Sinners: music sutures space-time.

This week we’re going to dive into a film that isn’t sooo recent in the sense that it didn’t premiere in these months, but I wanted to talk about it because it premiered just a few months before aaaall of this started. I’m talking about Sinners. The horror film that positions itself as one of the favorites for the recognition of Best Picture of the year.

And we have to talk about this because even though it has many clear and symbolic edges related to historical and moral themes… it also has an enormous weight on the musical side and well, since here we focus on that, I would say with complete certainty that it’s the most important one. With this approach we’re going to try to guide ourselves in this episode.

So, let’s go… Sinners is a production that takes us to a United States in the year 1932, that is, a country still very, very racist. But beyond race, we’re going to talk about the weight of music as a resource that connects and unifies, beyond races and dimensions.

The person in charge of the music in this film is also one of its producers: Ludwig Goransonn, whom we know for works like Black Panther and Oppenheimer.

How important it is, I think, for a musician to be among the main decision-makers of a project. Although this film is officially based on the director’s personal story, Ryan Coogler, there are many rumors that its true basis is found in a mix of stories of musicians from the same period and related to supernatural stories, Robert Johnson, for example. In the context of Sinners’ development, the figure of the musician who “sells his soul” is not an isolated myth, but a cultural symptom. The film precisely revolves around this tradition: each note is the memory of a mythical, cultural and ancestral pact between music and the underworld.

But why?

Here we start with the interesting part… this proposal places music as a resource with the potential to perforate planes of reality, to navigate and weave a network of directions that, for the purposes of this episode, we’re going to think of as directions of forces between the ontological layers of life. We can begin between the up and down that translates between the divine and the “demonic” or related to the concept and symbols of the underworld. Here, the music of Sinners has the capacity to gather these energies and channel a kind of portal between them. Through music a door is consolidated, with the possibility of bringing elements from both energetic poles into reality.

But before that, what does this “portal” sound like? according to this film, it is mainly led by a guitar, disruptive effects, electronic dissonances and by the blues genre, which in itself carries great historical and cultural weight. From the first piece of this soundtrack, we hear references to key parts in the film’s narrative; it is a conjugation of the elements of its very name “Filidh, Fire keepers and Griots” which represent seers of ancient Ireland, a group of people that was believed to act as a channel with the spiritual world, and musician-narrators of West Africa, respectively. In general we have music that seeks that cultural representation of 1930s Blues mixed with dissonant electronic atmospheres and imitations of pulses to capture the audience’s uncomfortable attention.

Now, it seems curious to me that music is treated with the potential with which it is treated here… let’s go back to this proposal of planes to find a possible why embedded in the collective.

Historically it is known, and here I’m not going to start mentioning the academic references that support these arguments, that music has always accompanied society, has always been a constant in different historical processes, has triggered and encrypted revolutions and cultural identities. So, music orchestrates this pulse of change; music is something that, although it has been attempted to be institutionalized and to a certain extent it has been achieved with the pretext of understanding it, escapes our emotional comprehension. Let’s be concrete: we are emotional beings in aaaall the sense of the expression and music acts precisely there, in our perceptions and emotional trajectories. It is,

I think, a very accurate proposal to place music with this potential to transcend what we understand, that is, to represent and invoke that which escapes our rational logics. Because yes, the explanation of music and its potential, like love, is a resource and a force that does not remain subject to orders, bodies or territories; music escapes, music invokes the revolution of logic. Perhaps that is why the effort to institutionalize it, criticize it and govern it is so marked (yeah, this is a nod to academic theories, of taste and to digital platforms).

Now, in Sinners music is also placed from a temporal vertex that travels between the effects of time.

Music also has this authority to persist, direct and connect genealogies and with that, memories and projections. From the temporal plane, it becomes insurgent memory and cultural resistance. A way of keeping history alive and of gestating that which still does not find a body. There lies the strength of this axis.

There is one song in particular where this can be seen on screen. In “I lied to you” this temporal union appears precisely between the protagonist, his ancestors and his possible descendants, all gathered in and through the practice of music… curious because this piece is the same one that invokes the antagonists of the film; it could be said that this piece is the one that concretizes the exact suture point between planes.

In this way, the music in Sinners is and makes a system of axes work… that creates and sustains a network of directions. It acts like a coordinate axis that, in its convergence, detonates a vanishing point that perforates reality.

Now yes, in this case, the proposal is clear and, quoting a poem by Gabriel Celaya from 1953: Art, in this case music, is a weapon loaded with the future.

Original Version