M Lamar

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M Lamar
Lamar in 2017
Born (1972-05-29) May 29, 1972 (age 51)
Mobile, Alabama, U.S.
Education
Occupations
  • Composer
  • performer
  • multimedia artist
RelativesLaverne Cox (twin sister)
Musical career
Instrument(s)
  • Vocals
  • piano
Websitewww.mlamar.com

Reginald Lamar Cox (born May 29, 1972),[1] known professionally as M Lamar, is an American composer, performer, and artist.[2][3] He is an operatic countertenor and pianist whose work incorporates film, sculpture, installation, and performance.[4]

Lamar is the identical twin of actress Laverne Cox,[5] and played his sister's character pre-transition in two episodes of the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black.[6][7]

Early life and career[edit]

Lamar was born in Mobile, Alabama,[8] and as a child he sang as a soprano in his church's choir.[9] He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and attended Yale for graduate school in sculpture before dropping out to focus on music.[2] He moved to New York primarily to pursue vocal training with Ira Siff, founder and lead soprano of La Gran Scena Opera Company.[10]

In 2014, Lamar participated in an open dialogue with authors bell hooks, Marci Blackman, and Samuel R. Delany called "Transgressive Sexual Practice" as part of hooks’ work as scholar-in-residence at The New School.[11] He has cited the writing of hooks and Toni Morrison, as well as operatic composer Diamanda Galás’s Plague Mass, as inspirations for his work.[10]

One Archive and the University of Southern California commissioned Lamar's Funeral Doom Spiritual, which premiered in 2016 as both a performance and multimedia installation with objects, videos, and prints.[12][13] The work is loosely based on the life and death of Willie Francis, a Black American charged with having murdered a 53-year-old white man at the age of 15;[14] Francis's case only received significant attention when he survived an attempted execution by electric chair, after which the NAACP spoke with him and learned the two had been in a sexual relationship.[10] This event led to further development of Funeral Doom Spiritual, which had its conceptual origins in Lamar's studies of representations of blackness, black masculinity, interracial desire, and the intersection of Michel Foucault’s work on the panopticon with Frantz Fanon’s writings on internalized racism and the white gaze.[10]

In 2016, Lamar received a grant from the Jerome Foundation to compose the work Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman for the Living Earth Show.[15] The work's libretto includes quotes from John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Nietzsche, and Hegel.[16]

Lamar coined the terms "Negrogothic" and "doom spirituals"[17] to describe his aesthetics and work. Exceeding his own "goth" style, Lamar says the Negrogothic "circulates horror genres with colonial-racial questions" and is "about horror and romance together, the condition of black people in the American project."[18] These rhetorical innovations are related to his valuing "self-construction", specificity, and illegibility as means of preventing the reduction and appropriation of African American art.[19]

In 2022, Lamar appeared on the ABC show Claim to Fame under the pseudonym "X". He was eliminated in the third episode when his celebrity relative was guessed.[20]

Discography[edit]

Year Title Label Additional Personnel
2010 Souls on Lockdown[9] NEGROGOTHIC RECORDS
2013 Speculum Orum: Shackled To The Dead with Bryce Hackford (synths, tape loops), Matthew Robinson (cello)
2015 Negrogothic
2017 Funeral Doom Spiritual[21] NEGROGOTHIC
Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche[22] NEGROGOTHIC with Mivos Quartet (Olivia De Prato, Lauren Cauley, Victor Lowrie, Mariel Roberts) featuring Charlie Looker, Colin Marston, Cum Gutter, Bryce Hackford[14][23]
2019 Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman[24] Co-composed and performed with The Living Earth Show (Travis John Andrews & Andy Meyerson)[16]
2020 M. Lamar Live with Haela Hunt-Hendrix, James Ilgenfritz's Anagram String Trio

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Laverne Cox | Biography, TV Shows, & Movies | Britannica". www.britannica.com. May 25, 2023. Retrieved June 25, 2023.
  2. ^ a b Johnson, Ken (September 18, 2014). "M. Lamar: 'Negrogothic, a Manifesto, the Aesthetics of M. Lamar'". The New York Times. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  3. ^ Als, Hilton (July 13, 2009). "Diva Deconstructed". The New Yorker. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  4. ^ Wickstrom, Maurya (January 2017). "M. Lamar: Singing Slave Insurrection to Marx". Theatre Survey. 58 (1). Cambridge, England: The American Society for Theatre Research: 68–85. doi:10.1017/S0040557416000697.
  5. ^ "Laverne Cox And M. Lamar Discuss Identity, Collective Trauma, Celebrating The Black Penis And More". HuffPost. February 8, 2012. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  6. ^ Bertstein, Jacob (March 3, 2014). "In Their Own Terms – The Growing Transgender Presence in Pop Culture". The New York Times. Retrieved June 21, 2014.
  7. ^ "'Orange Is The New Black' Star Laverne Cox's Twin Brother Plays Her Pre-Transition Counterpart (VIDEO)". HuffPost. July 26, 2013. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  8. ^ "Exploring M. Lamar's 'Negro Gothic Sensibility'". Out Magazine. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  9. ^ a b Woolfe, Zachary (January 12, 2017). "A Goth Male Soprano Who Plumbs the Darkness". The New York Times. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  10. ^ a b c d Colucci, Emily (October 3, 2014). "The Plantation Is Still Here: An Interview with Artist M. Lamar". VICE. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  11. ^ Swan, Shea Carmen (November 10, 2014). "She Came, She Saw, She Transgressed". The New School Free Press. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  12. ^ "News From ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and the ONE Archives Foundation" (PDF). ONE Archives Foundation. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  13. ^ Mashurov, NM (2016). "Coffins Across Centuries: M. Lamar's real life Negrogothic Horror". IMPOSE Magazine. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  14. ^ a b Bernstein, Felix (April 25, 2016). ""Virtuosity Provides Freedom": Thoughts from an African American Composer". Hyperallergic. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  15. ^ "Composers Selected for 2016 Jerome Fund for New Music & Minnesota Emerging Composer Award (MECA)". American Composers Forum. November 23, 2016. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  16. ^ a b Quick, Quentin (April 15, 2018). "M. Lamar alters consciousness in 'Lordship and Bondage'". San Francisco Examiner. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  17. ^ Lamar, M. (May 1, 2019). "Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman". Theater. 49 (2). Duke University Press: 45. doi:10.1215/01610775-7480887. S2CID 203429481. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  18. ^ Kane, Pete (February 5, 2015). "M. Lamar: Negrogothic and the Sexual Underbelly of White Supremacy". SF Weekly. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  19. ^ Rachel, T. Cole (January 13, 2017). "M. Lamar on being your own genre". The Creative Independent. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  20. ^ Claim To Fame: Every Celebrity Relative Revealed So Far, retrieved September 7, 2022
  21. ^ Walls, Seth Colter (February 6, 2017). "M. Lamar / Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: Funeral Doom Spiritual Album Review". Pitchfork.
  22. ^ "Listen: M. Lamar, Charlie Looker & Mivos Quartet". WQXR. New Sounds Live. April 28, 2016. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  23. ^ "M. Lamar, Mivos Quartet: Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche". Apple Music. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  24. ^ "M. Lamar's 'Negro Superman' draws on Sun Ra and metal". AFROPUNK. February 20, 2019. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
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