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M Lamar, photo Johnny Q, courtesy Rewire

Dagmar Bosma met up with the American composer, performer and artist M Lamar to talk about his interest in the writings of bell hooks.

I encounter composer, performer and artist M Lamar onstage at music festival Rewire in the Hague. It is the premiere of a new work by Lamar titled Machines and Other Intergalactic Technologies of The Spirit, a piece that is heavily inspired by Sun Ra’s retro-futurist sci-fi projections on the mind and spirit. In the piece, rhythm and harmony are dragged out into a seemingly endless vibration. You cannot really distinguish separate songs in Lamar’s set, which pours out over the audience, enveloping the space in long, shivering echoes.

Lamar studied painting and sculpture before dropping out to focus on music and become a trained opera singer. He now works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and multimedia installation. His modern opera pieces, such as Lordship And Bondage: The Birth Of The Negro Superman, are often grounded in theory and literary writing, and combine classical music with doom metal and spirituals, a type of religious folksong closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American south. Lamar coined the terms ‘Negrogothic’ and ‘Doom Spirituals’ to describe his fully embodied aesthetic and musical style. Inspired by the gothic novel, in which the horrific and the romantic coexist, Lamar’s ‘Negrogothic’ symbolism evokes the horror of the plantation, of lynching, of mass incarceration, police shootings and racial sexual fetish, as well as the romance of the resilience of black people.

I meet Lamar the next day at Page Not Found in the Hague, following his talk on the work of cultural theorist bell hooks. In commemoration of hooks’ recent passing in december 2021, the gathering offered room for reflection as well as mourning. Speaking from personal experience, and from a place that felt deeply emotional, Lamar introduced the author’s 2004 book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Afterwards I ask Lamar about the impact that hooks has had, and continues to have, on his work and way of being in the world.

[answer M Lamar] ‘bell hooks is my north star, even though I only met her in person a few times. Reading her work has been a life changing experience and has enabled healing, growth and real change for me. It kickstarted my mental health. It helped me make sense of my life in making sense of the world, gender, race and capitalism. Her writing has informed my work in content, but more foundationally, it has teached me what wellness for a black person could look like. I feel like I gained a parent through reading her work, and I believe we can all find parents in writers like hooks. She has also been a mentor-figure to me and has guided me as an artist. She herself was an artist and her work is as much an artistic as a critical endeavor. She worked from such a great need and urgency, writing to find a way to go on. The negro-spirituals I perform have that urgency too, originally sung by enslaved people to aid in each others survival.’

bell hooks, photgraphed by Lyle Ashton Harris, The cover of Metropolis M Boeken/Books is by Lyle Ashton Harris

bell hooks emphasizes how all genders are impacted by the dominance of patriarchy, and how important it is for the wellbeing of men and women both to move away from patriarchal being

THIS ARTICLE IS PUBLISHED IN METROPOLIS M BOEKEN/BOOKS, THE NEW BOOK FANZINE/REVIEW WHICH IS AVAILABLE FOR FREE AT DIFFERENT LOCATIONS IN THE NETHERLANDS

 

Hansje van Halem, Fold Type, in Sketches Edition #4, Uitgeverij de Buitenkant 2022, 80 pagina’s full color

Dagmar Bosma

is kunstenaar en schrijver

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