M. Lamar: Singing Slave Insurrection to Marx

Abstract

This essay is about a performance by the musician, singer, and performance artist M. Lamar, who describes himself as a “Negrogothic Devil-worshipping free black man in the blues tradition.” I saw the piece,Destruction, in the American Realness Festival at Abrons Art Center in New York City in January 2016. During the seventy-minute-long performance, the countertenor sang and played the piano, and appeared in mediated form in a complexly assembled film montage. In both live and filmed form his performance was a labor to resurrect the dead into an insurrectionist revolt, an army of all the black people whose lives have been taken—from slavery to lynchings, to incarceration, to police shootings. The lush, sometimes heart-stopping sound environment was both live and recorded, a mix, mash-up, and collage of sounds and sources the core of which was Lamar's singing of fragments of slave spirituals. In what follows, I am prompted by Lamar's work to explore my own ongoing commitment to Marx through what I read as the work's temporal innovations. These innovations, I suggest, supplement Marx's failure to imagine a revolutionary strategy through anything but the standard progressivist notion of time and history. In so doing, I claim Lamar for an affiliation to Marxism and materialist thought by identifying in his work a material immortal.