Collected Item: “M. Lamar Oral History, 2021/03/23”
Title
Interview with M. Lamar
Who conducted the interview? List all names, separated by comma.
Kit Heintzman
Who was interviewed? List all names, separated by commas.
M. Lamar
Email Address(es) for all interviewers. Separated by comma.
kheintzman@gmail.com
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your oral history. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
#12steps, #art, #artist, #Black, #brands, #Brooklyn, #capitalism, #colonialism, #documentary, #film, #freemarket, #goth, #healthcare, #HIV, #musician, #Negrogothic, #NewYork, #opera, #performingarts, #PREP, #queer, #sharecropping, #slavery, #therapy, #trauma, #transgenerationaltrauma, #Trump, #vaccine, #welfarestate, #whitesupremacy,
What is the format of your recording?
Audio
In what ZIP code is the primary residence of the interviewee? (enter 5-digit ZIP code; for example, 00544 or 94305)? In what city/town/village does the interviewee live? In what country does the interviewee live? All comma-separated.
Brooklyn
What is the gender of the interviewee? Be sure to allow interviewees to self-identify their gender in the pre-interview or interview. *Do not assign a gender identity to interviewees.*
he/him
What is the age of the interviewee?
45 to 54
How does the interviewee describe their race or ethnicity? Be sure to allow interviewees to self-identify their race/ethnicity in the pre-interview or interview. *Do not assign a racial or ethnic identity to interviewees.*
African American
Describe the oral history.
Self-description: “My name is M. Lamar. I make music, primarily. I make video, film. I sometimes engage in art installation kinds of practices within art galleries and art spaces. I’m also in pre-production in two documentary films that I’m directing. A very motivating pull in my creative life for a very very long time. And so, I would love to encourage anyone who might be listening at any point in history to investigate my work. I have no faith that it will exist in 50 years, but you can find me on Spotify, Amazon Music, iTunes, all those places, YouTube. I don’t know if those places will exist in 50 years, but my work is found in all of those places. If you’re interested in a sort of... how would you describe what I do? Negrogothic music. I’m a male soprano/countertenor or a male treble voice. I play piano. I make longform pieces about any number of difficult subjects, like, say, the transatlantic slave trade or the persistence of police murder of unarmed Black people, and if you know Funeral Doom Spiritual, The Slave Ship, and Requiem Speculum Orum: Shackled to the Dead. I have a piece called Lordship Bondage The Birth of the Negro Superman which is about transcendence and spiritual awakening in the context of extreme dehumanization in the context of imperialist, western, capitalism, patriarchy. That album is a collaboration with the classical duo The Living Earth Show.”
Some of the things we talked about included:
Spiritual survival: music as a spiritual experience, the breath as sacred, the sensory experience of operatic techniques, singing oneself out of bed.
The possibility that capital as we know it might change: Stimulus checks, welfare state.
The opportunity to really work on vocal technique and the loss of the experience of performing for a crowd, muscle memory of the voice.
Grandfather’s experiences of abuse at the hands of white landowners under sharecropping, and the consequences of intergenerational trauma.
White supremacy and the pitting of working class white people against working class people of color, white male anxieties about safety, hate crimes, murders by police.
Looking forward to getting vaccinated.
Living with a boyfriend during the pandemic, finding alone time, access to loving touch.
Having a low-risk threshold.
Insurance and financial access to somatic therapy and 12 step programs.
Regular visits with health care practitioners pre-pandemic and how the pandemic changed that: stopped taking PREP to avoid risk of COVID-19 exposure at clinics.
Anticipation of 2020 touring, and decisions about whether or not to play/cancel a show on March 3, 2020.
The greatest excuse not to socialize.
Donald Trump and spectacle.
The intersections of the internet with DIY spaces, not-for-profit galleries, and illegal spaces.
People becoming brands.
Grant writing.
Other cultural references include:
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, Kathy Acker, Cornel West, Maria Callas, Venus Williams, “The Young Girl” by Katherine Mansfield, Andy Warhol, Spotify, Bandcamp, iTunes, Youtube, Instagram, Brené Brown, “Deep River”, “Amazing Grace”, Sonic Youth, John Zorn, Walter Benjamin, and James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power (1969), A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011).
Some of the things we talked about included:
Spiritual survival: music as a spiritual experience, the breath as sacred, the sensory experience of operatic techniques, singing oneself out of bed.
The possibility that capital as we know it might change: Stimulus checks, welfare state.
The opportunity to really work on vocal technique and the loss of the experience of performing for a crowd, muscle memory of the voice.
Grandfather’s experiences of abuse at the hands of white landowners under sharecropping, and the consequences of intergenerational trauma.
White supremacy and the pitting of working class white people against working class people of color, white male anxieties about safety, hate crimes, murders by police.
Looking forward to getting vaccinated.
Living with a boyfriend during the pandemic, finding alone time, access to loving touch.
Having a low-risk threshold.
Insurance and financial access to somatic therapy and 12 step programs.
Regular visits with health care practitioners pre-pandemic and how the pandemic changed that: stopped taking PREP to avoid risk of COVID-19 exposure at clinics.
Anticipation of 2020 touring, and decisions about whether or not to play/cancel a show on March 3, 2020.
The greatest excuse not to socialize.
Donald Trump and spectacle.
The intersections of the internet with DIY spaces, not-for-profit galleries, and illegal spaces.
People becoming brands.
Grant writing.
Other cultural references include:
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, Kathy Acker, Cornel West, Maria Callas, Venus Williams, “The Young Girl” by Katherine Mansfield, Andy Warhol, Spotify, Bandcamp, iTunes, Youtube, Instagram, Brené Brown, “Deep River”, “Amazing Grace”, Sonic Youth, John Zorn, Walter Benjamin, and James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power (1969), A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011).
On what date did you record this oral history?
2021-03-23T14:16