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Exploring ‘Hamilton’ and Hip-Hop Steeped in Heritage
In the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, once the most overlooked founding father, by seamlessly weaving hip-hop into a musical theater framework. It’s a novel hybridization, but is Mr. Miranda successfully paying tribute to both traditions or somehow weakening one of them? How specific are his references? How skillful is the rapping? Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times and an avowed musical theater enthusiast, spoke with Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The Times, about technical fluency, Stephen Sondheim and Biggie Smalls. These are excerpts from their conversation.
ANTHONY TOMMASINI To start with, the idea of drawing on hip-hop to tell the story of Hamilton — his personal struggles, his idealism, his relationship with our contentious founding fathers — was thrillingly inspired. On a basic level, the American Revolution was driven by words: fiery statements of principle; charges of imperialist oppression; accusations of betrayal; fine points of governance; even wordy obfuscations to gloss over disagreements that could have sabotaged the country at its start. What better musical genre to tell this tale?
But I was pleased to read recent articles in The Times about Miranda’s background in American musical theater and his polyglot musical language. The score of “Hamilton” abounds with songs, complex vocal ensembles and other elements that speak to his love of the musical theater heritage. I share that love.
At its core, musical theater is about the smart, elegant and playful combination of words and music. But the mix is not 50-50: Words drive the form. And in a great musical, every element of the music supports and lifts the words. That’s what I revere about Stephen Sondheim. Every detail of his ingenious and beautiful music calls your attention to his great lyrics. Miranda’s music is very different from Sondheim’s, but I had a Sondheimesque experience at “Hamilton.” Every musical moment in that score swept me into the smart and dazzling rapping.
JON CARAMANICA What struck me most was the way Miranda uses hip-hop not just as a mode — adding rapping into a world of singing, which has been done on Broadway before, though never this effectively — but also as a context. He’s writing about a moment of total political upheaval, when upstart thinkers were building a nation on principles vastly different from the ones they fled. Of course that requires a fresh musical approach. It’s a position statement about the nation’s founding ideals, the revolution that was hip-hop, and also the unrelenting whiteness of Broadway. It’s not by accident that the whole of the main cast of Hamilton is nonwhite, apart from the king.
And here’s one way that Hamilton feels truly hip-hop to me: It encourages you to side with — or at least be sympathetic to — the bad guy.
TOMMASINI Of course, musical theater and opera composers have done that for centuries, by writing complex, nuanced music and scenes for villains. Think of the moment in Act I of Puccini’s “Tosca” when Scarpia, the menacing chief of police, who lusts after Tosca, greets her when she enters the church: Having dipped his fingers in holy water, he offers his hand to Tosca to touch, so she may perform the sign of the cross. The music makes this twisted, lecherous and powerful man seem, for a moment, gallant and devout.
Hip-hop wins sympathy for the bad guy in a more aggressive, pummeling way. It’s also often a stinging complaint against injustice. Maybe that’s why Aaron Burr seems so compelling in “Hamilton.” He opens the show, vehemently rapping his grievances about the unfairness of his situation. How did Hamilton, of all people, he asks, a “bastard, orphan son of a whore and a Scotsman,” dropped in the middle of forgotten spot in the Caribbean, grow to be a “hero and a scholar?”
Another bad guy we sympathize with, now that I think about it, is King George. Miranda gives him that sneering yet wonderfully breezy song “You’ll Be Back,” when the king anticipates that the colonists’ dream of independence will puncture. The song reminded me of something out of Herman’s Hermits, with its “da da-da dat da” refrains.
I’ve heard that some real hip-hop devotees find the music of “Hamilton” too, well, watered down with musical theater elements for their taste. What do you think?
CARAMANICA Well sure, but looking for pure, uncut hip-hop in a Broadway musical is a fool’s game, and Miranda is no fool. Hip-hop is a native tongue to him, but he’s putting it in service of the musical. His hip-hop references are expedient first, winks to those in the know second, and true to the genre’s tenets last. There is a nerd instinct in hip-hop, particularly lyrically minded hip-hop — it can be collegiate at times. What inspires Miranda is assonance, polysyllabic rhyme, cramming bars full of detail. He’s also someone who understands rapping as a game of one-upmanship — hence the pair of scenes in which Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson face off, which could have come from “8 Mile” or Scribble Jam.
TOMMASINI Those two rap battles are brilliant. Hamilton, indignant and furious, becomes ballistic in his denunciations, almost like gangster rap.
CARAMANICA I’ll tell you a few of the hip-hop references that peek through. When Hamilton says, “I’m only 19, but my mind is old,” in “My Shot,” (a line echoed by his son Philip later), that’s Prodigy of Mobb Deep, on “Shook Ones Part II.” There’s a bit of the hip-hop classic “The Message” in “What’d I Miss.” And “Say No to This,” when Hamilton’s eye begins wandering, starts with a quote from LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.”
The section of “Right Hand Man” in which George Washington is courting Hamilton to come work by his side reminded me of “Coming of Age,” from Jay Z’s debut album, “Reasonable Doubt.” It’s a back-and-forth between him and a hungry protégé, Memphis Bleek. Jay is looking for an eager student, and I can imagine Bleek coming back at him with Hamilton’s refrain: “I am not throwing away my shot.”
And Biggie, Biggie, Biggie. For a certain stripe of hip-hop fan, Biggie is the ne plus ultra. I’ve got all of “Ready to Die” and “Life After Death” committed to memory, and I suspect Miranda does, too. “10 Duel Commandments” is, natch, a remake of “10 Crack Commandments,” with its same blend of horror and pathos. And the “if you don’t know, now you know” Jefferson drops in “Cabinet Battle No. 2” is straight out of “Juicy.”
But most strikingly, when Hamilton confronts his own mortality, in “It’s Quiet Uptown,” I couldn’t help but think about Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts,” still one of the most chilling hip-hop songs of all time. The characters have different paths, but both have ended up exhausted, frayed, desperate.
To me, Miranda is a storyteller first and a rapper maybe fifth, or maybe a storyteller in an age when rapping is the most effective megaphone.
TOMMASINI That’s an interesting way to frame Miranda’s approach. This suggests another connection to the musical theater tradition. Sondheim, who has been an important mentor to Miranda, has written countless songs that advance the story and reveal something about a character, even if this embeds the song in the context of the larger work and means it may have no real independent life. His critics point to this as a shortcoming; his admirers see it as a hallmark of his greatness. The songs in “Hamilton” are also embedded into Miranda’s larger score. Not many would make “sense” performed on their own. To me, this represents creative daring. But I have to adjust, in rap, to going along with what in musical theater are called “false rhymes.” You know, like these from the opening song: “The ten-dollar founding father without a father/Got a lot farther by working a lot harder.”
CARAMANICA That reminds me of another Miranda trick: rhyming the same word — say, “sir” — when really the rhyme is in the preceding syllable. That’s classic Cam’ron.
TOMMASINI Miranda embraces these components of hip-hop and turns them into something fresh and powerful in the spirit of musical theater. His words have punch and elegance. And he sets them to music in ways that make the words come through — another instinct right out of musical theater.
CARAMANICA And he’s flexible with the music, too. Jefferson’s arrival in Act II heralds a shift in the show’s relationship to hip-hop: After an act more or less steeped in New York, we’re in the South. It’s there in Daveed Diggs’s nimble rapping — he’s easily the best technical rapper in the show — and also in some of the references, like when he’s making it rain with leaflets during “The Reynolds Pamphlet.” That has a skittish, double-time strip club anthem beat, as if the Richard Rodgers stage was the Atlanta flesh palace Magic City.
In addition to being an actor, Diggs [who plays both Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette] is a rapper in his own right. His group is called clipping, and they’re like a Death Grips you’d actually want to listen to. They’re from Los Angeles, and you hear echoes of that city’s Project Blowed movement. Diggs’s rapping is frenetic and complicated but deeply controlled, a skill that works in the avant-rap underground and, as it happens, on Broadway.
TOMMASINI Your descriptions suggest that Miranda’s inspirations from hip-hop are precise. What he draws from musical theater might be more general, though ever-present. At crucial moments, when a character is in crisis or coming to a life-defining realization, Miranda gives us what sounds pretty close to an unabashed musical theater song. The most moving is “That Would Be Enough,” when Eliza, Hamilton’s devoted wife, is pregnant with their first child. She has begged Washington to send her husband — Washington’s right-hand man — home to her. The song is a plea from Eliza to her husband to appreciate the simplicities of family life:
“Look at where you are
Look at where you started
The fact that you are alive is a miracle
Just stay alive
That would be enough.”
CARAMANICA Would this be the place to note, though, that I don’t think “Hamilton” passes the Bechdel Test? It’s reliance on masculinity is pretty hip-hop, too. So I’m glad Eliza gets the last word.
But really, this show is a tangled love story between Hamilton and Burr. And yes, as you suggested, this is absolutely Burr’s show. As Burr, Leslie Odom Jr. has tremendous carriage, but also he’s creeping around the stage, forever mindful of being found out. Hamilton is the hero and the martyr. But Burr second-guesses himself. He protects a secret inner life. He’ll take out anyone who threatens to so much as scratch his flawless exterior. Say hi to the bad guy — he doesn’t plan to die.
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the phrase “if you don’t know, now you know.” It appears in the song “Cabinet Battle No. 2,” not in “Schuyler Defeated.”
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