Hamilton is the Shit, Get over it

Hello everyone that reads this blog, so basically no one. I hope you have enjoyed the theme of this thing, I really like vinyl and record players, but this week, we’re going to have a little bit of a change. As you know, this blog is for an English class about music. Sounds fun, right? Wrong. This sucks. So this week is basically going to be a giant middle finger to the system, because fuck it, I’m already getting a bad grade in this class.

So, this week, I am going to talk about a musical that has taken the world by storm. But guess how I picked it?? Nope, not the clever ways I’ve done for the past ones. There was poster for Hamilton in there, so I guess that is why I thought about it. I picked it because I think it’s a cool ass mf musical that has changed the game for modern musicals. But guess what? IT IS ALSO SOLD ON VYNIL. My ass is way too broke to afford it. This shit is like $70-100 for the complete album. That’s right, fucking one hundred dollars, do you know how much ramen I could buy with that? Aint no way in hell that I’m going to drop that kind of cash on an album. Plus there is no way I could find it in the record shop downtown because it is a limited edition and they are harder to find. So I just picked it because I haven’t talked about any musicals yet.

Have you figured it out yet? That’s right, we’re talking about Hamilton: An American Musical. Honestly, if you haven’t heard about it yet, you have to living under a damn rock. But anyway, I really love this musical, so obviously my opinions are skewed, but it also means that I get annoyed when people say shit about it in a classroom and accuse me of only using conjecture when they only use conjecture.

Okay, stepping down from my soapbox. This post is supposed to be about culture and this album. Well, that should’ve been easy, I have a lot to say about the culture around Hamilton. So there are a few main points I want to hit on this thing so I can get my points and so someone might look at the musical in a different way. There is the culture that made the musical, the culture that musical made, cultures interacting within the show.

The Culture that made Hamilton

Okay, so Hamilton was written by this dude named Lin-Manuel Miranda (LMM). This bitch is wicked good with music. The cool thing is, LMM had a different musical before Hamilton called “In the Heights” which was all about the Dominican-American part of New York. You might be thinking, “Why is he talking about a different musical?” Well, this musical was the forethought of Hamilton. It was the first time the LMM introduced rap into one of his musicals on Broadway. So this was the “dipping the toe into the water” before LMM jumped in headfirst. But what does this have to do with culture? Well, Broadway in general doesn’t really do the whole R&B scene, for a couple of reasons, mainly the electronic side being hard to put into a live stage production with a full orchestra, also the vulgarity that is generally attached to the popular version of rap. Some of you might be thinking, “What gives you the right to make these claims, do you have any proof?” Well, I am actually a musical theatre nerd. My ass knows people on Broadway, touring around the world on Broadway, has met directors and arrangers of off-Broadway musicals, and knows a lot of musical theatre buffs like myself. So if I am not qualified to talk about this, then I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about anything. When I make generalizations, they will tend to be a little more accurate than if I made generalizations about literally any other topic, basically, musical theatre is the only topic thus far that I actually know more about than the average person. But back to my statement, “In the Heights” was the LMM testing out the R&B on Broadway with a couple numbers in the show being rap. That show did pretty well, winning four Tonys and a Grammy. So LMM introduced the R&B culture with “In the Heights” and then wrote “Hamilton” to actually mix these two cultures.

The Culture that Hamilton made

Next up, the culture that Hamilton made slash impacted. So, LMM wrote this musical over a very long time, doing tons of research and fact checking to accurately tell the story. Guess what this did, it taught an entire generation about the Revolutionary War and the founding of our nation. There are kids now that know things about that time period that I had no idea about when I was their age. Next up, people have continued to listen to the show and use it in many ways, including here at U of SC in the classroom and in other cultures, like a small one I know about, show choir culture. I went to three show choir competitions this year and Hamilton was a large part of a lot of the shows. The small niche of show choir has an iron grip on this musical, and like teachers say, you should respect and learn from any culture, no matter how small.

Oh shit, I almost LMM was invited multiple times to the white house and performed on a few different occasions with songs from Hamilton. If the President feels that the music should be shared, then I think we can all agree it has had some impact on a plethora of cultures.

There are a lot more examples than these, you can youtube it.

Cultures Interacting through Hamilton

Okay so here is the meaty part of this post. There are a couple cultures interacting here. This includes the historical side, as in the culture America was made in, the Broadway side (I have already explained my qualifications to comment on this), the R&B side, and the diversity of the cast. I think it was completely genius to use such an extremely diverse cast for this show. As we all know, America was founded by a bunch of rich white men who were helped by others but those other people were lost in the history books. The Hamilton original cast was extremely diverse, full of all sexes, orientations, races, and other factors as well. For example, the man who played Alexander Hamilton on tour was mixed, gay, and HIV positive. Here's a link that better explains the cast diversity.

Okay, next thing, R&B vs the Broadway side and how they interact. Well, one thing that is pretty cool about Hamilton is that was number 1 on Billboard R&B for over two weeks. Some people might say, “How do you know that it wasn’t a bunch of white people that bought it and it just so happened to make its way the number 1 and it actually wasn’t appreciated by the culture of R&B?” Well, sir, that is the exact point that I am making. What I am saying is that this musical has joined these two generally distant genres. This musical has created a conversation that wasn’t there before the creation of this musical. Now, some of you might ask, “Does this fit at all with your theme of your blog, or ‘Brand’?” Well actually, yes, because I believe that this is connected to vinyl in a more abstract way. Vinyl is something that is old, it’s just an older version of tape players, cds, and mp3 files. So how does that connect to anything? Well Hamilton is an old story retold, I mean that in the sense that the history of the Revolutionary War has already been written in textbooks, but LMM still wrote it into an art form and it is changing that way people think about and what they know about that time in history. It’s a stretch, but you know, so is life.

See you on the flip side I guess.