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.”

 

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.

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?

Reginald: July 16th, 17th and 18th at the Chocolate Factory.

Diego: In Long Island City, right?

Reginald: Yeah, it’s called “The Black Death.”

Diego: And who’s this director you keep talking about?

Reginald: Jonathan Jacobs, he was one of the founders of the National Theater of the United States of America.

Diego: Sounds like it’s going to be great, hope it all works out for you.