From where I sit, which has never before been as close to the stage as I was that night, Broadway, like most media, needs hip-hop more than hip-hop needs it. From the handful of musicals I've seen, I understand that the form is omnivorous, and that the jokes often rely on the audience's awareness of additional, extra-musical contemporary cultural operations. Hamilton raids almost everything and in so doing acknowledges a few other silent majorities: people who are curious and widely read, people who don't suppose that loving hip-hop culture and those who make it precludes the reading of historical biographies or other means of self-education, people who don't suppose that getting enough money to be able to afford Broadway's hottest ticket adds a layer of irony to their rousing whoop for the home team when Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette look to the crowd and say, "Immigrants: We get the job done."
But Hamilton is also very specific. As much as it's plainly American history told through the life and times of a singular person, it's also rap as understood by one Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was born in 1980 and grew up in New York City and went to Wesleyan, with all that man's nostalgia and associations and vernacular. The songs he wrote for Hamilton are not rap songs. This is musical theater made by someone who knows rap to be all our cultural lingua franca, whose sense of humor is legible to people like us. It is songwriting done within rap's regulations and limitations. It's a work of historical fiction that honors the sentiments of rap, a play off collective memory that feels overwhelming personal.
I felt raw watching it, like 20 feet from Miranda's enormously earnest eyes ("It's like he really cares what we think," said my neighbor, who I'd begun to suspect should maybe have bailed on Broadway a long time ago). I can't bring myself to bang this record in my car. I am not unable to prevent my ass from shaking when I listen to these tracks; I put it on and get lost in it like a book on tape or a really dope podcast, laughing by myself in the frozen aisle at Trader Joe's when the love song, "Helpless," references a Trina and Mannie Fresh song, "Da Club." I realize that I now know more about Alexander Hamilton's sister-in-law than is strictly necessary for my job.
They released tickets through November 2016 today if anyone is interested.
