It's a work of historical fiction that honors the sentiments of rap, a play off collective memory that feels overwhelming personal. It is songwriting done within rap's regulations and limitations. This is musical theater made by someone who knows rap to be all our cultural lingua franca, whose sense of humor is legible to people like us. The songs he wrote for Hamilton are not rap songs. As much as it's plainly American history told through the life and times of a singular person, it's also rap as understood by one Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was born in 1980 and grew up in New York City and went to Wesleyan, with all that man's nostalgia and associations and vernacular. Hamilton raids almost everything and in so doing acknowledges a few other silent majorities: people who are curious and widely read, people who don't suppose that loving hip-hop culture and those who make it precludes the reading of historical biographies or other means of self-education, people who don't suppose that getting enough money to be able to afford Broadway's hottest ticket adds a layer of irony to their rousing whoop for the home team when Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette look to the crowd and say, "Immigrants: We get the job done."īut Hamilton is also very specific. From the handful of musicals I've seen, I understand that the form is omnivorous, and that the jokes often rely on the audience's awareness of additional, extra-musical contemporary cultural operations. He was happy like a man who sees an oasis.įrom where I sit, which has never before been as close to the stage as I was that night, Broadway, like most media, needs hip-hop more than hip-hop needs it. The gentleman next to me said he couldn't get enough of the energy. I don't even think they were voyeuristic, or here for the party. All the well-heeled people in the fancy seats Atlantic Records put me in were not at all perturbed by people of color rapping at the Richard Rogers. A musical animated by the most popular music of the past 30 years, which casts the Founding Fathers as a crew of skirt-chasing, workaholic, competitive twenty-somethings with mile-high ambitions and everything to prove, was the next natural step after Aladdin, but nope, and that was in 1992. ![]() ![]() Disney should have made bank off this idea. ![]() Here we are not going to begin with the premise that Hamilton, bona fide talk of the town, is unlikely.
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