Sinners versus K-Pop Demon Hunters

I understand there are other movies nominated for a Hugo, but don't really care. These are the ones I saw. While some people judge movies by the costumes and set design, or sometimes even the actors and script. I put a huge amount of judgmental weight on their soundtracks. 

I have an everyday music playlist that I play whenever I’m on the clock, to remind me of that. Periodically I throw different albums into the mix, and retire songs whenever I get tired of them. And although lots of Sinners songs held their own for months, notably Pale Pale Moon and a nice although historically inaccurate cover of Wang Dang Doodle,

 (I still like the Pointer Sisters version best, although I also like soundtrack version, and the Grateful Dead version, and the original Howlin’ Wolf version -- Fast-Talking Fanny and their gang made their way into a classic American song that people will still be covering in a hundred years)

to my ears, the KDH soundtrack seems fresh every time. Golden actually came on while I was starting to type this, and I was humming along.

I’m going to share something that links these two movies: alink to a PBS documentary called Pu’uwai Haokila: The Story of How Hawai’iShaped Modern Music.

 It talks about a small kingdom, unfairly overthrown by a larger oppresor. The rest of the world didn’t seem to care. So a pack of shamans, armed only with their music, began traveling the world to gather reconaisance and gather allies, and do whatever they could to try and set it right. One of their entry points was the World’s Fair – specifically the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where they delivered an exciting style of playing guitar that, well, shaped modern music. Like the documentary says. And it was the crucial foundational ingredient in everything from the steel guitars of old timey country to the slide guitars of the delta blues.

To my poetic mind, pop-rock-soul-country-all the music that moves me all stems from that moment where Black, European, and Polynesian forces united their musical traditions – with more than significant contribution by Native Americans with relation to rhythms and harmonies -- and lit this cosmic spark, initiated by the urgency of a squad of bards from a small and desparate kingdom amalgamating all the music they encountered in their travels. 

Check out the history of that awesome resonator guitar that figures in a crucial scene of Sinners, or read about Joseph Kekuku if you want to know more. I had an amazing time last weekend watching Hawaiian guitar legends George Kahumoko, Jr. and Kimo West talk about Joseph, and play music on a 1930s Rickenbacker lap steel that would have sounded very familiar to all the people in Sinners. They heard it on the radio all the time.

Sinners speaks goes to different ideas about the music sparking from the collision of Black and European traditions. The scene where people in a nightclub are listening to a guitar solo – and suddenly they are flashing into the future to see Jimi Hendrix, and more – is one of the most Real-With-A-Capital-R scenes I have ever seen in a movie. But I’m about music the way Stephen King is about baseball, or the way Quentin Tarentino is about feet. 

And Zoroastrian themes about good and evil fit perfectly well within vampire stories and the whole Southern gothic dynamic, and they’re all over K-Pop Demon Hunters too. I would’ve liked Sinners a lot better, though, if those Indigenous vampire hunters at the beginning had been singing one of their own songs, and if the Chinese-American couple had been listening to some steel guitar, and if the Hendrix apparition had been sanctified by one of his ghostly Cherokee ancestors.

Now I’m going to cut to the shamans of K-Pop Demon Hunters, who descend from a long tradition of musical aggregators. Jinu was busking on a bipa – an ancient Korean-style stringed guitar-like thing – centuries ago, and the female trios preceding Huntrix perform in whatever style is contemporary. Lots of those catchy melodies on the sountrack are lifted from European classical music (infringement proof, lol) with a heavy sprinkling of Black styles from Motown to Hip Hop, all rendered in what has evolved into the ”Korean Pop sound” – multilayered production, crisp beats, influences not so much drawn from culture as from pop culture, swiping the best elements from multiple styles.

What Sinners and KPDH have in common is the idea that music can fight evil. That evil is a very real and dangerous thing, but music can turn it back to hell, where it belongs. I can get behind that.

What shifts me toward voting for KPDH is the idea that I grew up in the South Pacific, listening to Asian music alongside all the other kinds. Asian musicians have been shut out of the American pop industry even though a Pacific Islander was kind enough to invent guitar solos for us. One of the characters in my courtroom-drama-work-in-progress is an Asian-American musician who had to go to South Korea in order to have a music career; he’s based on real life examples, notably Mark Lee, a Canadian of Korean descent who started out in boy band known as NCT and recently put out a terrific solo album called Firstfruit that got attention from Rolling Stone.

I’m a big fan of K-Pop (my favorites include SHINee, BTS, Stray Kids, Ateez, EXO, MonstaX and on and on) because it got me through the pandemic. My music computer died a month after lockdown began so I just embraced a new genre while re-uploading everything, and then I started expecting the kind of HD surround which only K-Pop can deliver.

And I’m also a big fan of this movie. I’ve mostly given up on movies. I sat through the Oscar noms year before last and it was all movies that I never want to see again, and this was the first year I haven’t bothered to see any of the best picture nominees.

But somehow I found this cartoon musical enchanting enough for multiple plays. It’s a story about a romance between a mostly-good girl and a mostly-bad boy, and the female characters are absolutely unafraid. Whether it’s fighting demons, looking gross during an eating scene or delivering moving songs about disclosure such as This Is What It Sounds Like, these girls are central.

This is a female-gaze movie for girls, about girls. I was recently chatting about how in South Korea, it’s perfectly okay for boys to enjoy watching cute girls sing, and there are quite a few examples in the movie of the diversity among music fans. In America, female-gaze is still taboo, and it’s assumed no boys would be interested in watching cute girls sing – too unmacho. Our media is centered on attracting to the young male demographic that has enough disposable money to go to the movies these days, and I’m really hoping the success of KPDH might sway things just a tad, especially since the soundtrack has been defeating all contenders in the music charts for the past year and is currently holding its own alongside the new BTS album on the K-Pop charts.

That’s a lot of demons banished back to hell. 

I don't think it'll win; the Hugo crowd probably prefers tapping their toes to Wang Dang Doodle as opposed to this newfangled stuff their grandkids keep singing. KPDH mostly slid under the radar of the prior generation. There wasn't even any merch available for the longest time, and we had to rely on fanmade stuff.  It's still my favorite though, and I kind of want to skip the ceremony so I won't get disappointed when it gets passed up for someone else's comfort film.