Hilton Als, New Yorker - July 20, 2009

If there's such a thing as a post-structuralist, transgendering singer, it's M. Lamar. While songs are his metier, 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. I first saw him last year, when the brilliant performer and downtown impresario Justin Bond curated a show that featured a number of up-and-coming luminaries. Lamar stood out, not least because of his bass-inflected falsetto, his strident, melodramatic piano playing, and what he celebrated in one song: a certain part of the female anatomy. Sporting a black weave and white boots, Lamar took himself as seriously during that performance as any myth in the making can and should. The twenty-nine-year-old artist has a show at the Chocolate Factory, July 16-18, called "The Black Death," a song cycle that, as he puts it, "traces landscapes of longing caused by extreme dehumanization." In other words, Lamar means to perform work about home, hearth, hope.

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