🎶 Anthropology of Music: Blues Between Lament and Temptation

In Sinners (2025), Sammie’s music is more than a soundtrack. It’s a window into the human soul, carrying both confession and curse. His blues become a space where grief and longing are voiced, but also where darker temptations are stirred. The film invites us to think seriously about how art can heal or harm the soul.

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Music as Human Expression

The film shows music as an honest expression of what it means to be human. Sammie’s voice, aching, cracked, heavy with desire, sounds like the Psalms of lament: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1). His songs become the cry of someone wrestling with suffering and injustice.

But biblical lament is not just expression for its own sake. It is directed toward God. When pain is voiced to God, it becomes prayer. In that act, art takes on a healing role, lifting sorrow into God’s presence.

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When Lament Turns Dark

Sammie’s music, however, doesn’t always make that turn toward God. At times it circles around despair and bitterness without hope. Instead of bringing the ache before God, it becomes a kind of spell, what the film portrays as an opening for destructive powers.

The wisdom writings warn about this danger: “For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall” (Prov. 5:3–4). Pain left unoffered to God easily becomes provocation, music that doesn’t heal but tempts.

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The Cry of Suffering in Sound

One of the striking insights of the film is that humans are expressive creatures. We don’t just endure suffering, we voice it. In that sense, music becomes a kind of theology in sound. But those cries can go in two directions:

• Toward God: lament that becomes prayer, seeking redemption.

• Away from God: lament that becomes curse, fueling destruction.

This split reveals the power of the blues in the story: they are both Psalms waiting to be prayed and siren songs leading to ruin.

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Honest Lament vs. Empty Invocation

The theologian Walter Brueggemann describes lament as “speech of disorientation,”⁵ a way of telling the truth about suffering before God. In that way, it is faithful, it keeps relationship alive even in complaint. Sammie’s songs show what happens when lament loses that address: it shifts from prayer to invocation, calling not on God but on destructive forces.

Here the blues become a mirror of the soul’s choice: will grief be voiced toward God or twisted into something that devours?

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Conclusion: Healing or Harm?

Sinners reminds us that art is never neutral. Music always carries spirit. It can be incarnational—bringing the rawness of human experience into God’s healing presence—or it can be idolatrous, turning pain into a liturgy of temptation.

Sammie’s music reveals both possibilities. His voice holds together sorrow and seduction, prayer and curse. And the film leaves us with a haunting truth: every song is an anthropology of the soul. Every note declares what we worship and where we turn when grief demands to be sung.

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Notes

1. See Psalm 13; Psalm 77 for biblical laments in which the psalmist voices anguish before God.

2. Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, 1984), 52–58.

3. Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 246.

4. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 25–27.

5. Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 19–21.