On a highly emotional TikTok livestream, Chloe Bailey opened up about why Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending box office hit, had her “sobbing” and why its message is that damn potent. For Bailey, the film resonated. It was a reflection of her own journey as an artist traversing the cruel terrain of the music industry.
“Can I be honest? After Sinners, I cried,” Bailey admitted. What ensued was an open meditation on the parallels between the movie’s narrative and the emotional cost of being a genuine artist in a world that often prioritizes compromise over creativity. In the film, the character Sammie, a talented guitarist, is tempted by the idea that he could achieve eternal success with the help of metaphorical ‘vampires’ who want him to sell out. To Bailey, this plot was a brutal illustration of the choices many artists must make between pursuing personal truth for quick success or staying faithful to their art and suffering for it.
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“It just reminds you so much of the industry, right?” she said. “And it’s like, you can have a gift like Sammie did with his guitar to be successful, the vampires were telling him to sell out so that he could live forever and his music could live forever.” Her words were not cynical so much as a reflection of decades of accumulated knowledge about how the business tends to romanticize those who sell out while belittling those who don’t.
Bailey went on to show how, in the film, the outside characters, those who refused to surrender, endured “fighting for their lives” while others partied above them, a scenario that rang particularly true. It documented the hardly visible fight of artists who persevere against the temptations of shortcuts. “No matter how hard you work, how good of a person you are, no matter how talented you are, sometimes that’s not enough to get you places that you need to be,” she added, her voice filled with quiet frustration. With her account of why she’s so emotionally invested in Sinners, Chloe Bailey isn’t just singing of her love for the film. She’s heightening a discussion about the music industry’s murkier currents and the emotional toll of maintaining your artistic integrity. Many creatives felt those words hurt just as much as the film itself.
