Hip hop is nothing if not rich in drama. Beyond even the competitive feuding, the best rap music chronicles its makers' highs and lows, detailing the gnarly realities of difficult lives lived triumphantly. Hip hop and theater, with their shared fondness for linear narrative, should make for more frequent bedfellows, but it took until this year for the two genres to combine to properly resounding effect. Debuting at the Public Theater to raves earlier this year and accumulating hype ever since, the rapped musical Hamilton tells the story of the United States founding father born and orphaned in the Caribbean, who used a prodigious writing talent to catapult himself off the island of St. Croix and leave as deep a thumbprint in United States history as has been made.
Hamilton could not have been an easy show to write, even for a theater savant like Lin-Manuel Miranda, the 35 year-old Grammy-winning author of In The Heights and recent MacAuthur "Genius Grant" recipient. The play is composed of 46 individual songs, here split between two discs (Acts I and II) that make up the album. Adopted by Miranda from Ron Chernow’s biography, Alexander Hamilton, the songs are vehicles for Hamilton’s life experiences, and great pains have been taken to maintain the accuracy of an already-fascinating story amidst the likewise-necessary shimmer of theatrical performance. Pairing early US history with one of the country’s youngest musical art forms, one born of the underprivileged especially, could have been as painful as listening to one of your history teachers "bust a rhyme," but Miranda’s command of both golden era hip hop and showtunes allows him to turn the pomp and circumstance of even congressional proceedings on its head.
Though ostensibly a rap record, from the show opener, "Alexander Hamilton", it’s immediately apparent that we are still essentially in musical-theater territory. Theatrical dialogue must be clear and audible to reach its audience—even when presented in song—which denies the cast the freedom to indulge in grand tonal flourishes or vocal tics. Miranda and his cast’s delivery is steadfast and well-enunciated, the flows delivered with a watchmaker’s precision. It helps that the song itself is a bracingly economical synopsis of Hamilton’s early years: The treacherous hurricane that destroyed St. Croix, the letter he wrote to his absentee father that published by a local paper and caused such a fervor on the island that a group of businessmen took up a collection to send the then 17 year-old Hamilton to New York for college.
Disc one is the more jovial of the pair, chronicling Hamilton’s rise to prominence, and flexing a number of smile-inducing touchtones. Over beatboxing and a drum breakdown replicating hands banging on a lunch table, we get introduced to eventual Hamilton murderer, Aaron Burr. "My Shot" is Miranda spouting couplets in a manner a little too close to slam poetry for anyone’s good, but a number introducing "The Schuyler Sisters", (one of whom Hamilton would marry and another of whom he’d keep a suspiciously affectionate pen pal correspondence with) sounds like it could have been a last-second album exclusion for one hit wonder and infamous Wyclef protégés, City High. "Wait For It" moves with a dancehall lilt and "The Ten Duel Commandments" pays homage to the Notorious B.I.G.’s "10 Crack Commandments".
Disc two is Hamilton’s unraveling, covering, among other things, his affair with one Maria Reynolds and the very public fallout that followed and the death of his 19-year old son in a duel defending his father’s honor. Musically, there are direct allusions to LL Cool J and Mobb Deep ("I’m only 19 but my mind is older," Phillip Hamilton spouts on "Blow Us All Away", a near-quote of "Shook Ones Pt. II") and an a capella verse from Miranda on the second-to-last track "The World Was Wide Enough" is thoroughly reminiscent of the prayers that used to close out DMX albums.
The Hamilton cast recording was executive produced by Black Thought and ?uestlove of the Roots, who know maybe better than anyone the intricacies of presenting hip hop over live instrumentation successfully. These are, however, still very much showtunes. An audience for musical theater comes to hear a story first and foremost (they bury the backing musicians in a pit, for goodness sakes) and the songs of Hamilton work to that end with every bar, even when seamlessly formatted for storyline, as in the case of the show’s freestyle battles by way of cabinet debates.
As an educational tool, Hamilton is a new standard, a piece that will very likely do more to cement Hamilton’s legacy into the consciousness of the general public than any history class ever could. Kaplan would be wise to commission volumes of these kinds of hip hop-driven biographies from Miranda and force him into some kind of lifetime contract. As an album, however, the audio removed from visual context, it’s a lot to digest. It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.
The closest thing to it in popular rap in recent memory would be Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. Just like Hamilton, GKMC is an album that requires time and attention, and rewards that investment handsomely. Hamilton, though, is an album for a very specific audience. It’s for theater lovers, sure, but more generally for people who probably wish they were watching a production of Hamilton. There’s an argument to be made that GKMC’s songs, too, work best within the context of the entire album, as a holistic production to be devoured whole hog. But many of those songs are able to live on their own as great radio singles in a way Miranda’s songs never could. For Hamilton there is no such debate. You need the whole of it, from curtain rise to call.
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