In 2017, Get Out was released, becoming one of the highest-grossing horror movies of the year, directed by comedian and actor, and now director, Jordan Peele. Here, the protagonist becomes the victim of a group of middle-aged white men who, obsessed with Black culture and the Black experience, use hypnosis to invade his body, relegating him to a place known as the Sunken Place. The movie presents it as an empty space where a person’s spirit ends up submerged, floating without any sense of will or agency, unable to control their own body and forced to do nothing but watch the rest of their life pass before their eyes. A year later, Leon Thomas released his second EP, Genesis, with its third track being named after this very place and directly influenced by Peele’s film. Leon abstracts the concept from its literal meaning and instead uses the feeling it evokes: being in the Sunken Place means feeling submerged, unable to escape, trapped in a moment from the past with no way of moving forward (“Got me in a sunken place, got me all lost in space”). This is how the protagonist of the song feels because of the breakup he went through with his ex. The song, then, falls within the broader theme of heartbreak. But it does not approach it in a cliché way, because its specificity saves it from that. Leon places the events he is describing within a very particular time and place: a year ago, in or around Tallahassee, the capital of Florida; a year later, possibly in cities with strong nightlife scenes like Miami or Atlanta, or, considering the artist’s current residence, Los Angeles. In the first verse, he brings the listener into the breakup through these subtle details, telling us about his ex’s past and present, how she used to attend Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), and how she has now dropped out to work as a stripper: “Heard she got her ass done, she gotta attitude, heard you got new titties, now you actin’ brand new. Then you dropped out of FAMU… Only had a year to go, you should have stayed through. Hurts to hear you really out here strippin’ though. It was all good just a year ago”. The contrast between this girl’s two realities lets the listener see Leon’s resentment toward her and the way he looks down on her, while at the same time revealing how much he misses her. That ambivalence adds a lot to the character’s psychological profile and humanizes him. Maybe even more than it should, because this song largely works as a character study of an incredibly pathetic man who narrates all the ways he degrades himself because he is incapable of moving on. This becomes clear because immediately after proudly placing himself above her for dropping out of college to pursue nightlife and sex, he tells us that he cannot have sex with other women because he is still in love with her: “Can’t work, taking work off. Two mixed girls in the crib with they shirt off. I could have a threesome, but I’d rather jerk off to the pictures that you sent me livin’ on the iCloud”. Another way he degrades himself is by admitting that he keeps texting this girl even though he knows she will ignore him, all so he can use that pain as inspiration to make music: “How can I move on if I text you every late night? Even on a great night, text you on some shit you just ignore, so I come home and record and I sing about it all”. But those songs are not just for his own catalog. He imagines them as weapons against his ex. Since he has no physical access to her, he wants her friends to play his music in the car while she is there as a form of revenge. He wants to use his position as an artist to enter her safe space and hurt her: “I pray that your girls play it with you in the car, ‘cause I know she love that Leon, ’cause my shit is super hard”. As I said at the beginning, I really value the level of specificity the song reaches. It works as a character study that we can use as a mirror for ourselves, watching from a distance, in raw form, just how pathetic and undignified we can become when we are hurt, even to the point of wanting to hurt someone we once called our soulmate. However, one thing I have to criticize is its insistence on sexuality. There are plenty of lines where Leon describes himself desiring this girl. That is normal when you cannot have someone and feel so much love and desire for them alongside so much hatred. But many of those moments could have been reduced and used to characterize their relationship and her as a character a little more. On top of that, the song falls into the typical male gaze, where the woman is reduced to a mere object. It is almost as if the character’s resentment becomes visible through his sexual desire: I cannot have you, so I objectify you and fantasize about you. This can add even more to the character’s own degradation, and it does, but I don’t know, and I don’t think Leon was conscious of it. As a result, all these almost violently sexual lines end up becoming part of a potential form of gender-based violence. A little more awareness or critical distance from this would have been appreciated.