I was picturing, ‘What are the voices that are best suited to tell the story.’”ĭebuting in more optimistic times, when the country had its first Black president, Hamilton declared, says Leslie Odom, Jr. I wanted to write a hip hop album, so I was never picturing the guys on the statues that are being torn down right now. As Miranda himself told The Root’s Tonja Renée Stidhum, “All of these guys are complicit in the brutal practice of slavery, slavery is the third line of our show… that is just a prerequisite for the story we’re telling.” But he didn’t first set out to write history. Early in the first verse, he lifts a line more-or-less verbatim from Prodigy of Mobb Deep, telling his peers, “I’m only 19, but my mind is old.The current moment has forced the original cast and crew of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s massive hit musical Hamilton to revisit and reevaluate the story it tells about America’s founding. “My Shot” is the song where Hamilton tries to prove his verbal dexterity, so it’s appropriate that he does so with reference to a couple of the great MCs. (Here are examples from Jay Z, Bun B, Lil Wayne, and A$AP Rocky.) Though it’s similarly not a reference to one particular song, Hercules Mulligan begins his verse by repeating “Brrrap, brrrap,” which is every rapper’s favorite way of imitating machine gun fire. When Burr and Hamilton are joined by their young contemporaries Hercules Mulligan, John Laurens, and the Marquis de Lafayette, the three men introduce themselves by swaggering in and saying, “What time is it? Showtime!” As anyone who’s ever rode the B train into Manhattan will know, this is the exact same way that litefeet dancers (the modern day descendants of hip-hop’s b-boys) introduce themselves on the New York City subway. As Miranda put it in one interview, “ I don’t want to give them away, because I feel like Rap Genius is going to have a field day finding them.” (Brief side note: A few references, including nods to Brand Nubian and “ Blame It on the Alcohol,” didn’t make the transition from the Public Theater to Broadway, due to clearance issues, and so aren’t mentioned in the breakdown below.) Some are explicit- a few songs are referenced in the musical’s playbill-and some are a little harder to confirm, but that’s part of the fun. ![]() To name one last example, during the final line of “Say No to This,” the musical’s number about Hamilton’s infamous extramarital affair, Miranda sings a brief snippet of what he has called “ the ultimate infidelity jam”: “ Nobody Needs to Know” from The Last Five Years.īut the soul of the show is hip-hop, and there are carefully placed shout-outs to everyone from Mobb Deep and Eminem to DMX and (especially) Biggie. When George Washington introduces himself, he says he is “The model of a modern major general/ the venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all/ Lining up, to put me on a pedestal.” Miranda has called this, with typical hip-hop braggadocio, an improvement on Gilbert and Sullivan’s own patter song from The Pirates of Penzance, saying, “ I always felt like ‘mineral’ wasn’t the best possible rhyme.” Similarly, when Aaron Burr cautions his contemporaries against joining the revolution, he says, “I’m with you but the situation is fraught/ You’ve got to be carefully taught,” quoting from South Pacific. There are also Miranda’s winking allusions to Broadway. ![]() Of course, not all the references are to rap and R&B. And there’s also its referentiality: The show borrows liberally but always makes sure to pay tribute to hip-hop’s own forefathers. There’s the show’s casting, which has America’s founding fathers played by people of color. There’s the way the musical, about the immigrant and founding father Alexander Hamilton, tells the Jay Z-, Biggie-, or Nas–like story of how one man used his way with words to rise up from the bottom. There are many ways in which Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking new musical Hamilton is quintessentially hip-hop, and many of them don’t have a thing to do with rapping or beats.
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