M Lamar
First edition of 125
Perfect bound soft cover
6 x 8.25 inches
88 pages
9 black and white images
OUT OF PRINT
Funeral Doom Spiritual, the libretto to M Lamar’s album of the same name, offers readers the opportunity to hold lyrics in their hands, an experience that the music industry has otherwise forced out of existence. It is the smaller of Lamar’s resurrections with this work, the larger of them being the resurrection of black bodies and black spirits, not only those that have come and gone before him, but those still to come, those bound to come not on their own terms but under the terms set by global capitalism and a colonialism we have yet to successfully stake through the heart.
As the setting for these resurrections, Funeral Doom Spiritual presents readers with black space on the page. Every page is black, creating a space that is simultaneously the black expansiveness of a darkened theater, the black pulse of a tomb, and a surface that resists the notes to which white space on a page leaves itself open. Funeral Doom Spiritual takes the space it claims and uses it to float text as grey as smoke. In the smoke-text we hear the voice of a seer, mourning.
Mourning takes time, time the majority of us are not permitted when the monetary cost of being alive is so high, and our dying itself can be a sum charged to whomever we leave behind. Funeral Doom Spiritual’s seer takes their time back and gives it only to those they can save with it, in their exclamations of loss and the laying of blame for millions of deaths, through the work of carrying the coffin of every one of those dead on their back under the falling starlight, in the graveyard so many of the dead were denied, and finally, in concert with the rage of the resurrected. With Funeral Doom Spiritual, M Lamar offers readers the opportunity to stay still for a moment, to read and thereby be a participant in mourning, and in doing so, to take back some of their time too.
Excerpt from Funeral Doom Spiritual:
The year 2116 in a great European capital constantly on fire.
(Spoken in a Low Doomsday Male Voiceover)
As the kingdom burns
A Republic of Loathing in flames
From the ashes and ruins of long dead earth
On what was once known as Easter Sunday
Our seer rises to speak
they took you from me
they took you from me
THAT WHITE MAN
with
HIS WHITE HANDS
on his long ARMS
FIRE arms
took you from me
they took you from me
Law arms
Law arms fire long
took you from me
Excerpt from Hunter Hunt Hendrix’s essay, On Mourning:
There is something deep about the way that he mourns, a depth deeper perhaps than the foundations of meaning itself. In my interpretation of his work, these juxtapositions between cultural identities and narratives are the key—they are more than pastiche, more than time travel. As a queer goth opera singer of field spirituals, M Lamar finds resonances and deadlocks between different patches of history, desire and signification, engaging in a radical way with the logic of representation and the unrepresentable. His mourning is not, to put it in a clichéd way perhaps, just about darkness—it also deals with a certain deadlock that is generative.
