THE MELting pot
SINNERS X COWBOY CARTER X UK ARTIST OVERVIEW - lets dive in.
You’re probably wondering where the heck have I been.
I’ve been brainstorming new ideas for you guys, waiting to be genuinely inspired. I am so dire bored of commercialism and consumerism even though it seems to appear that I am promoting this as a brand. I suppose that is what the music industry is about right? Finding a niche, finding a label, a brand.. but is that a true reflection of our society and our reality? Is that how true expressionists and artists would live their life? Be confined to a niche just so that it's digestible for a consumer? For a music label to have a prospering business, for an algorithm to squeeze every ounce of you to the world just to pour you back out? I guess so.
Anyways, let me not bore you with my limited capacity of being able to come up with some sort of educable discourse. Let me not just sound like every other whine, mourn or moan bag. Instead, let's talk about songs that sound like they’re mourning, moaning, whining and crying:) Pull out the emotions with a cross genre spectacle. Find the similarities amongst us all and why we feel what we feel. Welcome back to JaneysJukebox.
This blog is going to be about the two most major pop cultural pieces of work this year in conjunction with an uprising UK artist. Analysing the Grammy award winning album Cowboy Carter, one of the biggest block busters of the year, SINNERS (the soundtrack), and UK artist Svn4Vr.
My advice when reading this JOURNALISTIC analysis, is to simultaneously listen to the song(s) to get the full experience.
SINNERS
Sinners premiered on April 3, 2025, at AMC Lincoln Square in New York City, and was theatrically released in United States on April 18, 2025, by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film received critical acclaim and grossed $367 million worldwide. - Wikipedia
THE MELTING POT - THE CULTURAL BRIDGE OF MOURNING
Irish elements to highlight shared themes of mourning, resistance, and oral tradition between African American and Irish folk cultures—especially around colonization, diaspora, and storytelling.
Both Cowboy Carter and Sinners use Irish musical influence not for novelty, but to emphasize how Black American Blues and Irish Celtic Folk share deep emotional and historical resonance especially in their lament traditions (Blues, Jazz and Sean Nos and caoineadh). The intersection between their vocal expression with the free movement of their riffs and free movement of their rhythm. Expressing what they were mourning for and reclaiming. Almost like a desperate love letter. EMOTION.
SINNERS
The film explicitly draws parallels between Black Southern blues and Celtic folk traditions, emphasizing shared themes of struggle, migration, mourning, and ancestral storytelling. An intentional interweave of genres to suggest a deeper connection between African American experiences and Irish history.
From a narrative standpoint in sinners, Sammie’s blues sequences represent life, resistance, and community, while Remmick’s Irish songs become instruments of seduction, menace, and undead transformation—signaling colonial/carceral diasporic tensions made literal through music.
American country music is not just Southern or “white”—it is a cultural fusion, with major contributions from Black, Irish, and Indigenous musical traditions. A perfect example of a multi genre fused songs from the Sinner Soundtrack that includes, hip hop, country, irish folk and blues:
I lied to you
Flames and Fortune
Trouble Waters
Traditional Irish elements: Traditional irish instruments such as the fiddle, strong rhythmic pulses for dance, using modal scales and ornamentation.
African American blues, hip hop, soul and jazz elements: Call and response (christian themes to reflect community), blues notes - flattened 3rds, 5ths and 7ths, melisma (similar to ornamentation) where there is an expressive vocal run off from a specific note and auto-tune (a traditional hip-hop vocal mixing technique used to enhance the tone of a song).
EXPANDING THE DEFINiTION OF AMERICAN MUSIC TO REFLECT ITS TRUE MULTIRACIAL DNA - THE MELODIC FUSION OF CULTURE
To begin with some american soul/ country music, I am not going to tell you where and what and how it originated, I am going to tell you to listen to the soundtrack and album back to back and let you feel what you want to feel. Those southern blues will yearn to you, for you in fact. The gospel richness, praises, almost as if it is calling for you to listen, to understand. This is what the sinners soundtrack does. It gives you soundbites of different genres for you to pay attention. Why is there Irish melodic techniques such as ornamentation, why are the soundbites of hip hop rhythms woven through the soundtrack, why is there mixing techniques such as auto tune intertwined between different motifs and what is all of this trying to represent? Sinners and Cowboy Carter are trying to translate the yearn through the different genres like how a tv show translates through different languages so that everyone can relate, everyone can hear the yearn. There is an incentive behind this, to demonstrate that we as people are closer than we know. It overarches the boundaries of the sound that is “supposed” to come from blues. Genres are just a funny little concept really..arent they? And on that note, let’s discuss the cowboy carter album.
COWBOY CARTER
Again, similar to sinners, this isn't a sound you would expect coming from a traditional blues or country album. Because it's not supposed to be a country album, it's supposed to be a yearning album. To represent a true reflection of society. So in depth and rich in the spirit of yearning again, using traditional Irish motifs, rhythms and melodic techniques, interwoven with folk, interwoven with blues and gospel and again like sinners, hip hop. This is cultural integration. Innovation. Demonstrating that there is no limit to what you can musically do or release as an artist and it certainly doesn't depend on your race, or where in the world you're from or how you grew up. These works are here to let you evoke whatever feeling your feeling in the most non generic way possible. We can allow ourselves the space. And again, traditionally each culture has a different sound, but we can still feel the exact same way no matter what you're listening to. The songs listed below are songs that demonstrate the multi-cultural influences:
Flamenco - Folk Guitar plucking/ Stacked harmonies/ Free-movement. These are all elements that derive from Folk, Country and Church influences.
Riverdance - Irish folk, hip hop and Pop cultural influences. I mean its in the title of the song itself. A very obviously multicultural fused song.
COWBOY CARTER - BEYONCÉ
released march 29 2024
SV4VR - Local UK artist
Basically, everything I was talking about in one artist. How our multi-cultural backgrounds can deeply influence our sound, to penetrate right through the stereotypical expectations of popular artists. Introducing: SVN4VR. An artist who subconsciously expresses all of his diverse backgrounds into one sound. Influenced by church choir arrangements and harmonies intertwined with his Yuroba heritage. A spirit of sound you can not shake from your spirit. You can hear the call and response that is heavily influenced by christian music, yet integrates it with the music he grew up with - the ‘sound cloud rap 2016’ era. There are many folk elements in his songs; again, rallying back to the theme of yearning through any sound that can evoke the most feeling, regardless of what may be stereotypically expected. His sound is as expressive as it gets, using every genre possible to get his emotion across to his audience. He uses chaotic adlibs mimicking gun sound intertwined with harmonic rich melodies. A beautiful polyphonic texture with each melody holding a place for a different genre. You guys, MUSt listen. Here are songs I recommend listening to by Svn4vr:
Fleashdeath Anthem - Produced by C WORLD, written by svn4vr (A mixture of rap style adlibs, folk guitar almost similar to ‘Between the Bars’ by Elliot Smith, and the Christian music element of Call and response. Everything one could give to a song to make you feel the way you feel.
Kitchen Nightmares/ cornrows - Produced by Cameron M Baguley, written by svn4vr. Folk fusion with elements of the harmonica/ accordion and guitar, including yodel adlibs and layered harmonies.
These works of ART define what is means to be a true expressionist. To be able to reach the very core, soul and spirit of music and use it to evoke an image, send a message and to make us think and reflect. What better way to convey a message than to feel it, hear it and experience it.
Listen to the tracks below as you read this JOURNALISTIC review on the different works of art.
