M. Lamar

Even though most music performers are referred to as "artists," M. Lamar really earns the title. Lamar seems interested less in conventional songcraft and more with creating, for lack of a better word, "pieces."...  Read More

M. Lamar in The New Yorker
If there's such a thing as a post-structuralist, transgendering singer, it's M. Lamar. While songs are his métier, he's ultimately a performance artist who celebrates and parodies the very idea of the chanteuse: he deconstructs the persona of the diva even as he wraps himself in divalike hauteur...  Read More

Lamar holds and trills his guttural utterances with the marvelous fortitude and surety of a Nina Simone or a Patty Waters. Wearing his blackademia on his form-fitted leather sleeves with equally tight-ass jeans, Lamar places the listener into often uncomfortable situations. I thought at times, bloody black fetuses might climb out of the piano's guts, slither downstage, sit and stare accusingly at me. Like Kara Walker, or David Hammons, Lamar confronts with history, shuns with narrative, pricks our noses with shameless recall, all the while smiling, his eyes turned to the floor, waiting.

The singer and pianist M. Lamar, who is black and approaches gender through the lens of race and does it in a highly entertaining fashion.

His haunting counter tenor is reminiscent of the vocal stylings of Diamanda Galas, and the experience of listening to him sing about 'white pussy for sale' is rather unsettling.

The singular artist M. Lamar is a classically trained counter tenor whose brilliant original work is in the unabashedly political yet emotionally powerful tradition of artists like Diamanda Galas and Paul Robeson. He also has a sense of humor, and the songs, with titles like 'That Obscure Object of Desire' and 'Exploitation Chic,' can be sexy, funny, angry, and sad, often all at the same time.'

This songwriter was born to appear in a David Lynch film, sounding like an operatic loon trapped in a piano.