“Just for a Few Hours, We Was Free”: The Blues and Mapping Freedom in Sinners (2025)
In the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, Ryan Coogler has a vampire story to tell. But before he can begin, he needs to tell another story—a blues one. Sinners opens with a voiceover thesis statement performed by Wunmi Mosaku (who plays Annie in the film—more on her below) about the work the blues can do, then rambles the narrative through and around 1932 Clarksdale, eventually settling into a juke joint outside of town. Here, the blues story builds to a frenzied climax, ultimately conjuring the vampires propelling the film’s second half. It’s those vampires that most immediately register as cinematic spectacle, but Coogler’s impetus to film in IMAX and leverage all of his professional relationships for the movie wasn’t the monsters—it was to showcase the blues at a scale the music deserves. In Sinners, the blues takes center stage as a generative sonic practice, sound that creates space to be and to know in the crevices of the material world, providing passage between oppression and freedom, life and death, past and future, and good and evil.
I’m not exaggerating in calling the opening voiceover a thesis. In a movie where Coogler trusts his audience with a great deal of interpretation, he puts an incredibly fine point on the role that blues performs here. We’re told that some musicians—be they Irish, West African, Native American, or southern US Black—are so skilled that they can pierce the veil separating the living from the dead, and while this piercing can help heal a community, it can also attract a certain evil that wants to exploit this rupture. The narrator doesn’t say “It’s the blues!” but the next visual information we get is that it’s Clarksdale, MS, in 1932, and an injured, blood-soaked Sammie (Miles Caton) is stumbling into his father’s church, clutching what’s left of the neck of a guitar. No one in Sinners says the word “crossroads,” but here we are, at the place where the blues meets the devil—where the end meets the beginning–and our young hero has a choice about which way he’s going to go.
If Coogler doesn’t fully trust his audience to know what to do with the blues without being told, it’s likely due to decades of commercialized attempts to defang the genre that have filtered out 21st century listeners’ ability to hear most of what makes the blues potent. Drawing on what Clyde Woods in Development Arrested (1998) has termed the “blues epistemology,” a blues way of knowing, B Brian Foster speaks with contemporary Black Clarksdalians in I Don’t Like the Blues (2020) to chart much of the current state of the blues. Pulling on one particular thread of Foster’s ethnography can help clarify what’s happening in Sinners, as he unpacks the many reasons why the blues don’t resonate quite like they used to.
In Woods’s framework, the blues is more than a musical genre; it’s a way of understanding and, crucially, reshaping one’s world. The blues, a genre arising in the late 19th century and reverberating through the 20th, functioned as epistemology in order to explore a way out from under plantation power after Reconstruction and through Jim Crow. Woods chronicles centuries of “plantation power” in the Delta and how that power reconfigures itself over and again through different eras of US history, always with the goal of extracting labor and life from Black Mississippians. The blues pushed against the edge of what was considered possible and sought to imagine and create a world that was free—not just from plantation power but from all the logics that support it or would circumscribe Black self-determination and autonomy. In I Don’t Like the Blues, Foster encapsulates the heart of blues epistemology with a flourish: “While many people hear the blues as performance and play, Black residents of Clarksdale knew it to be flesh and bone, a spirit in the dirt. Their blues was a conduit. A map. A method” (15-16). Throughout his book, Foster demonstrates that what the blues was is no longer what the blues is. One of those reasons is that resistance to plantation power (whether in the Delta or beyond) simply sounds different now, having worked its way through jazz and funk and soul and hip hop and trap.
In Sinners, Coogler starts by telling us what the blues could do, then he shows us that power in a climactic scene midway through the film, reminding his audience that a blues epistemology might not always sound the same, but it can still do the work of mapping out freedom. After the camera cuts away from Sammie at the crossroads in his church, we loop a bit back in time to meet Sammie’s cousins, the SmokeStack brothers (twins played by Michael B Jordan), who purchase the juke joint’s eventual location. The first half of the movie follows the brothers as they split up and get the band—and hospitality crew—together to open the venue that night. Sammie is new to this life, but a deeply gifted bluesman, and he receives counsel along the way about what the music is and how it works. Once the juke is packed, the booze is flowing, and the dancefloor is sweating, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) invites Sammie to take the stage and tell the people who he is and where he’s from. What follows is an ambitious narrative and technical feat that pays off the opening voiceover.
Sammie, also known as Preacher Boy, launches into a song called “I Lied to You,” addressed to his minister father (played by Saul Williams). It’s a confession that he’ll take the blues over the church any day. His singing pierces the veil, and we witness a litany of musicians joining the space from the past, present, and future: an Afrofuturist rock guitarist, hip hop DJs, breakers, twerkers, a ballerina, a Zaouli dancer, and Beijing opera performers, among others. Weaving in and out of Sammie’s blues, the sounds of each of these musicians layer and feed back into the mix to create a densely ecstatic sequence. This is the community healing piece of the voiceover thesis. The performers joining from far-flung places and times connect to an ancestral lineage of creative self-determination that runs through the patrons of the juke joint (Bo and Grace—played by Yao and Li Jun Li, respectively—are Chinese shop owners helping out at the juke joint and the presumed source of the Beijing opera performers).
Sinners’s musical conjuring isn’t an academic article, but it does have some musicological points to make. Audiences encounter musical styles uprooted from specific times and places, all mingling around this blues moment in 1932 Clarksdale. Coogler structures the scene by stacking out-of-time sound and movement, emphasizing the potency of a blues epistemology while also acknowledging that the blues’s power is situational. In its time—post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow—the blues could call in and draw on the fullness of diasporic music-making and world-mapping. But at other times, and in other places—say, a 2025 music venue—the blues is less likely to ignite such a moment as it is to show up as a participant, arriving as one of many in the musical ancestry to support the veil-piercers of the day. This phenomenon is the “changing same” of Black music, as Amiri Baraka put it in Blues People: “consistent attitudes with changed contexts” that explain why the sound changes over time (153). In Sinners, the immediate context is a community of Mississippi sharecroppers who seek healing, and the blues widens the frame so that the juke joint revelers can connect to and draw strength from a broader, deeper community beyond the edges of their material world.
As “I Lied to You” mingles with sounds past and future, the camera moves through the juke in a counterclockwise motion, grounding the scene further in diasporic ancestral practices. In Slave Culture (1987), Sterling Stuckey traces elements of Bakongo burial ceremonies throughout the New World, focusing especially on the ring shout, a sacred ceremony practiced by enslaved people in the United States involving a shuffling circular dance accompanied by song. Consistent across these traditions is counterclockwise movement:
Wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed—it is called the ring shout in North America—the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods, the tempo of the circle quickening during the course of movement. The ring in which the Africans danced and sang is the key to understanding the means by which they achieved oneness in America (12).
The counterclockwise circulation rehearses the life cycle, with the sun rising in the east (birth) and setting in the west (death), only to rise again (gesturing toward the connected nature of all life).
Stuckey draws on Robert Farris Thompson to note that special emphasis on counterclockwise motion would happen in Bakongo rituals that superimposed a cross on the circular movement, where the horizontal line represented the division between the living (above) and the dead (below). Here is the dividing line of Sinners, then: an ancestral ceremony with a crossroads superimposed on it, a blues invocation where the audience is propelled counterclockwise through the circle of juke joint dancers, where the dead and not yet alive join in the festivities.
The theme of lineage and ancestry courses through Coogler’s work. On the personal level, this may play out as a boxer sparring with his late father’s legacy. On a larger scale, Coogler often traverses the land of the Great Migration and the sea of the Middle Passage, tying back together the threads left dangling by the terrorisms of the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow. For a people whose lineage was savagely untethered by their ancestors’ enslavers, the power of a blues epistemology comes from its ability to tap into traditions and rituals that couldn’t be fully severed, restoring the “oneness” of those engaged in the dance and fueling their ability to imagine and create a path to freedom.
There is the other part of the voiceover’s thesis statement, though. When you pierce the veil, evil seeks to charge through. As the “I Lied to You” sequence hits peak intensity, Coogler treats movie audiences to another visual effect that the blues performers cannot see but feel; the juke joint appears to spontaneously combust and its roof is on fire (the roof, the roof. . .). Coogler metaphorically lets the motherfucker burn, down to the concrete foundation supporting the people as they continue to dance. At the edge of the dusty parking lot, the movie’s villain—an Irish vampire named Remmick—watches lustily while flanked by his latest converts. He wants Sammie; particularly what Sammie knows how to do.
Because Remmick hive-minds with whomever he turns into a vampire, taking on their memories and abilities, if he can get at Sammie, he’ll be able to pierce the veil, too, and commune once again with his long lost ancestors. We could read Remmick’s drive as an allegory about cultural appropriation, a white man who wants to steal the blues, and certainly there’s an element of that at play. But the “Killmonger was right” corollary of Coogler films suggests that villains are often more complex than they may at first seem. In Sinners, there’s a mob of Klansmen that function as the more straightforward baddies, but Coogler isn’t interested in giving them much screen time. Yet he lingers with Remmick just as he did with Killmonger and Namor in his two Black Panther installments. In each of these cases, Coogler explores different experiences of what it’s like when the boot of Empire is on your neck. Remmick, coming from Britain’s first colony, speaks of his home being taken and of religion being forced on him. He seems to hold genuine disdain for the Klan and notes that he’s happy to turn them all to prey, not because he wants what they have but because they deserve a gruesome death. He plays and dances to the music of his ancestors with care and devotion. And he argues that what he has to offer—community with his coven, the power to overtake the plantation class, eternal life—is better than what Smoke, Stack, Sammie, and the rest of the juke joint patrons currently have.
No one living trusts Remmick—in fact, Annie (Mosaku), the heart, brain, and wisdom of the movie, specifically distrusts him even before he reveals his true vampiric nature. And Coogler doesn’t position Remmick to be perceived as “good” in any sense of the word, except at playing that banjo. But, like Killmonger and Namor, Remmick gets to be right about some things. It appears in flickers of concession on characters’ faces when Remmick tells them they live in a place where they’ll always have to fight to even try to be truly free. It appears again when the juke joint protectors melt a bit during Remmick & Co’s performance of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” a glimmer of a thought of “wait, should we let them come inside and play this absolute bop??” (for detailed historical context for this song see Daphne Brooks’s “See My Face on the Other Side” [2017]). Coogler’s villains ultimately suffer defeat, but before they do, he makes sure audiences glimpse how they’ve suffered under Empire, offering an understanding of their destructive actions as born of unhealed generational trauma.
Piercing the veil is tricky work. Dangerous work. In The Long Emancipation (2021), Rinaldo Walcott notes that “much of what we have come to call Black culture is a mode of living life within, against, and beyond plantation logics” (20), not only a rejection of logics of oppression but also a practice of creating and nurturing something else. To set about finding knowledge and being, as Sylvia Wynter puts it, “completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human” is to set off into the not-fully-known, where one may encounter a variety of ideas and beings who won’t ultimately lead you to freedom but who may offer you something a little better than what you’ve got (Wynter, 2000 interview with David Scott, 136). Walcott calls this the difference between emancipation and actual freedom. While emancipation is often mistaken for freedom, Walcott argues that “postemancipation acts of Black life have been consistently interdicted, thereby preempting and often violently preventing Black life from authorizing its own desires for bodily autonomy” (105), preventing Black life from being free.
In Sinners, Coogler shows us the way the blues could clear space for finding freedom, but none of the characters in the movie make it all the way there. It’s a movie situated in the long emancipation, where an imposed religion calls the blues the devil’s music, where plantation sharecropping and the Klan violently forestall Black freedom (but sometimes get what’s coming to them), and where various vampires carrying their own intergenerational trauma try to seduce Black people into accepting a different flavor of emancipation in place of the freedom the blues leads them toward. The map to freedom may not sound like the blues anymore, but Sinners reminds us the work isn’t done.
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Featured images: Screen Capture by SO!: Sammie’s right hand clutching broken guitar neck, black cross in the background against white wall [2:10]
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Justin Burton is a Professor of Music at Rider University, teaching primarily in the Music Production degree as well as in the Gender & Sexuality Studies program, and author of Posthuman Rap (Oxford, 2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (Oxford, 2018).
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“Music More Ancient than Words”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Africana Aurality — Aaron Carter-Ényì
Music Meant to Make You Move: Considering the Aural Kinesthetic–Imani Kai Johnson
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The Techno-Woman Warrior: K-pop and the Sound of Asian Futurism
I
As a ’90s kid, I remember too well us school kids singing and dancing to the songs at the top of the charts on music shows such as Ingigayo (인기가요) and Music Bank (뮤직뱅크). It was what one might call the “pre-K-pop” era: there were a lot of solo artists performing in various genres, and the notion of idol culture as we know it now was only fledgling. Without the mass production system or the global distribution that has come to be the norm in today’s K-pop, first generation idol groups around the new millennium—H.O.T., Fin.K.L, god, Sechs Kies, S.E.S.—not only set up these business models and standards, but also inspired the music and aesthetics of later generations. The group aespa’s cover of “Dreams Come True” by S.E.S. is an exemplar case, and NewJeans, with their unflinching Y2K aesthetics and sound, take us back to the millennial through and through.
What are we to make of this return? I wonder if the return of the millennial across South Korea’s cultural sectors has to do with the old, daunting problem of capitalism. The kids born in the ‘90s are now adults with buying power, and nostalgia always sells. It’s by no means new to ask this, but still: are we at a cultural impasse where we cannot tell—and sell, for that matter—genuinely brand-new stories? What “genuinely brand-new” means is also another question.
Interestingly, though, it is also about aesthetics. The millennial aesthetic is not just a trope that is old, marketable, and familiar to a consumer base; it was always something inherently futuristic. The K-pop scene around the millennial was abundant with references to cyberworld and AI, keeping pace with the emerging and developing presence of the Internet. The group CLON immediately comes to mind: named after the term clone, the group was performing futurist visuals and electronic techno sound and dance throughout the early 2000s. If our contemporary culture and music scene is bringing back this specific aesthetic of the past, this is then already always a look toward the future—that is, by reviving the old that was all about the future yet to come, we also, in the now, desire a new future. It is the very mode of thinking or imagination that also travels with the return of the millennial as a product.
K-pop today has been witnessing new generations of bands that showcase futurist visuals and sound such as EXO and aespa. Now, despite these well-produced and -invested bands–and the whole industry wired toward mass production and profit-making–I want to direct us to another scenario where this neo-millennial touch is much more than simply the most up-to-date upgrade for the old and familiar financial success plot. By way of what I might call comparative listening, I ask that we attune ourselves to how sound not only travels across time and space but propels us to look toward the future that has not yet come. To this end, I begin with a story of a cultural phenomenon in the early K-pop scene: long before K-pop became a global sensation, a young former-actress Lee Jung Hyun was offering her listeners a flight through sounds that deterritorialize and relocate them onto a different spatiotemporal plane.
II
Amidst the early idol wars of the millennial that came to define K-pop as we now know it, we also saw and heard something unprecedented. We were certainly not ready when a 19-year-old female singer made her debut on a major ground wave television music show on the last day of October 1999. On this day, Ingigayo, a now defunct weekly Sunday live music program, aired Lee’s first performance of “Wa” (와) which was an instant sensation across the country. It starts with a camera zooming in on an extraterrestrial planet with a ring around it that says, “LEE JUNG HYUN Let’s Go To My Star.” Accompanying this visual cue is the likewise out-of-this-planet sound effect that instantly transports the audience to her “Star,” wherever that might exactly be.
After setting up the otherworldly soundscape, Lee begins to introduce herself, except that, aside from occasional decodable words—“zero,” “Korea,” “Jung Hyun,” etc.—the introduction falls short: we cannot really hear what she is saying or, more to the point, meaning. It is here, at the point of “zero,” ungrounded on our planet Earth and distant from any system of meaning at hand, that Lee sends out the invitation to her own planet and embarks on her almost ritual-like performance with such full force, showing the audience that this sound and these dance moves of hers are the very power source of the not-yet visible spaceship. (Cue the windy stage effect!)
Lee’s memorable entrance to the scene was almost instantly followed by both financial success and cultural impact. Right after her performance aired, Lee began to win every competition on every major music show; she showcased her repertoire with variations, although keeping with her futuristic, spacey visuals and sound. Everyone from elementary school kids to celebrities on TV imitated Lee’s pinky mic and her gargantuan, “big eyed” fan, not to mention her unique techno dance moves. It was as if Lee’s debut statement—“Let’s Go To My Star,” also the title of her first album—came to realize itself by, quite literally, transporting the people of earth to her star, where different aesthetics and politics apply. The visual and aural shock of Lee’s strong experimentalism shifted and transformed the cultural terrain of the Korean pop music scene, taking the viewers and listeners to possibilities and futures that had no name yet.
Can this be a starting point where we can imagine futures yet to be charted? It is no secret that this futurist aesthetic introduced at the turn of the century is even more widely visible and audible in K-pop today. EXO, for instance, owes its group name to exoplanet, and as their story goes, members are extraterrestrial beings that came to planet Earth, without any memory or the superpowers they once had off-planet. Or, we could look to aespa: like EXO, their narrative takes us deep into a future where members in the “real” world encounter and connect with their avatars (called “ae”) in the “virtual” world.
Throughout these cases, the futurism of the millennial that Lee pioneered seems to be calling to us once again, only to be reinforced in and through the new market that has been expanding larger than ever. Again, capitalism and the laws of the market seem to be victorious. But how did Lee do it in the first place—where did she find her inspiration? When there was hardly any precedent of the systemized or mass-produced storytelling that has now come to be the norm of the K-pop industry, Lee was single handedly telling a story that no one in the K-pop history would have easily come up with, and sound was the very centerpiece.
As many of Lee’s contemporary commentators pointed out, her music combines then-emerging techno rhythm and sound with Korean traditional music; her mixes feature thumping beats accompanied by traditional instruments like ajaeng (in “Wa”) and kkwaenggwari (in “GX 339-4,” often performed live as an intro to “Wa”) that delivered historically and culturally readily available sounds to the South Korean audience. This surprising, genre-bending mix of musical and sonic repertoires left many listeners unsure whether her music was of the past or future. Lee further added to this hybridity by overdubbing the fast-paced techno rhythm with slow dance moves inspired by tai chi, as she revealed in her interview with Section TV. In another interview with the national evening paper Munhwa Ilbo (문화일보), Lee said that she found techno in Europe four years ago and that it was now widely spread across Europe and the United States. She added that, when she was recording the album, techno was just being introduced to South Korea, and that she wanted to popularize the genre further by making the title song more accessible.
This was the origin story of “Wa”: as one of the earliest exponents of techno in the K-pop scene in the 90s, Lee needed more familiar components—lyrics about love and betrayal, traditional instruments, etc.—to ease the audience into the new technological sound. And it is sound that connects all these nodes of Lee’s story. It was the fusion of Korean traditional music and European techno that allowed Lee to open up a whole new terrain of music that no one had heard of. In other words, it is as if sound allowed Lee to travel time and space, crossing and crisscrossing different genres of different periods and places through music. It is useful to go back to the latter interview, where we can glimpse her exposure to a wide-ranging repertoire of international music traditions:
I enjoy listening to various kinds of music like Indian, Cuban rock, Eastern European, and African, but these genres remain inaccessible to many domestic listeners. Dedicated music fans might be able to access them by downloading files from the internet or something, but the ninety percent of people cannot. That’s the reality of our country.
It was these sonic crossings between different eras and parts of the world that inspired Lee not only to produce and introduce new sounds to the domestic scene, but, in and through those sounds, to herald the very future of K-pop. When there was barely any systemic approach to music production or any music streaming service in existence like Spotify or even YouTube—MTV was the closest thing we had—Lee was embodying the force of sound itself to cross times and spaces and present something totally new, taking all of us to her star.
III
Lee’s story of sound as an interstellar force to cross temporal and spatial boundaries sends us not only to today’s K-pop but, rather unexpectedly, to midcentury America, where K-pop as such could not have been known. Lee’s florid, even lurid, out-of-this-world attire and futuristic electronic sound reference a notoriously occult figure of the mid-20th century American music scene: Sun Ra.
Jazz composer/pianist, leader of the independent record label/space travel agency El Saturn, the myth incarnation and many more, Ra claims to have come from outer space to bring all the Black people on earth back to where he came from through his music—where, as he says in the film Space is the Place, “sounds of guns, anger, frustration” of earth are no more. In a 1968 prose “My Music Is Words,” Ra writes:
To me all types of music are music but all types of music are not Space Music. According to my weigh of things: Space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity. It is not a new thing project to me, as this kind of music is my natural being and presentation. It is a different order of sounds synchronized to the different order of Being.
On another occasion, Ra said of his space music that “the vibrations of it will just put them over in the sound and the sound becomes like a spaceship and lift ’em on out there.” This self-claimed rescue mission through new music and its “sound of greater infinity” was not merely a pretentious rhetoric or gesture. Ra was one of the earliest exponents of the portable electronic synthesizer Minimoog. Initially trained as a jazz pianist and having played in the big band tradition with jazz giants like Fletcher Henderson, Ra turned to what may be called “space sound engineering” to introduce space travel through otherworldly sounds.
As many scholars agree, Ra is considered one of the initiators of Afrofuturism. While the term itself was coined by Mark Dery in the 1990s, Afrofuturism describes a pre-existing, distinctive aesthetic style and politics of a group of work by artists—Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Tricia Rose, among others—who imagine and secure Black life and presence in a future where robots, cyborgs, and superhumans can be imagined without difficulty. Dery describes Afrofuturism’s core feature as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” This “African-American signification” onto the future carried urgency because this future was, at least before Afrofuturists arrived, mostly white. Dery further asks, “Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies?”
Grappling with this white-oriented future scheme and the contemporary narrative of “progress and conquer” under the headings of the official government space project and the expansion of suburbs, Ra offered an alternative space project: we’re leaving this planet earth behind and turning toward somewhere we can build a different future, and this will be done through new music, new sound: “Space Music.” Indeed, sound has long been a crucial theme and tool for black aesthetics and politics. Black studies scholars—Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, Louis Chude-Sokei, Tsitsi Jaji, andré carrington, Daphne Brooks, Anthony Reed, Carter Mathes, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Tao Leigh Goffe, Matthew D. Morrison and more—take up Black sound (and often its relationship with technology) to discuss alternative stories of American racial history and future fraught with tensions, but not without hope (one of Afrofuturism’s main themes). Even long before this, though, Black artists had been engaging sound as power, from work song and holler to Blues and Jazz to Hip Hop and dance. Janelle Monáe immediately comes to mind as a contemporary figure who blends this sonic legacy with Afrofuturist features. She even directly comments on Ra’s precedent by conjuring up again his mirror-faced, black-hooded companion in Space is the Place in her own music video, “Tightrope.”
I’m by no means in a hurry to draw a line of influence or causal relationship between Lee and Ra. In fact, I’m not interested in saying that Lee somehow found this long tradition of Black sound and futurist aesthetics and “applied” or even “developed” it for her own use. Rather than setting up some sort of a kinship between Lee and Afrofuturists that may even remotely come across as appropriative, I’m much more interested in thinking, by way of juxtaposition, about whether it is possible to imagine Asian futurism informed and shaped not only by Afrofuturism but by K-pop. Ever since Dery’s inaugural coinage of the term, Afrofuturism has long been recognized for its versatility as a powerful concept to generate other kinds of futurity or futurism. For example, in his chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, De Witt Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be viewed within this more general political and aesthetic project, imbricating the experiences of the African diaspora with those of colonized peoples in Asia, South America, and elsewhere” (570). Dawn Chan confirms this root of Asian futurism and ponders upon its possibility, inspired by Ryan Lee Wong: “If Afrofuturist thinkers have created speculative realms of their own accord, carving out counterfactual worlds that might cast the shortcomings of our current one in high relief, might there be analogous ways for Asian artists to recast techno-clichéd trappings toward more generative ends?”
Despite all these ongoing discussions and questions, Asian futurism to this day remains significantly under-developed and -theorized. Further developing such a concept, not to mention its larger and broader—louder—cultural significances, seems to be in order, especially in light of the recent surge in successful renditions of the Asian future-scape as in A24 films like After Yang (2021) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). So, how do we do this? My modest proposal would be that we listen; that we attune and thus open ourselves to the sound’s power to travel far and wide.
This is not about finding quintessentially “Asian” sound, as techno-orientalism might have us do; it is rather about recognizing sound and music as an aggregate of energies that transports you to different spaces and times—to myriad possibilities and futures yet to be charted. Famously, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say as much when they comment on sound’s reterritorializing force: “sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. . . . . Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of reterritorializations” (348). Taking sound’s reterritorializing nature up in the study of popular music, Josh Kun talks of Audiotopia, “music’s utopian potential, its ability to show us how to move toward something better and transform the world we find ourselves in” (17). Sound and the sound of music, as it were, move us beyond the confines of our present world and toward futurity.
It is, then, precisely the very difficulty of identifying an aesthetic and/or political genealogy between Lee and Ra that propels us toward a new futurism. The seemingly random parallel across time and space between the two artists makes more sense now—it confirms, if not strengthens, the mobilizing force of sound to travel far and wide—cross-culturally, cross-historically across eras, periods, nations, continents. Lee’s and Ra’s very taking up of popular music and its sound for their temporally and spatially distant futurist projects attests to this sonic force and, with it, the possibility of sonic world-building that, through its mobile energy, transports the listener somewhere not here and now.
In The Woman Warrior, whose title I borrow for this essay’s, Maxine Hong Kingston ponders upon her leaving home for America. In this moment of mixed regret and nostalgia, Kingston also learns to see things and the world more clearly: “Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity.” Relocation is never easy, but it also brings, along with shocks and traumas, new perspectives and understandings. Kingston talks of “the new way of seeing,” but can it also be of listening? Is it a pure coincidence that this passage appears in the chapter titled “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”? If we can let our ears channel the invisible sounds of the world(s) alongside what we see, leaving or relocation may, at once and any moment, become reterritorialization.
In this way, sound calls for comparative approaches that extend from one culture and history to another, and asks for comparative work, both critical and creative, that welcomes sound as a hearing aid with which to listen to the world(s), both known and unknown. If, as sounders and soundees alike, we are lifted and opened up by sound and reterritorialized elsewhere, it only makes sense to look and listen away from where we already are or what we already know, and towards learning what other worlds and other-worlds might teach us. Let the sound open us, let ourselves sound out what we learn, then may we be able to finally begin to find courage for another beginning, another future.
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Featured Image: Lee Jung-Hyun (cover) on 2000’s STAR BOX “asian futurism” music video box set. via flickr
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Hoon Lee is a PhD candidate in English and Associate Instructor at Indiana University Bloomington. His focus is contemporary American poetry, poetry and institution, lyric theory, popular music, and sound studies. He is specifically interested in how poetry disrupts institutionality by creating spatial and temporal alterity, offering us alternative forms of living and future survival. He holds a BA in English Education and an MA in English Literature from Seoul National University, South Korea.
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