Ask anyone whose gods had to travel here below decks
Celebrating America's 250th with an appreciation of Cain Culto x Sudan Archives' KFC Santería
A Loop for the Two-Hundred-and-Fiftieth
One of the unadvertised consolations of having an obsessive-compulsive disorder is that repetition can sometimes stop being a symptom and become an ally. If a piece of music holds an emotion you need to feel and work through, you can play it thirty times in a row at volume and each pass takes you a little further into the feeling rather than further from it.
My therapist calls this perseveration. In religion, it’s liturgy. The rosary, the dhikr, the kirtan. It’s a praise chorus repeated until some clarity emerges from the dirge. Repetition is the oldest technology for keeping alive a feeling the world is trying to switch off.
This week the feelings I’m working through are grief and love, and the loop I’m running is “KFC Santería”, specifically the remix that Cain Culto made with Sudan Archives last summer. I found it, as one finds everything now, by algorithmic accident, somewhere downstream of a Doechii playlist.
A Violin as Weapon of Christ
Both of these musicians are string players, which is rarer in club music than it should be, and rarer still is the fact that these are two people for whom the violin is a church object.
Cain Culto was born Andrew Estevan Padilla in Florida to Colombian and Nicaraguan parents, raised in Lexington, Kentucky. He learned bluegrass fiddle at school and played it in the fundamentalist evangelical church where he grew up, eventually becoming a worship pastor and founding a Christian band.
When he came out as gay, the church’s answer was conversion therapy. The attempt to pray the gay out of himself ended in a week’s hospitalisation, an episode he now describes as spiritual psychosis. What walked out of that hospital eventually renamed itself after the brother whose offering God refused, joined to the Spanish word for worship. He became Cain Culto, an apostate who compulsively worships.
Sudan Archives was born Brittney Parks, a preacher’s daughter from Cincinnati. She learned the violin by ear in church, several services a week, and taught herself to play like the West African and Sudanese fiddlers she found in ethnomusicology archives, players who build instruments from gourds and horsehair. As a teenager she stayed out late in Cincinnati’s indie and electronic scenes, violin in hand, and got thrown out of the house for it. At nineteen she left for Los Angeles with a few outfits and her fiddle.
The music that crossed the Atlantic
What I hear in the remix, and mine is a viola player’s ear primed for harmony, is a progression carried in down-bows and pizzicato that grieves while the lyric blasphemes, and behind it all a wordless chorus whose cadence sounds, at first pass, Middle Eastern. Melismatic, modal, hovering somewhere between mosque and mass.
Parks has said that many of her favourite string players are Sufis, so maqam-adjacent ornament is squarely in her wheelhouse. But there’s a longer route to the same sound. What an Anglophone ear labels “Middle Eastern” in Iberian sacred music is usually the Andalusian inheritance: eight centuries of Arab modality baked into Spanish Catholic singing. This is the music that crossed the Atlantic with the conquistadors and was laid over Yoruba practice in the Caribbean. Yoruba praise-singing is itself melismatic, call-and-response, built on repetition. So a chorus inside a track called “KFC Santería” is the sound of syncretism doing what syncretism does. The ear’s inability to place the choir is the santería.
Because what santería names is the survival strategy of a faith under eradication. Enslaved Yoruba people in the Caribbean hid their orishas inside the coloniser's saints, Ochún robed as la Virgen de la Caridad, keeping the sacred alive by dressing it in the one costume empire had to applaud. Worshippers could express their fidelity, knowing that underneath the robes was something truer. What began as concealment became a religion in its own right, subordinate neither to Rome nor to the Yoruba faith it carried out of Africa. The mask, worn long enough, became a face. Culto takes that very seriously in the video.
Franchise theology
And KFC? Culto grew up in the state that the rest of the world encounters as a bucket of fried chicken, with Kentucky rendered into a franchise, a place become a supply chain, the same way God reached his childhood as a megachurch. Which is to say: as a franchise.
Cain Culto’s own account of leaving the church is not that he lost his faith but that he traced its wiring, and found that what had been sold to him as the eternal was plugged into capitalism. Listen to the lyrics and you can hear a deconstruction of the corporatisation of organised religion. The genius of the title is that it refuses to stop there.
KFC Santería: if the faith you were raised in turns out to be a franchise, you can still do to the franchise what the enslaved did to the cathedral. Smuggle the sacred through the deep fryer. Hide the worship service inside the club banger, the liturgy inside the jockstrap. The grief is that it was necessary. The love is that it works.
The remix has its own occasion. It was made last summer as ICE swept through Los Angeles, by a first-generation child of Central and South American immigrants who said plainly that he was holding a lot of grief and anger and needed to get it out on the track; its merch sent profits to communities hit by the raids. Parks found him the way congregations have always found their preachers — somebody in the comments said you have to hear this — and brought her own expulsion, her own church, her own violin.
Two hundred and fifty candles
Which brings us to the birthday. The United States turns two hundred and fifty this weekend, and the official liturgy will be the usual one: flyovers, fireworks, the founding recited like a creed. I have nothing to bring to that service. But I keep thinking that this track is the more honest anniversary hymn, because these two musicians stand in the country’s actual tradition, the one it exports less proudly than fried chicken.
A queer Colombian-Nicaraguan Kentuckian and a Black preacher’s daughter from Ohio, both thrown out of the houses that formed them, neither surrendering the instrument, both making something devotional out of the wreckage. That is not the exception to American history. Ask anyone whose gods had to travel here below decks. It is the through-line.
To live in this country at two hundred and fifty is to approach it the way Cain Culto loves the church: from outside the door it closed on you, fluently, and furiously. The grief and the love are not stages. They loop.
So no fireworks from me this year. Just one track, at high volume, on repeat, because repetition is how the expelled keep faith. I’ll let you know when I stop. Don’t wait up.