After catching his performance at
Pianos
a few weeks ago, (it’s an unusual experience to say the least) I
decided to sit down with Reginald in his apartment and turn on a tape
recorder to see who was really behind the M. Lamar act and what pushed
him to be so provocative. The conversation jumped around various
topics, but Reginald, baring a fresh scar where his appendix had been,
helped sprout various revelations in my mind as we spoke in his pastel
green living room.
Diego Cupolo: Let’s start simple, how did you end up at Goodbye Blue Monday?
Reginald M. Lamar: I moved to New York almost three
years ago and ended up moving in the Goodbye Blue Monday area with a
woman who said I should check the place out. It had only been a week
since I arrived from San Francisco and when I walked in I immediately
felt at home. There’s a very West-Coasty vibe about the place so I
started hanging out there a lot and performing there a few times and
eventually Steve asked me if I wanted to work there and I said “No.” I
just liked the guy and didn’t want to have a boss-worker relationship
with him because it could ruin that and I didn’t want a “job” job. I
just wanted to gig. But a few months later after I finished a tour in
May 2007, I was on the computer and he asked me again because someone
didn’t show up and all my money was gone and I was broke so I said
“Yes.”
M. Lamar performing. Click to enlarge.
Diego: I love that place because there are so many
performances, but not all of them are great and, luckily, I can escape
to the backyard area during those moments. It’s different for you,
though, you’re always there — what do you do when a band sucks?
Reginald: Well, (laughs) as a musician, it’s a
treat because you get to see some really amazing people sometimes. I’ve
found a lot of free jazz folks that have performed here to be very
inspiring. And when you see the bands that suck it makes me hope that
that’s not me. So it’s mixed bag, because we have shows every night of
the week, I’ve pretty much seen everything you could imagine. Usually,
maybe not, um (laughs) unfortunately, but the stuff that’s amazing
makes the whole night worth it.
Diego: So living in Bushwick, are you where you want to be right now?
Reginald: I was always skeptical about New York
because I would come here during college and hang out in Manhattan and
was watching it transform into this horrible place, this mall
basically, but then I had all these friends in San Francisco moving to
Brooklyn so I was encouraged that in moving here I would be able to
find a community of like-minded people who don’t value a corporate,
mass-produced — or even the mentality of “I’m gonna become a famous,
well-paid artist.” A community that I did find on various levels,
especially with the artists and musicians at Goodbye Blue Monday, but I
think that Bushwick suffers from “Oh yeah, we’re the next big
neighborhood,” meaning that we are on the cutting edge of
gentrification and that there are going to be scenes here that will
get commodified.
I guess in Williamsburg in the early 2000s there was a group of bands
that were scooped up by record labels and industry things and I think
there’s always this longing for commodification, which sort of makes me
sad. That definitely goes on Bushwick, but what I think is nice at
Goodbye Blue Monday is that there are different things going on there
where people are just happy to be making art, making work, and
displaying it.
Diego: So being “the next big thing” bothers you?
Reginald: Yeah, it does bother me because whenever
people are offering themselves up to be commodified there is something
fundamentally dehumanizing about it. I mean this kind of
culture-vulture, cultural vampirism thing is really is grotesque. I
mean it’s fine people can do it if people have to survive, and there’s
always going to be a thirst for the next thing, but it’s fashion
basically. Every year fashion designers come up with new lines in the
fall, showcasing the new thing that’s gonna be sold this year, and then
every spring there’s a new style for this or that, every season is
looking for something else to sell. For me in terms of the art that I
want to make, I’m not really seasonal, I want to have a very long
career, like people like
Nick Cave, he had a very long career, he wasn’t trying to change with the seasons, or like
Antony and the Johnsons, do you know Antony and the Johnsons?
Diego: I’m very uncultured.
Reginald: Antony and the Johnsons, I would say he
was a soul mate of mine, you should look him up, readers will know who
he is. I was watching one of his performances, and he’s kind of famous,
but I don’t think he is working with the mentality of “oh yeah, this is
going to be really trendy right now.” I just don’t think that art is
about that, I mean, real art transcends and addresses who we are as
human beings, it’s not a fashion. Pop culture is about fashion, you
know, Britney Spears, if you are a pop artist you have to appeal to
whatever the immediate moment is.
Diego: Let’s talk about your work, how do you describe what you do as far as your music?
Reginald: I like to have people experience what I
do as opposed to me having to describe it, but I mean, if I had to it
would be some sort of amalgamation of an apocalyptic — that would have
to be the first word — apocalyptic, blues, negro spiritual, satanic
operatic experience.
Diego: Apocalyptic, blues, negro spiritual, satanic operatic experience? That’s a lot of things.
Reginald: I mean, like, agh, you know, when I hear
bands describe themselves their always like, “we’re a cross between
this band and this band.” Like this really rocker dude I was hanging
out with — he looked like an 80’s or 90’s guitarist, you know, long
hair, the way rockers look. So I asked, “So what’s your band like?” And
he said, “Oh, we’re like a cross between the Stooges, that dirty thing
the Stooges have, with a little bit of the Stones, but with some AC/DC,
too.” So I’d like to avoid when you evoke other artists and compare
yourself, like you’re the result of what happened when these two people
cross-pollinated. I try to avoid that.
But I guess if I had to do that, I don’t know what I would say, all my references would be really obscure, like if
Leontyne Price found
Cradle of Filth.
Diego: Opera and heavy metal? (After Reginald explains who they are.)
Reginald: Yes, but on a formal level, there’s a lot
of dissonance in my music, a lot of unresolvedness, a lot of unresolved
chords, and if I could compare that to life in some way, life is
usually unresolved, I feel very unresolved in my life. And one of the
things about art is that you can resolve. In life, obviously can’t
resolve everything, but in art you can, you actually can resolve a
chord, you can resolve dissonance into a kind of harmonic constant
that’s soothing. And there are people that want to make very soothing
art that assures them that life is alright, but that is not what I am
trying to do. I think there is entertainment value to what I do, but
it’s not about it being comforting.
Diego: During your performance I noticed after
every song, you stopped, looked at the audience and it seemed like you
were looking for feedback. After that, you composed yourself and went
back into the next song. What was that about?
Reginald: Well, I’ve been working with this
director on this show I’ve been preparing for, which is going to be in
Long Island City this summer, and one of the things he wants me to do
is acknowledge the audience because that was something I guess I wasn’t
doing. I would just have my experience and continue what I was doing.
So a lot of the looking out and looking around was this moment of “Ok,
we’re here together” one of the things that I need out of performing is
to have an experience, with myself and with the music and sending this
transformative amour in a spiritual or shamanistic way, and hopefully
I’m bringing everyone else along in that transformative experience.
It’s not just me kind of like, masturbating or something, or having
some kind of demonic possession by myself, and hopefully I can get
other people involved in that process.
Diego: After seeing one of your performances I would assume your lyrics would be controversial to some people.
Reginald: And you say that because?
Diego: Just saying, you sing about white pussies and big black dick.
Reginald: Ok, this is important, this is kinda
canned because I was thinking about this before you came over, but I
think there’s a fundamental conflict between about being in the world
and destroying the world in my work, in my life, too, but we’re just
talking about my work now, and so there is, you know, I am a black man,
I am sexually diverse, in regards to homosexuality, bisexuality,
pansexuality — I encompass all those things, I am ambivalent in terms
of sexuality, in terms of gender, in terms of class, upward mobility is
not a goal of mine. All this it puts me in conflict with most things in
our cultural value systems, you know, sort of “American Dream” kinda
stuff.
Diego: So you’re opposite –
Reginald: I wouldn’t say opposite, just
fundamentally skeptical of it all, if that’s clear you know, and my
skepticism brings me to question it deeply and so then it brings me to
this place of “who am I?” and “what am I in this world that exists
now?” Since we understand ourselves, as Americans, as having a certain
history of slavery, of inequality with regards to women, with regards
to class, with regards to all kinds of terrible things — how do I
negotiate myself and my personhood? So I think a lot of what the
lyrical content is about is me trying to negotiate who I am and trying
to understand that historically because, you know, most smart people
say, “Well, how do we understand what’s going on in the world now?”
(pauses) “Well, we look at history, we study history.”
And so, if I am saying something like, “get down from that tree and
give me that nigga dick,” I’m saying that from a historical standpoint,
I’m trying to understand something about the sexualization that
happened during lynchings in the United States when the lynchers would
cut off black men’s penises and pickle them and sell them, or
photograph them. I’m trying to understand this in the terms of my body
as a black man and my black penis, how do I go about doing that?
For me, they’re just fundamental questions… it’s just historical,
it’s factual, it’s just, “Well, this happened” and so how do I
understand that? When I first read about it in some book I was really
disturbed and it was really troubling but it also shed some profound
light on my own sexuality and the ways in which I was sexualized doing
sex work and being in the sexual market place, having sex with a lot of
white people, white men and having them have various sexual
relationships to my anatomy.
Diego: Hold on now, just because I’m curious, did they cut it off before or after the lynching?
Reginald: After.
Diego: Okay, wow, and that was a standard practice?
Reginald: Yeah, it was a standard in the context of
lynching, which isn’t talked about much, people talk lynching all the
time but they don’t talk about the sexual aspect of it.
Diego: Well, I definitely didn’t know about it
before I saw your show. How would you say these incidents from our
history affect your work?
Reginald: Well, there’s a stereotype that there is
a savageness to black people that makes them more sexual, more
sexualized, and that slave owners felt justified in sexually exploiting
black people because of it. One of the common things was the fear of
black male sexuality, the myth that black men’s penises were larger
created an anxiety, I guess, in white men in terms of their lack of
prowess and so then there was always the threat, it was more of a
fantasy really, that black men were raping white women and defiling
them.
During slave times, sexuality was a huge part of mythology, and it’s
still something we hear now, I mean, my director was asking me what I
was going to do now that Obama’s president because I have all these
songs about race and all this kind of skepticism about black liberation
in the United States, but so what? Does this mean we’re some sort of
post-racial society now? I guess I can’t really celebrate, I can’t
really engage in some kind of “We have overcome” song.
Diego: Post-racial, huh?
Reginald: Yeah, I hate that term, but one of the
things I love talking about is when Jamie Foxx won the academy award
for playing Ray Charles in Ray. He got up and he was making his speech
and he said “My grandmother, she beat me.” He was talking about being
out of control or something and he talked about how she beat him and
how the result of her beating him is why he was there, in that moment,
standing on stage receiving an academy award (laughs) and I just
thought this is horrifying! But so much of how black people have been
conditioned with regards of raising their children is this level of
discipline that’s like the same kind of behavior that slave owners
treat their slaves, they would beat them. My grandfather was — he grew
up in a
sharecropping
situation where the landowners would beat him for hours and hours and
hours, so what did he do to his children? He beat them for hours and
hours and hours. And so we end up with someone like Jamie Foxx, who is
a success, talking about his success coming from being beaten down.
There wasn’t some kind of massive outcry of like “oh my god, this is
horrible, why is he talking this way about being beat down?” and it
makes me really sad that people have to equate black success with being
beaten down, because that’s still a colonized mentality.
Diego: So where do you see yourself in the spectrum
of the music world and culture singing your music as a queer black man
that doesn’t look like most people look. People come see you and you
give them this very psychedelic, hypnotizing show, echoing vocals. What
are you trying to do?
Reginald: That’s a good question. I want people to
leave the show differently than they came and what that means is that
they would have a totally transcending experience, stylistically and
aesthetically. I hope it’s unsettling. I want people to experience the
moment, the notion when the fundamental foundation of another idea is
taken away, that’s the moment when change can really happen in the
individual. So I am looking for those moments. I hate the idea of
putting music on in the background, like when you’re cleaning or doing
the dishes, I’m not really interested in background music, I’m
interested in an experience that can fundamentally change you. Change
your life. So that’s all, I just want to like, change people’s lives.
(laughs)
Diego: I’ve always wondered about the increasing
presence of very grotesque imagery in music. Are we running out of
ideas? What do you see it as, why do you use it?
Reginald: It’s funny though because I think that
these bands that I knew In San Francisco do all this horrific and
exploitative, almost a
Vice Magazine
kind of mentality of crudeness and I just don’t think that my work is
in that category. Even if I’m talking about White Pussy or Nigga Dick I
just think that it’s too beautiful. I think the way of presentation,
it’s so aesthetic, so beautiful, maybe in a way that makes it even
slightly absurd that the presentation is so aestheticzed that what I do
is nothing grotesque at all. I think it’s horrific only as much as the
reality of our history and the things being talked about in the work,
like in the way the Holocaust is horrific or the Native American
slaughter is horrific.
Diego: Maybe it’s more horrific at first because you sing about things that people don’t normally want to think about?
Reginald: Yeah, sure, but there’s always something
behind it all. My song “White Pussy” is very much about the junk food
of Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. The lyrics are “white pussy, white
pussy for sale” and we live in this cultural context where it’s being
offered up, we’re being forced to have desires for this thing that’s
being held up in front of us. And then there’s people like Beyonce who
are willing to embody everything that white pussy represents, it’s
really the same thing.
Listen to M. Lamar’s “White Pussy”
Diego: Overall, even though you’re saying your work
is to better understand who you are, I’m sure there’s a lot of people
that have the same thoughts as you do and it can help them out, too.
Reginald: Yeah, that’s not why I make the work, but
in terms of its function in the world, I mean, well I guess I’m
interested in making beautiful songs, but beauty to me isn’t always,
like, easily, you know, beauty is complicated. (laughs)
Diego: So when’s your show?
Diego: In Long Island City, right?
Reginald: Yeah, it’s called “The Black Death.”
Diego: And who’s this director you keep talking about?
Diego: Sounds like it’s going to be great, hope it all works out for you.
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