Epic Rap Battles Of History Alexander Hamilton

Konstantinos Blatanis*

Abstract

Interest in this article revolves around Lin-Manuel Miranda’due south musical biography of Alexander Hamilton as both an occasion of contemporary commercial theatre and a cultural phenomenon which foregrounds issues of historical understanding but likewise constitutes an unconventional tape of the crisis of historicity that defines its ain moment. The study focuses on the distinctive mode in which the play co-opts rap and hip hop music for the purposes of a large-scale Broadway production and examines the ways in which African American music is thus employed in a work that ultimately betrays its historical specificity. Furthermore, the article interrogates the terms in which Hamilton invites spectators to appoint afresh with questions regarding who, on what grounds and to whose benefit may be granted the correct to “rap” the nation’south story.
Keywords: Hamilton, Broadway musical, African American music, hip hop, historical understanding

The long and varied history of the American musical is marked by the distinctive and often unexpected ways in which the genre intervenes in the public debate. Every bit scholars Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth Wollman accurately notation, no matter how “light-hearted, escapist, frivolous and even embarrassingly corny [the musical may seem at first glance, it] can in fact serve as bold commentary on aspects of society” (1). Indeed, it is music itself, the most prominent of its component elements and by all means “the ultimate making of any musical” (Kerr qtd. in Warfield 244), that allows each private occasion of the form to converse with its immediate historical conditions. Furthermore, music onstage contributes as well in its own exclusive modes and, at times, in radical ways to matters and issues of historical understanding, on a larger and more general scale.

One of the primary contentions of this commodity is that, similar to what historian Dominick LaCapra underlines well-nigh the value of the novel, information technology is instructive to address music in a play as an eloquent “object of report” (History and Criticism
116) for historical interrogation. Over the class of the present decade, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s phenomenally successful biography of Alexander Hamilton serves to exemplify, more than intensely than any other instance of the contemporary American musical, the particular qualities, the assets as well as the limitations of such an approach.

Ever since its world premiere at the Public Theatre, in February 2015, and its quick transfer to the Richards Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, in August of the same twelvemonth,
Hamilton: An American Musical
has been standardly recognized as the epitomic “hip hop musical” that aspires to revolutionize both the genre and the collective understanding of the founding menstruation.

Following Miranda’southward first attempt to use hip hop music onstage with his play
In the Heights
(2007),
Hamilton
was welcomed as a venture that contributes decisively in “diversifying the Broadway musical aesthetically, musically and choreographically,” merely also as a work that “envision[s] a new earth of Broadway and The states guild, one that is not
postal service-racial but racially inclusive and enlightened” (Titrington Craft, “Tin Nosotros Leave” 217).

It is important to annotation right at the outset that not all critics and scholars converge in their appraisals of the show, withal few would disagree with the statement that “a hugely popular work like
Hamilton
may well influence America’due south visual, aural, and narrative epitome of the American Revolution and its aftermath for generations . . . finding its way into people’s heads through the catchy soundtrack and its memes” (Romano and Bond Potter 6).

Video 1

Undoubtedly,
Hamilton
constitutes no exception to the rules of the course, and thus music is indeed the main vehicle by means of which the play seeks to accomplish its goals. As a result, it is imperative that a candid assessment of this work illustrates primarily the reasons for which hip hop is prioritized over any other popular musical idiom of the nowadays era as well as the terms in which this specific employment is effected.

In item, the present give-and-take recognizes as its bespeak of departure the following seemingly simple, yet demanding question: is it really hip hop what
Hamilton
audiences experience? Further and equally intriguing concerns which arise are likewise pursued hither and are formulated in these lines: How does hip hop arrange the needs of a highly commercial theatre prove, and how does it cater for the demands of the standard Broadway audience? How does the story that music in
Hamilton
offers its spectators interrelate with the official history of the nation’s starting time treasurer? Had it not been for the sectional resources of hip hop what would have gone missing from this dramatic and theatrical approach of the critical historical moment of the American Revolution? What is the task that
Hamilton
recognizes for itself in a sociocultural context whose “alarming and pathological [inability to bargain] with time and history” (Jameson 20) has already been thoroughly detected and identified over the course of more than four decades now?

Concluding simply non least, does the play practise justice to the history of a currently immensely popular idiom on global scale, but also and undeniably and so of the music that “register[southward] [get-go and foremost] both the aspirations and frustrations of
the first generation of African American youth to come of age in a desegregated and awkwardly integrated, mail-affirmative action America” (Rabaka 8)?

Before all else, it is important to note that the honesty with which
Hamilton
lays bare its purposes emerges as one of its master and most prominent characteristics as a musical. The very first notes with which the audience is greeted and which are carefully placed to the service of the opening lines of the libretto point clearly the work’s overall aims and distinctive qualities. In the opening number—noted for its absolute directness and highly intense rhythm in terms of both song and trip the light fantastic—the stage is populated by an impressively big cast of identifiable historical figures who innovate themselves as well every bit each other and whose presence openly seeks to tantalize, more anything else, the spectators’ senses. Information technology is in this vein that the championship graphic symbol’s historical political antagonist and lethal opponent raps the opening lyrics of the show.

Specifically, Aaron Burr introduces the U.S. first treasurer and is immediately followed by Alexander Hamilton himself but also by more figures such equally John Laurens, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, all of whom participate in a slow rap performed confronting a piano riff that gradually escalates in tempo and intensity and somewhen transmutes into a typical Broadway dance melody that the unabridged company picks upwardly. In perfect harmony and absolute unison, the lyrics that accompany this act place emphasis on what can prove spectacular and sensationalist about the historical. The following lines delivered by Burr and Laurens, respectively, are thoroughly revealing of the show’s outlook:

AARON BURR: How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a / Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten / Spot in the Caribbean by providence, / impoverished, in squalor, / Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”
JOHN LAURENS: The ten-dollar Founding / Begetter without a father/ Got a lot farther by working a lot harder (sixteen)

Manifestly, what underlies the overall try that the opening number epitomizes is the conviction that in relation to historical matters the collective retention and sensibility tin can be enticed in sensationalist modes and via techniques which ultimately lead to a consequential popularization of the past. The play clearly taps into and contributes to a farther strengthening of the mythologization of the founding period.

Scholar Lyra Monteiro justifiably relates the play’due south input to the more than general trend identified every bit “founders chic,” which seeks to glorify the item historical moment “while also humanizing the founders” (89). For his part, Philip Goldfarb Styrt accurately observes that “the history in which
Hamilton
is and so invested is . . . the kind of pop, common, and familiar history typical of public monuments, text books, and mass-market biography, such equally the (absolutely heavyweight) biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow that served as Miranda’s inspiration” (3).

Nonetheless, information technology is instructive to annotation that despite their drawbacks and limitations and, at times, precisely because of them, aesthetic representations exercise manage to place their own claims on historical agreement. The “performative, figurative, aesthetic factors” (Writing History
1) whose dynamic LaCarpra insightfully explains are as well operative in historical approaches that are in essence sensationalist and serve to reinforce a popularization of particular aspects of the past or fifty-fifty of entire periods.

Miranda’south piece of work pursues its aims precisely through the power of the “artful” that music renders possible onstage. Undoubtedly, the audience’s “emotional response” (27), seminally analyzed by Freddie Rokem, proves highly pregnant not only in radical and perceptive theatrical approaches of the historical, but every bit so in this spectacle which aspires to cast Alexander Hamilton as the epitomic immigrant, whose story is directly pertinent to the present moment. The euphoric rapping that identifies his course as that of yet “another immigrant comin’ up from the bottom” (17) allows no room for a careful exam of the distance that separates the show from historical facts, as well as the fact that its libretto relies almost exclusively on a single and highly debatable source; that is, Ron Chernow’south biography of Hamilton, first published in 2004. As William Hogeland advisedly highlights, “Alexander Hamilton was not an American immigrant, at to the lowest degree not in the sense intended by Chernow when he invokes the idea. . . . [T]he immigration archetype Chernow invokes refers to a late nineteenth-century miracle, beginning well after the demise of the British imperium” (24–5).

Similarly instructive is Howard Zinn’s indicate that Hamilton, George Washington’s adjutant, was outset and foremost a member of “the new elite [whose constituents were] linked together in factions and compacts by business and family connections” (77, 81). Evidently, the musical’south scope covers no such problematics. Instead, the bear witness capitalizes on the African American music genres and the non-white casting every bit it seeks to found its story as an exemplary immigrant narrative. To this end, and in an almost epic tone, Hamilton himself raps defiantly in the 2d number that he is just similar his state, “immature, scrappy and hungry” (26), while towards the end of Act One he is joined by Lafayette to emphatically belt these words: “Immigrants: We become the task done” (121). It is indeed hard to refute that, upward to a sure signal, there is a “subversive effect” (Goldfarb Styrt 14) in these dramaturgical and theatrical gestures, or that they may constitute efforts to reclaim aspects of “cultural citizenship [through the utilize of elements] associated with minority cultures” (Titrington Craft, “Headfirst into an Abyss” 431).

Video 2

Still, the question that can never remain unaddressed pertains to the exact blazon of historical understanding that such gestures promote.
Hamilton
offers its average spectator nearly no incentive to abandon the level of the spectacle and to engage with a further and deeper examination of probing of its “performative, figurative, aesthetic factors.” As Monteiro sharply argues, “to have black and dark-brown actors stand in for the great white men of the early Us [raises multiple and consequential questions] in a play that does not admit that the ancestors of these aforementioned actors were excluded from the freedoms for which the founders fought” (93).

Indeed, the multi-leveled semiosis, the dramaturgical power and theatrical consequence of the music employed in this case are the aspects that need the greatest critical attention. In precise terms, studying the story that the music “tells” onstage and deciphering its bulletin allow us to assess fairly the version of history the show communicates to its audience likewise every bit the type of historical agreement that is thus supported.

In the printed edition of the libretto, Miranda adds several parenthetical notes in which he openly states that he wrote the score for
Hamilton
with the desire and aspiration to found a dialogue with such towering figures of contemporary African American music every bit Tupac, Notorious B.I.G., Busta Rhymes. All the same, a careful test of whatsoever given song in the show and, by extension, of the results that this implied dialogue yields onstage reveals that what is beingness employed in this case is null else than the outer vanquish of hip hop. In essence, the play taps into the tempo and the rhythm as well as the current earth-wide popularity of this musical idiom. Information technology is indeed no surprise that, on almost all occasions, hip hop swiftly transmutes here into all other kinds of music, virtually of all well-established and widely familiar Broadway tunes.

It is significant to note that Jeremy McCarter—the author’s collaborator—specifically explains that hip hop is used in the musical as “grade, not content” (10). Furthermore, Miranda himself admits that on Broadway “no ane wants to heed to hip hop all night, and we are not going to give information technology to him all nighttime” (qtd. in Rumsey 258). For her role, scholar Phoebe Rumsey tellingly notes that the show “avoids overwhelming spectators with as well much ‘in your face’ rap—a style of urban preaching that can dissuade members of the white, upper- and centre-course Broadway demographic if overused” (258), and she adds that Miranda “consciously measured the corporeality of rapping” (258) that is allowed onstage.

In essence, the “performative, figurative, artful” distinctive qualities of
Hamilton
rely upon an implied dialogue with a wide array of sources. Thus, indicatively, the distance from a melody inspired by the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic
South Pacific
to an upbeat swing or pop-soul tune patterned upon easily-recognizable, highly commercial songs of the 2000s is not just a short step for the show, but literally no footstep at all. In his insightful report of the rock musical from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, Scott Warfield notes significantly that “instead of the real thing, Broadway has [standardly] offered upward a diluted pop sound. . . . In an environment where some form of watered-down pop-stone has become the
lingua franca
of Broadway, one might ask if a genuine rock musical in the spirit of
Hair
is still a possibility” (247).

In its approach and co-optation of hip hop,
Hamilton
contributes precisely to the empowerment of this item Broadway
lingua franca, since it offers its audience hip hop music which is deprived, nonetheless, of its very essence. In effect, the play is in accented tune and synchronization with the phenomenon upon which Slavoj Žižek characteristically commented, at the plough of the millennium, in these words:

On today’due south market, nosotros notice a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: java without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol . . . Virtual Reality simply
generalizes
this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides
reality itself
deprived of its substance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Real” (279).

Precisely because the “hard resistant kernel” of hip hop is thoroughly absent from
Hamilton, the musical constitutes ane of the multiple agents in mainstream civilisation that, as Reiland Rabaka shrewdly observes, arroyo and co-opt hip hop as “some sort of free-floating, ‘postmodern’ sonic signifier, and non as is most often the instance, deeply continued to and undeniably indicative of the origins and evolution of African American musical history and civilization” (13). Every bit the scholar insightfully explains, “word wizardy, rhetorical acrobatics, audible innovations, and sonic experimentation of rap music and hip hop culture” (21) are non merely the component elements of a style; they are the core matter of “the spiritual, sexual, cultural, social, and political expression of an alienated and oppressed group which has historically had few other areas in which to fully express itself on its own terms” (41).

To an alarming extent,
Hamilton
betrays the very history of the music to whose power it resorts. The musical pays no service to the unique and highly consequential trajectory of African American music in time and fails to address, even elementally, the ways in which hip hop dramatizes and captures “the precarious position of black radical idea in the United States, even equally African Americans take reached the highest levels of political power” (Nielson and Gosa 13). Veering consciously away from an exploration of the multiple ways in which music has perennially proven instrumental in “prob[ing] black consciousness” (Marcoux 2), the bear witness establishes a genuinely apolitical and ahistorical outlook regarding hip hop. This arroyo of the music it employs informs also and is directly reflected in the way
Hamilton
casts identified pivotal moments in American history. Unfailingly loyal to its way that endorses all elements of the historical that may prove spectacular and tin can offer a sensationalist popularization of the past,
Hamilton
raps the Revolution as an epitomic moment of crunch through the lyrics assigned to General Charles Lee: “Washington cannot be left alone to / his devices / Indecisive, from crunch to crisis. / The all-time thing he tin can do for the revolution / is turn ’n / Go back to plantin’ tobacco in Mount Vernon” (98). Information technology is in the exact same vein that the 2nd act of the play offers in the class of rap battles the cabinet battles in which Hamilton fought to convince his political peers, first, nigh the validity of his plan to presume state debt and constitute a national banking concern and, second, about the nation’southward neutrality in the 1793 conflict between France and Britain.

On the whole, hip hop music in
Hamilton
accommodates no historical probing of any depth or width. If at that place is one thing that its impressive and memorable “performative, figurative, aesthetic factors” practise accomplish is to offering spectators vibrant incentives for research that may hopefully exist carried out definitely outside and beyond the confines of the playhouse. To the very catastrophe number, the show remains more than than annihilation else a celebratory occasion for America, Alexander Hamilton, the genre of the musical and, terminal but non least, cocky-reflexively, of
Hamilton
itself, as the vocal delivered by Miranda himself in the original production clearly signifies: “America, you slap-up unfinished symphony, / You lot sent for me. / You let me make a difference. / A identify where even orphan immigrants can get out their fingerprints and ascent up” (273).

Video three

Finally, it is of import to highlight that
Hamilton
is anything merely devoid of political significance. Nevertheless, what also needs to be explained is the fact that the show pursues its political ambitions in the verbal, same mode in which it approaches hip hop music. Specifically, it is the emphasis on the spectacular that allows the play to emerge as a work which provides “connective tissue” (160) between the founding period and its ain nowadays moment, and which may constitute “a class of protestation” (208) for minority rights during the years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

It is indeed impossible to downplay the fact that
Hamilton
remained thoroughly faithful to its nature as a Broadway musical and withal succeeded in addressing its famous motto, “Who lives, / Who dies, / Who tells your story?” (280) equally a sharp comment on President Trump’southward vision of social and cultural diversity and a peculiarly disturbing bulletin for Mike Pence, who attended the operation as Vice-President Elect in November 2016. Yet, this is achieved on a stage where there is very little, if anything, essential of what Eric Nielson and Travis Gosa define as “the continued ability of music to engage and unify diverse populations beyond race, space/ place, social course, and generational lines” (eighteen). African American music is co-opted in this example, yet its truthful historical and cultural dimensions are entirely eclipsed. As Elizabeth Titrington Craft explains,

information technology most certainly
did
matter that the founding fathers were white guys, and as the racially driven political divides of the Obama and Trump eras take laid blank, to say that all Americans take one another’southward backs, without regard to race or other forms of difference, is more than aspirational than factual. (“Headfirst into an Completeness” 440)

Equally and then, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s dialogue with African American music is more aspirational than anything else. Undoubtedly, the fact that a piece of work which “imagine[south] a black, rapping Thomas Jefferson” (Titrington Craft, “Headfirst into an Abyss” 441) is deemed by sure agents equally threatening reveals a lot about the severity of the ever burgeoning conservative, populist agenda that defines the present moment on global scale and does not necessarily reflect the sheer value of the play itself.

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*Konstantinos Blatanis
is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Linguistic communication and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His inquiry interests lie in American literature, modern drama, popular culture, media studies and critical theory. He is the author of the book
Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003) and co-editor of the volume
War on the Human being: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).

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2020 Konstantinos Blatanis
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques
east-ISSN: 2409-7411

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