Sinnermen

Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners is (so far) the pop cultural sensation of the second Trump administration. Elijah and Elias Moore, aka Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by an alternately caddish and cantankerous Michael B. Jordan, return home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta in 1932. Smoke and Stack aren’t content to take on a sharecropper’s plot, but want to be entrepreneurial New Negroes. The twins have been away – fighting in the First World War, pimping in Little Rock, working as enforcers for Al Capone in Chicago – and have come back to Clarksdale to escape the racism in the north for the ‘devil we know’. They decide to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and plays the blues, and assemble a crew of old friends and lovers to do up the place, which they call Club Juke.

Stack and Sammie chug along Depression roads, scything through the cotton, proselytising to potential collaborators and customers about their little corner of freedom. The Southern topography and the sharecroppers’ moments of surreptitious pleasure – secret meetings under the cover of vegetation, bawdy jokes beneath the blistering sun – bring to mind the way LeRoi Jones (who became Amiri Baraka) describes Billie Holiday’s voice in Black Music. It morphed, he writes, from a singer’s instrument to a woman’s to ‘a Black landscape of need and, perhaps, suffocated desire’: ‘Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.’

The cousins scoop up a harmonica player called Delta Slim (a riotous Delroy Lindo). As the trio motor through Clarksdale, he recognises some men on a chain gang and tries to lift their spirits. ‘Hold your heads!’ he shouts, before an overseer blasts warning shots at them. As they drive away, Slim recalls being locked up with a musician friend, and the way the jailers exploited their talent, getting them to play at a high-society house party. White people love Black music, he says, but not Black people. Or, in the words of the late, great critic Greg Tate, they want everything but the burden. He tells them about his musician friend, who was travelling by train with all of his savings and was robbed by a group of Klansmen for the money he made performing at the shindig. The thieves made up a story about murder and rape, and the mob lynched the man on the spot, ‘right there in the railroad station’. Slim trails off, his speech giving way to humming, then singing, then to something deeper still, an existential funk, which is managed by a little improvised drumming on the car door and some inchoate murmuring that can be shaped into song later on. A little remembering and a little forgetting. The moment is a distillation of the mysterious process of converting hardwon experience into music. On the 1920 census, taken when he was somewhere between twelve and fifteen (the records are inconsistent), my great-grandfather is listed as a labourer and prison inmate in Bledsoe County, Tennessee. Watching that scene, I couldn’t help but imagine him on a chain gang, snatching the blues during the blistering work of picking crops.

When the joint opens, the brothers quibble over money – a large number of the club’s patrons pay with wooden tokens from the plantation. Sammie’s talents make him a target for Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a vampire, and his newly undead associates, a Klan couple whose racism Remmick uses for his own purposes (like so many politicians and industrialists before and since). Remmick was turned centuries before, in Ireland, by a rapacious, colonising vampire and hopes that Sammie’s playing, which can raise the spirits of the dead, can bring his lost community back to him. After one of the vampires’ victims is invited into Club Juke, the customers are picked off one by one and join Remmick’s troupe, which tries to lure the living outside with its music.

When Stack (the impish, charming twin) gets bitten, Smoke cradles him, trying to staunch the wound, but it’s too late. ‘Best thing about me was him,’ he says. In another doubling, the scene recalls one from Coogler and Jordan’s first collaboration, Fruitvale Station (2013), about the police murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland on New Year’s Day 2009. Grant is handcuffed and protesting to a white transit cop called Johannes Mehserle, who ultimately shoots him in the chest (Mehserle said he thought his gun was a taser). ‘You shot me, bruh. I got a daughter,’ Grant says, as blood fills his mouth. ‘Get up bruh,’ Grant’s friend yells, before being carted off to a paddywagon. (‘The myth of blues is dragged from people,’ Jones writes in Black Music.)

Coogler filmed the scene at the BART station where Grant died. ‘I’ve died like, maybe five times in television and film,’ Jordan told an interviewer when the movie came out. ‘I think Fruitvale Station’s gonna be the last one for a while. I gotta give my mom a break. I’m tired of her seeing me die all the time. It’s not natural.’ In a strange way, the death in Sinners is a tender re-enactment of the earlier scene, as Jordan embraces a dying version of himself that will live on for ever on film. Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a hoodoo worker and Smoke’s estranged partner, says that the spirits of the undead are ‘stuck in the body’, not living, but not able to join the ancestors, either. The silver screen could be seen as a kind of purgatory, too.

Towards the end of the film, the idea emerges that the twins and those at the juke joint were doomed to die one way or another – killed by the vampires or by the Klan, who plan to attack at dawn. Remmick, sounding a lot like the cult leader Jim Jones, most of whose followers were beleaguered Black people, tells Smoke, Annie and the rest that they’re not going to be able to live freely anyway, so why not join the undead? On the one hand, the argument that you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, lowers the narrative stakes. On the other, it suggests that, since there may be nowhere for Black people to be free, it’s better to focus on the here and now, the bardo of the present, or, in the words of the poet Claude McKay, to embrace futility with fervour by ‘dying, but fighting back’. ‘Before the sun went down,’ one character says, ‘I think that was the best day of my life.’

The movie was conceived and filmed before Trump’s re-election, but part of its premise – that the club, a sign of progress in a deeply violent place, can only exist for a limited time before giving way to ideological reclamation and chaos – is a reflection of the situation America finds itself in now, deep into the post-Obama whitelash. The juke joint is one of Black America’s enduring cultural totems, found everywhere from Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple to Ernie Barnes’s painting The Sugar Shack, which featured prominently in the sitcom Good Times as well as on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album I Want You. ‘Musically speaking,’ Zora Neale Hurston writes in ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ (1934), ‘the Jook is the most important place in America. For in its smelly, shoddy confines has been born the secular music known as blues, and on blues has been founded jazz.’ Club Juke stands for every Black cultural space facing censure and potential erasure. Trump has accused the National Museum of African American History and Culture of promoting ‘divisive, race-centred ideology’, and last month called for ‘unpatriotic’ musicians like Beyoncé to be investigated for appearing at Kamala Harris’s campaign events.

With legal, social and political norms shifting sickeningly quickly, some of the most prominent Black American entertainers are being confronted by a conundrum of the sort that faced Club Juke: if you can’t beat ’em, do you join ’em? Should you stay inside or venture out, attracted by the siren song of money and power? Sinners worries about how easily people can be swayed by that alluring call.

In January, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Soulja Boy and Nelly were listed as performers at events celebrating Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The announcement followed a wave of Black entertainers including Waka Flocka and the SlutWalk founder, reality TV star and social media influencer Amber Rose publicly stating that they backed Trump. Before Trump’s first inauguration, Snoop had castigated Black people who considered appearing as ‘Uncle Toms’ and in March 2017 he released a clown-themed music video in which he mock assassinated a Trump-like figure (a deportation-happy president called ‘Ronald Klump’). But in January 2021, the outgoing president pardoned one of Snoop’s associates, and last year the rapper told the Sunday Times that he has ‘nothing but love and respect’ for Trump. Accused of being a hypocrite and a sellout, Snoop took to social media, as if trying to convince listeners he hadn’t been turned: ‘Get your life right,’ he said. ‘Stop worrying about mine. I’m cool, I’m together. I’m still a Black man, still 100 per cent Black.’ In an interview last month, he claimed that he had used his appearance at the Crypto Ball, one of the events celebrating the inauguration, to empower Black communities and ‘teach financial literacy and crypto’. ‘Even if I would have done it for [Trump], and hung out with him, and took a picture with him, can’t none of you motherfuckers tell me what I can and can’t do,’ he told The Breakfast Club radio show:

I’m not a politician. I don’t represent the Republican Party, I don’t represent the Democratic Party. I represent the motherfuckin’ gangsta party! … The things that I do in real life should matter to you more, not what I do when I’m deejaying or making music … What is he like as a real person? When you walk up on Snoop Dogg, what is his energy, what is his aura?

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has for the better part of a decade been in thrall to hateful notions of ‘free-thinking’, manifesting as an embrace of MAGA ideology, antiblack racism, antisemitism and Nazism. He claims his estrangement from his former friend and collaborator Jay-Z is a result of the latter’s disgust at the MAGA hat that he took to wearing when he visited the White House during Trump’s first term. (‘This hat, it gives me power in a way,’ Ye told Trump in October 2018. ‘You made a Superman cape for me.’) On the cover of his new album, Cuck, he uses a photo of a Klan couple, and in interviews for the album he has been wearing an all-black Klan robe. Last month he released a song called ‘Heil Hitler’ on Elon Musk’s X platform, preceded by a barrage of racist posts. This is the same man who, in 2005, at a telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief, ignored the teleprompter script to say: ‘George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.’

Nelly says he accepted the invitation to perform because he respects the office of the presidency. At the post-inauguration Liberty Ball, he came on stage to the strains of ‘Hail to the Chief’, flanked by dancers dressed as secret service agents in trenchcoats, dark sunglasses and red, white and blue USA hats. A biographical introduction ended with the country’s rags-to-riches promise writ small: ‘He has entertained our troops all around the world. Only in America can you come from the streets of St Louis to the White House. There’s nothing more American than Nelly.’ The orchestral instrumentation yielded to a trap remix, and then a medley of hits, including his gold single from 2000, ‘Country Grammar (Hot Shit)’. Nelly sounded a little hoarse, but it was possible to suspend disbelief until he arrived at the line: ‘Let me in now, let me in now/Bill Gates, Donald Trump, let me in now.’ He repeated it for emphasis. I thought about how much had changed in the past 25 years. All the while, the secret service dancers were doing something with their hands that looked a bit like knocking, conjuring the image of the federal agents who have arrived on so many doorsteps during ICE raids.

This is no time to retreat into nostalgia, but for the past month or so I’ve been doing just that. It may be true that these men have always prized their own interests above all else, but it’s still comforting to return to the past, before we knew this. ‘Country Grammar’, for example, is a great song. It’s a St Louis lullaby, a nouveau riche folk song that borrows the melody from ‘Down Down Baby (Roller Coaster)’, a children’s clapping game, turning it into the prelude for a potential drive-by: ‘I’m going down down baby, your street in a Range Rover/Street sweeper baby, cocked, ready to let it go.’ It’s a sweet hook, but the intimation of violence curdles the chorus. In the opening seconds of the video, Nelly stands under St Louis’s Gateway Arch, the low angle making him look larger than life. He gestures to the camera as if he’s knocking at a door. The clip takes us to two separate jukes: a nightclub and a block party. ‘My grammar be’s ebonics, gin-tonic and chronic,’ he raps, embroidering his lyrics with St Louis-isms, doing ‘wonders to the English language’, as Hurston put it. The video is a mini-tour of the city’s Black haunts and places of affirmation and decoration, including a tyre shop, a barbershop, a hair salon and a store selling beauty supplies.

In the middle verse, Nelly raps:

Say hi, to my niggas left in the slammer
From St Louis to Memphis, from Texas back up to Indiana
Chi-town, KC, Motown to Alabama
LA, New York Yankee niggas to Hotlanta
Louisiana, all my niggas with country grammar
Smoking blunts in Savannah, blow 30 mil like I’m Hammer.

It starts off like a shoutout to incarcerated friends, but he draws it out, and out, naming more and more places, and it becomes clear that he’s sketching a map, with boundaries wide enough to include hundreds of thousands of Black men. They are not just in jail but have been ‘left’ there, as if abandoned by the side of the road. It’s as affectionate a dedication as Delta Slim makes to his comrades in Sinners. There’s cartography and there’s drawing lines: Nelly makes it clear that he stands with all the folks captured in the video. But then he swerves:

From broke to having brokers, my price range is Rover,
now I’m knockin like Jehovah, yellin
‘Let me in now, let me in now
Bill Gates, Donald Trump let me in now.’
Spend now, I got money to lend my friends now,
we in now.

In 2000, it sounded as if he was asking to be let into the billionaires’ club. But now you could be forgiven for thinking he wants access to something more mysterious (the MC Hammer line is a reminder that money can be won and lost). It seems like Nelly wants to be where there’s real power. Who would have thought, 25 years ago, that would be the Trump White House?

Critics like Nijla Mu’min and Wesley Morris persuasively read Sinners as a way of thinking about historical erasure, the vampirism of certain white cultural and political entities, and the watchfulness of groundbreaking Black artists. But the film also invites another reading, as an argument for resisting the music of money and power. Sinners also offers an after-image of double-mindedness: you can be Smoke (money-minded) or you can be Stack (community-oriented), but you have to be able to work out when you’re stuck between the two or conflating them. How can you resist wanting to have it both ways, to be Black, and strident, and ‘all out’, in Snoop’s words, but also at the Crypto Ball? How do you stay ‘together’ (Snoop again)? As much as Snoop might want us to, it’s hard, as a fan, to separate the man from the music. What if the twins, in this real-world case, are the more cowardly version of each of us and the one who stands up?

‘Sinnerman’, the final track on Nina Simone’s 1965 album Pastel Blues, which has been sampled by countless hip-hop producers, including Ye, does not appear in Sinners or on its soundtrack, despite the echo in the title. The song, a rendition of an old Spiritual, may be too obvious a choice. Inspired by the revival meetings organised by Simone’s mother, Mary Kate Irvin, a Methodist preacher, ‘Sinnerman’ is a work song about the arduous labour of freeing the soul. In his biography of Simone, Alan Light writes that the song is an ‘example of her ability to adapt a traditional lyric into an allegory about justice and civil rights’. It’s the story of someone looking for somewhere to hide on Judgment Day, the piano rhythm keeping time with his wildly scampering feet: ‘Oh Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?’ The song’s repeated chant of ‘power’ is wrenching. Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.