PicoBlog

As black social life has become less and less about impressing or appeasing forces outside of it, the treatment of sin in our music has gone from strict condemnation and moralizing in spirituals, to reveling in blues, jazz, r&b, and hip hop, as if vice and depravity might allow us to rebel socially even while we remain oppressed politically and economically. Sin and decadence have become portals for the black sonic imagination and the idea of being evil has turned from dangerous to liberating as our music has evolved. Sin songs soothe us. Sin is the currency of private freedom and we spend and exchange it together, since everything we do is criminalized already, we make praise songs about lurid dilemmas like loving too many people at the same time, hating our enemies, punishing our haters, killing, stealing, running away, exacting bitter revenge, never being repentant. After internalizing the idea that your skin, your body, the way you move, the way you speak, the way you think and conceive of the world, is vulgar and threatening, guilt and the desire to change to appease critics shifts to giving them something to feel threatened about, fulfilling the prophecy—why not be black as sin and glad in it. 

Of course this is part defense mechanism, a diversion we create so we don’t have to try and redefine good and evil and cast ourselves as imperfect saints or doomed hedonists. We overcompensate for the shame that stalks black life by pretending to cherish our derelictions, sometimes we even learn to love them for real. We talk ourselves into loving ourselves unconditionally. Music is our accomplice. Few songs make us believe it. Moodymann’s “Sinnerman,” released in 2019 as a hidden track on the album Sinner, is one of those songs. It’s a ballad, a lament really—peppy and frayed on the edges. It’s also a duet or call and response. An unnamed woman opens, declaring herself a proud sinner and Moodymann responds by affirming her and joining her there. She declares a miscalculated reputation— they say I’m a saint but sometimes a sinner and then pointing out the merits of sin tell me that you look at me and don’t see a winner. Sultry electric guitar captions the announcement like it’s guiding the singer’s subconscious up from the submarine into a bright horizon to celebrate the unseen, private thought crimes exonerated by confession. 

Moodymann is already artist as shadowy anheroic figure, the ideal modern sinnerman recast in the warehouse turned club but birthed at the baptismal. He does not want to be revered, or even seen really. He wants his music danced to and felt in the body and the subconscious, not used to brand him as commodity. He transgresses his way out of the spotlight. His sin is understanding the glamor of modesty and the importance of black privacy. He knows that secrets and mystery inspire closer listening, music with more texture, and an audience that isn’t entirely hype and rumor driven. “Sinnerman” becomes pep talk and almost soliloquy about these choices—mirror talk back and forth between the feminine and the masculine and a twinning that feels like making amends with the shadow self and its tendency to torment, to defy, to undermine, to heal, to uproot. “Sinnerman” is about wanting time alone to sulk or bask in the consequences of antisocial behavior. It’s also about the sociality and community that comes of defiance—revolutionary anhedonic solitude.

You sat in your lonely room listening to Dilla, Kenny Dixon/Moodymann confesses, hoping they would remember. He’s talking to himself as much as to his ego ideal. The chorus, where the feminine and the masculine meet and agree is fuck them hoes, and fuck what they know. It’s not a flippant fuck them, it’s resounding, it expands and commits, tugs at the spirit and asks it to walk away. The feminine and masculine in the song are enamored with one another’s hermetic approach to self-mythologizing, they lean into one another as the only worthy company and the song becomes an airtight fairytale, smoldering, sunken downbeats, redeemed by serenade as only two sinners can redeem one another. Underneath all the hiding away is an unexpected erotic bloom rooted in digging, in ruins made visible. 

“Sinnerman” joins the tradition of black sin songs with a new approach to testimony, at once direct and recoiling. Moodymann’s is a rare universe wherein black life is afforded the luxury of ambivalence, characters in our songs are neither bad nor good, male nor female, and frustration and fulfillment come as a pair, not two vastly exclusive spheres. This is honest music to fall in love or fall in love with yourself by. Dixon has a temperament that earns the staggering of tones and the dark but hopeful atmosphere of the furtive song, overt in its disdain for the world outside of it.

It’s hard to tell whether Moodymann himself is a pimp or a saint when you dig around for biographical information on him. You end up realizing it’s none of your business, that he’s a myth publicly so he can be his own man privately and that many of his songs repent for this defensive antic. His grandfather owned a Detroit jazz club where he worked as a DJ for several years beginning at the age of nine. His tastes and talents are hereditary and obsession driven like many Detroit musicians. He was somewhere between black Baptist music and Motown sound and the sound of the factory assembly line and the sound of the back yard— he learned to juggle and join these tones impeccably. 

At his grandfather’s club he would have heard Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, he would have played Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” with its foreboding question looping over and over where you gonna run to— He would have heard the classic “Gin House Blues” excuse I’m in my sin, and Louis Armstrong’s aching croon my only sin is in my skin, what did I do to be so black and blue? He would have seen the psychedelic cover of Miles Davis’s Live Evil lp, a naked pregnant black goddess encroached upon by a bloody overflowing ocean with a serpent’s head, at once venerating and denigrating black womanhood as well as pointing to the genocide that was the slave trade and the unrelenting fertility of black life and black womanhood in spite of and beyond the state of near constant siege that began there.

He would have heard Joseph Jarman reciting the Henry Dumas line, dream: in those days we shall be terrible. Later Kenny would have played Biggie’s Juicy and rapped along to the lines, born sinner, opposite of a winner, and internalized that dejected come-up. In 2012 he would have joined all of us singing along to the Kendrick Lamar chorus I am a sinner, and I’m probably gonna sin again, and he would have been as relieved as we all were to announce it, to renounce the social perfectionism that accompanied the rhetoric of black excellence. Finally, excellence is the ability to be wrong on purpose, to not want to be right in the white world way, to own sin and ourselves, to recognize that some of our affliction is the need for revenge or as Amiri Baraka put it in his frighteningly honest play Dutchman ‘Charlie Parker wouldn’t have had to play a single note if he had just killed the first ten white people he saw, not a note!’ 

Our music is where we enact revenge fantasies so that we can be the loving sometimes docile recipients of endless oppressive strategies and survive it with our souls intact. Sun Ra would joke about being evil, about being Lucifer himself, and mean it, in the sense that he meant to do whatever it took to be Sun Ra on his own terms. Part of the black experience in sound is feeling demonized for being our truest selves, for the depth and chaos and power of our rhythms, and the heartfelt yearnings that they reveal. It’s evil to sound like ourselves, we’re told again and again through rejection or because were blamed for what our sounds inspire in others.

Let us sin forever in song and let that sin spill over into life, where we find impossible wholesomeness waiting for us on the other side of our nightmare ballads, which we love, and need, and sing with vicious optimism. Moodymann’s “Sinnerman” is a refreshing extension of the tradition of black sin songs. By the final verse the two speakers have bonded and merged over how empowering and healing some ruthlessness is, tell me why the crime don’t fit the offender, tell me why I’m sublime and still a contender… fuck them heaux.. is the final disintegrating loop. Sin and divinity, worship and obsession, saints and haints, all land together in a breathless fuck you. Black music’s greatest achievements often begin and end with a fuck you then, and you don’t know if it’s a departure or an invocation or something like the promise the black protagonist makes in Ganja and Hess after killing to feed his blood addiction I will not be punished, I will not be tortured, I will not be guilty. No sound can seduce us into a trance of freedom if we believe in sin. The effective black sin anthems are about releasing harsh judgements of the self and tending to what’s beneath them, the parts of us living underground, our devils, or angry gods. Fuck them heaux, and fuck what they know.

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