ignore the simple and fairly straightforward rules of capitalization.
Malik released his debut solo album Mind of Mine at the end of March, a compilation of songs deemed by many to include an underwhelming amount of bangers. However, what’s most interesting about the album isn’t necessarily the songs themselves, but their titles, most of which look like they were typed by someone who both couldn’t spell and had a caps lock button that was broken beyond repair.
The stylistic choice to just massacre the capitalization of song titles doesn’t really make sense. It would be impressive if you told a sparrow to type “Borders” and it came up with “BoRdErSz.” That’s the work of a genius sparrow, a sparrow that deserves awards. For quite some time I have operated under the assumption that we should hold 23-year-old pop stars to higher grammatical standards than those for very smart birds, but as I gazed down the line of Malik’s songs, including “MiNd Of MiNdd (Intro),” “BeFoUr” and “rEaR vIeW,” I began to doubt everything.
Was Malik blackout drunk when he typed out the song titles? Is flagrant disregard for spelling and capitalization a new part of the sexy bad-boy image in 2016? What happened to just wearing a leather jacket and standing near a motorcycle?
Malik is not the first to commit to an avant-garde track list. In fact, many artists have made the decision to capitalize every letter in all of their song titles. Tyler, The Creator’s Cherry Bombs lists fully capitalized songs that all seem as if they are being screamed at you.
Troye Sivan also toyed with capitalization on Blue Neighbourhood, capitalizing every letter of every song title except for one, all in lowercase, stylized as “for him.”
Other artists have toyed less with capitalization and more with repetition. Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered. seeks to avoid titles by ironically titling each song as “untitled 01,” “untitled 02,” and so on. This choice works to unite the album. The numerical nature of each song title makes it harder to identify them as singular tracks, forcing people to listen to the album more as a whole instead of in pieces.
It seems angsty artists have always disregarded spelling. Who could forget P!nk’s “U + Ur Hand” or Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8tr Boi”? Maybe saying goodbye to spelling and punctuation really is the first step on the road to rebellious pop superstardom. Maybe Malik knows that no matter how stupidly he spells his song titles, his enormous fan base will still rocket him to greatness, or as Malik would probably spell it, “gReAtNeSs.”
