to be fair, they also talked about other musicals i didnt care about, but I wasn’t feeling it, lmao. i would have been happy with literally any other topic, but i fall asleep during this shit, cant help it
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I have to admit that I only knew that Hamilton was a slave owner and that he is played by a black guy. I didn’t even know he raps.
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he even says “be a lamb sally”
Jesus fucking christ.
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Edit: I ended up using this comment as an excuse to infodump but I tried not to do the whole thing where, by infodumping, I am implying that this knowledge is uncommon or that the person I’m responding to is ignorant of it. And it appears that I’ve explained the idea of a leitmotif to a theater kid. My bad, Othello. I just like explaining things. Love your stuff
it implied Hamilton is TOTALLY biracial
It’s pretty wild what facts needed to be left out or minimized to make this come across. Being playing by LMM instead of a white guy is a big part, obviously, but the whole idea that he was an “immigrant from the Caribbean” does a lot of heavy lifting there, too.
He was the grandson of wealthy merchants on one side and of Scottish nobility on the other. He was seen as lower status because he was born in the colonies and out of wedlock, but he was very much a colonizer. And his “immigration” was moving from one British colony to another and British colony. He received a decade of private education and tutoring before his mother died and it was that education that he used to be able to go to New York with the purpose of continuing his education.
you could have had a scene where sally hemmings comes out played by a child and had a long mournful monologue, about her abuse at the hands of jefferson, a “founding father”
For anyone who’s not super familiar with musical theater, it tends to make heavy use of callback, reprise, and theme to tie together disparate ideas. If you don’t know what that means, think of the happy music that plays in the beginning of Up. When that same music plays near the end of the opening sequence and that makes you wanna cry? It’s not just because it’s sad. It’s because the music juxtaposes the sadness of the moment with the happiness and hope they’d just lost. It’s that kind of thing.
Hamilton has stuff like this all over and is pretty tightly woven, but there are some dropped threads where you would expect some kind of callback and we just don’t get any. The reason? There were several more songs about opposition to slavery that were dropped because they didn’t play well in the test showings.
Hamilton is truly a story of oppression, as packaged for the privileged masses.
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No need to delete it. I put mine back up. I’m just having a weird day and was getting in my head about coming off as annoying.
I also got very into Hamilton for a while, to the point where I was writing out maps of various motifs that came up and itemizing where they were and what that did to the meaning. I think my window into Hamilton was through neurodivergence, of people looking at you like you’re crazy and being simultaneously condescending about your forwardness and obsessiveness but also in awe of a lot of your output and endurance. That said, I keep finding examples of ways that perspective falls short, so I appreciate you being sincere and sharing that.
oops, I really do know jack shit about that musical
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I got put in the worst role in theatre plays all the time for being ND and mocked the NT kids for forgetting their lines and generally fumbling up while I said the single line I had perfectly, it didn’t help with being a people’s person
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Are you feeling the freedom yet?
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i somehow knew it was gonna be that image. This is one of those things that both fascists and communists cringe at, but for opposite reasons
Damn I feel old now
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it’s like a mixture of being a theater kid with being a kid who plays strat games all night
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Not trying to sway your opinion, you’re entitled to it. From a certain perspective though, having black folks play slave owning founding fathers is sweet justice in the sense that true racists would turn over in their graves to know that a black man was playing them.
There also are not an abundance of opportunities for black opera singers. Tossing aside the race of the characters is a statement. Listen to Leslie Odom Jr, Aaron Burr’s actor, thank Lin-Manuel Miranda deeply for creating opportunities and providing “a new vision of what’s possible” as he accepts his Tony for best actor. That old white slave owners indirectly led to the success of some crazily talented black folks in my time is something I can dig. You’re free to disagree.
Anyway, give it a watch.
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My only engagement with the Hamilton material is with the Ben Franklin song because I love the Decemberists and Colin Melody sings the soundtrack version, but that song does cast at least a little shade on BF when it makes fun of him for being too horny to do politics right and for being a shitty father.
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I love the Decemberists
gang
Those are all fair points, I didn’t know anything about them…ahem…whitewashing intended scenes.
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true racists would turn over in their graves to know that a black man was playing them.
ah yes, the old riddle. is putting harriet tubman on the 20 dollar bill based because it would make andrew jackson angry to be replaced by a black woman? or is it cringe to put harriet tubman on the currency that was used to purchase her?
the answer is actually that we should keep andrew jackson on the 20 dollar bill because he hated the federal reserve
Lol, a fair point. I think this somewhat cements this being a matter of perspective. Neither perspective is wrong or right, just different angles while everyone is still wanting whatever is worse for the slave owners, and whatever is best for the black folks. I’m open to having my opinion changed about whatever is the most just outcome.
It’s funny because I have a deep appreciation for music, but I find so many musicals deeply and profoundly insipid
Hamilton most of all
Rap music for people who are scared of People of Color
I don’t remember who said it, but the fact that the first big rap broadway show was about the whitest thing ever - a treasury department secretary guy - is absolutely expected
first big rap broadway show
ummm excuse me it’s called hip-hopera
oh my GOD
Sadly I did not coin that term and it was popularized by R Kelly of all people lol
Sadly I did not coin that term
we’ll see who believes that once i’m through correcting this article
because of Trapped in the Closet, which, to be fair, qualifies as a hip-hopera (not to ignore R. Kelly’s crimes)
I can’t relate to this album, he’s just talking about growing up poor like a poor person!
He’s an elder statesman! That’s just like me!a treasury department secretary guy
You gravely misspelled “hero”.
As a bisexual and former theatre kid, it does feel like certain stuff like broadway and that particularly bombastic pop existing in gay communities is some sort of psy-op or gaslighting. I hate the stuff, honestly. Lotta great gay music out there and its rarely the stuff pushed by the machine.
Musicals are what happens when you place incredibly high demands(singing, dancing, acting, tons of extras) on performers to the point that it hurts their singing and acting. And then decide, its just a style of performance everybody! Like theyve turned the affect of bad performance into a stylistic choice and its sooooo fucking grating.
If your desired takeaway is anything other than, cool costumes! Impressive coreography! Fun performing! What a voice! You probably wont like musicals.
I like Encanto as a musical because of the anarcho-feminist themes. Most movies have the hero do productive labour like fighting bad guys, disarming bombs, or performing art. Mirabel is a hero frustrated she can’t do productive labour on the same level as her family, but she spends the entire movie fixing problems through caring labour and learns to value her abilities for that, which exposes an important dimension of labour theory to the casual watcher. Also the Encanto is an anarchist commune.
I guess I could have specified broadway musicals. There are some great musical movies. I enjoyed moana. Also i have a friend who keeps bugging me to watch encanto, maybe ill watch it
As a bisexual and former theater kid, the one musical I actually liked was about an alien hive mind taking over a small town and making everyone sing in a musical.
I will be real, I will snooze through musicals, operas, anything that is haute culture, not out of principle but I am sitting in a comfy chair and somewhat well composed vibrations are hitting me, it is dark-ish if I turn my head. Sleepy time
This was me every time we went on a field trip to hear the local city orchestra play
The teachers would usually be upset, BUT THEY WERE THE ONES WHO WOULD PLAY CLASSICAL MUSIC DURING NAP TIME IN KINDERGARTEN, HOW WAS I NOT SUPPOSED TO ASSOCIATE CLASSICAL MUSIC WITH SLEEPING?
I still do it, I can’t help it. I only know plays by reading the books they are written in.
Hamilton was not high culture. It’s like the definition of middlebrow
never said I slept through it
Fair enough
I firmly believe Lin-Manuel Miranda should have been bullied more as a child. The play is just cringy slam poetry disguised as rap.
Immortal Technique did his best.
is slam poetry where poetry slams come from?
You perform slam poetry at poetry slams, yes.
I never knew where this was coming from, it just made my toe nails fall off out of blandness so I avoided it like the plague
Everyone goes through the stages of slam poetry.
Initial Exposure: You go with your college friend to watch the prettiest, most bohemian girl on the planet from their psych 101 class perform slam poetry at the bicycle-repair-shop-and-underground-cafe in your college town. You’re floored by her emotional story of helping a friend call the National Suicide Hotline. A single tear rolls down her face as she chokes out her final verse. You’re floored by her performance.
Second Exposure: You watch the next performer nervously address the mic. They are somehow the most well groomed person you’ve ever seen and the sweatiest person you’ve ever seen. The Christmas lights that are hanging a foot above the stage dance off from glistening forehead. He is funny, weaving a story about his precocious little brother stealing mom’s credit card to by Pokémon cards. Then boom. Cancer. He hangs his head and continues, finishing softly and existing the stage swiftly. You’re moved…but suspicious.
Final Exposure: You’ve watch a few more acts and are starting to see a pattern. A mother tells a story about her miscarriage 20 years ago. An obviously not-out-yet student laments about feeling rejected by his roommate’s ex-girlfriend. An eternally benched football player in his second senior year recounts his struggle to get a scholarship while juggling a job and watching his siblings. Finally a middle aged man in a stained Star Wars shirt opines about some lost love and your pretty sure he’s talking about a child he met online. You and your friend decide to leave, get drunk, and relentlessly make fun of the acts you just saw.
if i ever was exposed to slam poetry, it was through five seconds of poetry slam that made me immediately turn away. my native lang sucks ass for these things though, take my word for it
the ideology is nauseating but the most baffling thing to me are people who say they like it for the music. the few times i’ve tried listening to a hamilton song it has made me feel like i’m being subjected to someone uncle rapping at their nephews wedding party
i have a rough idea of what is going on it, not more. I neveer listened to it, bc i was repulsed by my second hand knowledge already so i put it in the “look at it after this laundry list of actually cool stuff”, so i am a bit of a
wrt to it
See this is why when we have state funded communist gay bars like in
we’ll have a sign for the bartenders to tap which will read “No Hamilton”we will create a society without things like hamilton, idk what it means, but it will be a better one for it
One of my NB customers was wearing a shirt with a Hamilton quote on it and I wanted to die.
I sat through a friend’s baby shower while they blared the entire Hamilton soundtrack through a tinny Bluetooth speaker
I no longer fear hell, for I have lived through worse
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Tbh I just felt bad for not being fucking interested at all and not having the power to fake interest as well.
musicals fuckin suck. ive been to so many shows where im the youngest person there, and im not super young lol. lotta gray hairs like this trash.
to be fair, I can see the appeal of having people sing very well and tell a story, or at least this is what I tell myself so people won’t see me as a gloomy, anti-cultural killjoy
so people won’t see me as a gloomy, anti-cultural killjoy
it’s ok to be a killjoy about shit liberals love. Plus this shit isn’t culture, it’s just rich white people dressing up to show off for their fellow whites.
part of me agrees with you there, but idk, I feel I should just drop that crowd and look for people worth taking to, just sucks that many queer things are so tame and boring, at least clubs let me dance my brains out
if you don’t have similar interests it’s pretty much impossible to be friends with someone. Youd be bored as shit of each other, one talking about Hamilton and the other talking about video games or something.
Oh, I meant the killjoy part, bc my inner green goblin makes me want to be really mean and condescending about lib cultural monuments, consequences be damned
The only good musicals are pantomimes because they know it’s shit and have fun with that.
it woukd rule to be a pantomime for some time
There’s a lot of young people that love musicals but old people are the only ones who can consistently afford tickets.
WHERE IS MY LENIN MUSICAL
Lenin spoof of hamilton would be 100 times better than the original
musicals are bourgeois decadence
Death to America
It is very hearting to see gay theatre people piss on this stuff as well, for the record, I would love to be more into theatre and stuff, I am just unfortunately not that much and Hamilton took the fucking cake and slammed it into my face
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Brecht, I think, pushed things in a good direction, not just bc I agree with him politically, he was actually fun to listen to if you got into it, but idk if there is something like that out there nowadays. Especially since Brecht has been laundered quite a bit in his cultural reception afaik. Definitely think things should be more participatory and less consumption-oriented, also theatre industry sucks royal ass. does the US one bully talents into nervous breakdowns as well?
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Awful. Makes me actually mad, even though it doesn’t affect me directly. This system needs to die. I remember the Le Guin story about the one child being tortured for the sake of the a city’s happiness, but obviously we already have
, so ig we are at the point of optimizing child mistreatment for 
and ’s treatsI wish I could just do that for its own sake. I don’t even wanna set foot into a Laypeople’s theatre troupe by now anymore, bc even there it’s about one-upping and social prestige (not generally, I just live in a structurally fucked place)
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❤
I aint no guy
oh, it’s just the one good musical, I think you might like it
I just wanted to Shapiro post, lol, thank you though, I will listen to it later
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