I Finally Listen to Hamilton

So, who out there has heard of this musical called Hamilton?
It seems like the kind of thing I would like, right?  I like history.  I've got a huge - soft spot for musicals.  And yet, when Hamilton first started getting popular, I viewed it with disdain and suspicion.  I couldn't exactly tell you why--it was more of a gut feeling than something I consciously reasoned out.  But I think I just didn't like the kind of people who I perceived as liking Hamilton--those suburban bourgeois liberals who think they're intellectuals but who get all their information from NPR, popular history books and TV miniseries.  And now, they were getting their history from Broadway.
They say that most forms of irrational prejudice are just a form of self-contempt in disguise.  And boy, is this ever true in this case.  I'm exactly the sort of person I despise.  I like to think I'm an intellectual, and I'm a self-styled history nerd.  But I get almost all of my historical information from TV miniseries, NPR, and popular history books.  And this is as true about the founding fathers as anything else.  A look over my reading list from the past 14 years reveals that I've only read 3 books on the founding fathers--2 popular histories (The Great Upheaval by Jay Winik, For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions by James R. Gaines) and 1 book written for schoolchildren (Paine by John Vail).  And there was also the John Adams HBO miniseries (W), which I saw in 2010, but didn't review on this blog at the time.

I did, however, know vaguely who Hamilton was.  That infamous Hamilton-Burr duel (W) had always fascinated me, and I did spend an afternoon reading all about it on Wikipedia once when I was in my 20s.
I think most people know about the Hamilton-Burr duel, and yet its bizarreness doesn't get talked about enough.  I mean, The Vice-President of the United States killed one of the Founding Fathers in an illegal duel.  And then nothing happened to him.  He just kept on being Vice-President.  How bizarre is that?  Why don't we talk about that more?
I don't recall either my middle school history teacher or my high school history teacher making a big deal about this duel at all.  If it got mentioned at all, it was only in passing.  Nor was it featured in the textbooks, if I recall.  In fact, I think the first place I heard about this duel was the famous Got Milk commercial.  And even that commercial framed the fact as some sort of obscure trivia that only a nerd stuck in a museum would know about.

Got Milk? Aaron Burr Commercial (1993)



I don't know, what was your experience?  Was this something you remember being talked about at school?

Beyond that, I also knew that Alexander Hamilton was Thomas Jefferson's rival.  And Thomas Jefferson is usually thought of as the father of the American liberal tradition, which I identified with.  So in my 20s, when I was prone to view history as a conflict between the good guys and the bad guys, I thought Thomas Jefferson was the good guy, and Alexander Hamilton was the bad guy.  And that has been largely my view of Alexander Hamilton since then.

This view was also confirmed by the John Adams HBO miniseries in which Alexander Hamilton came off looking like a bit of an ass.

John Adams rips Alexander Hamilton a new one



...so it struck me as a bit strange when I first heard that there was this new hit Broadway musical celebrating the life of Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton?  I mean, Hamilton wasn't one of the idealistic founding fathers. He isn't famous for writing about liberty or the rights of man.  He was the guy who started the central bank.  He was the squarest, most uncool of all the founding fathers!  Why make a musical about him?  Was this something ironic?  Was there a hidden joke in there somewhere?

Anyways, after ignoring Hamilton for the past several years, a couple of things pushed it to my attention recently.
(1)  I was having a conversation with a couple of co-workers about Jesus Christ Superstar.  The gentlemen in question were older than me--in their early 60s and early 70s respectively.  But it interested me to hear them talk about how popular the album was when it first came out.  "Everyone had that album back then," they said.
This was interesting to me.  I have long been a huge fan of this album, but I had believed, as the AVclub once said, that it was "Always somewhat culturally marginal , even at the height of its original popularity."  So it is interesting to hear their reminiscences about how popular the album was.  And then we talked about how awesome the songs were.
So there we were, 3 kindred spirits in spite of our age differences, talking about how much we loved Jesus Christ Superstar, and then one of the guys said that he thought that there were two modern musicals--Chicago and Hamilton--that equaled the brilliance of Jesus Christ Superstar.  Me and the other guy had never listened to Hamilton, so he recommended it to us strongly.  "I think it and Chicago are the only other musicals that are as exciting as Jesus Christ Superstar" he said.
Well, that's strong praise as far as I was concerned.  So this was the first thing that made me curious to check out Hamilton.

(2)  The other thing was the Some Good News video  that was circulating around the Internet a couple weeks ago, and which you've probably already seen.  And because everyone was sharing this on Facebook, I watched it as well.

Hamilton Original Broadway Cast Zoom Performance "Alexander Hamilton"

...it's quite a catchy song, isn't it?  And it also seems to promise an epic story to follow.

So, I found myself getting sucked in more and more.  I started reading up about Hamilton on Wikipedia, and looking up clips on Youtube.  

As I mentioned above, I had always been interested in Hamilton's rivalry with Thomas Jefferson. So I started looking up those songs on Youtube first.  And boy, are those rap battles of Hamilton versus Thomas Jefferson fun to watch.  It's exciting to see the ideological differences of the founding fathers set to rap music.  And the verbal dexterity that is going on in these back and forths is truly amazing.  So many rhymes dropping so fast.  And that guy who plays Thomas Jefferson in the Broadway play is just oozing charisma.  So fun to watch.

Cabinet Battle 1 Live

Cabinet Battle 2 Live

And at this point I was hooked.  So then I was looking to listen to the whole album.  

A good place to start is this video here--the whole Hamilton album, illustrated by fan art.

Hamilton: the musical (Animatic version)

The deeper you dive into Hamilton on Youtube, the more you discover that most of the fans seem to be in their mid to early teens.  (Evident by a lot of the fan anime, and also in the comment section.)  This is contrary to my expectation of the average Hamilton fan being a 40 year old Broadway-loving yuppie.  It took me a little bit off-guard at first (teenagers like Alexander Hamilton?), but it makes sense when you think about it.  That's precisely the age when you are most moved by cheesy musicals.  

Moving on from the animated version is the full album, including the songs that were cut from the Broadway version, but which actually help to connect the story together more.

[FULL LYRICS + CUT CONTENT] Hamilton: An American Musical

The Review

So, if it wasn't apparent already, there's a lot of stuff I like about this musical.

After listening to it a few times over, however, I'm not sure I'm wild about the whole thing from beginning to end.  I mean, it's got a lot of really cool and upbeat songs.  But man!  Does it ever have a lot of depressing songs.  The end of the second act especially is just one depressing song after another.

The tragic death of Hamilton's son is unfortunate.  It's unfortunate obviously because it was an actual tragedy.  But it's also unfortunate from a dramatic standpoint.  I mean, I get that the writer Lin-Manuel Miranda couldn't skip over this event.  It's too big to cut out.  But it's unfortunate, because it's an emotional downbeat that the musical can't recover from.  

Dramatically speaking, the final dual between Burr and Hamilton should be the emotional climax of the second act.  And the swelling music does try to make this an emotional moment.  But it fails, because there's just too little emotion left to give at this point.  After Hamilton already lost his son, that was the big tragedy of his life.  Being shot by Burr just seems superfluous now.
This is the problem with doing biography as drama.  Biography doesn't care about pacing out the emotional beats so that it fits the needs of the theater.  It's not Lin-Manuel Miranda's fault, he's doing the best he can with the messy story that he's got.  But it does nonetheless have an effect on the listener.

But not only that, the whole second act is loaded with sappy weepy songs.  Burr and Hamilton singing about how much they love their children, Burr singing about the death of his wife, Hamilton's wife singing about her heart being broken by the Reynolds affair-- and then the death of Hamilton's son on top of that.  And then there's that long sappy epilogue where they sing about Hamilton's death and legacy.  Enough.  I had to stop playing the album in my apartment because it was just making me depressed and melancholy.

But on the other hand, when it's good, it's really really good.  The rap battles linked to above were really good.  The song about The Election of 1800 was really good.  The Adam's Administration song was good.  The Room Where it Happens song was really good.

As for the historical inaccuracies... whoa boy, where to start with this one?
Well there's definitely no point trying to list all the things that this musical didn't accurately portray.  We'd be here all day.  And you don't need me to.  A lot of these inaccuracies you'll be able to catch on your own.  For example, in my case, even without going to Wikipedia, I knew that the Burr-Hamilton dual wasn't directly about the election of 1800.  And I also knew that Thomas Jefferson was not able to prevent Burr from assuming the Vice-President's office (as is implied in the musical).  And I was fairly sure that Burr and Hamilton were never close friends.
And for everything else, there's Wikipedia.
Frequently as I was listening to this musical, I would think to myself, "Wow! That's really interesting! I had no idea!" And then I would look the incident up on Wikipedia, and realize that what actually happened had very little resemblance to what was portrayed in the musical.
Basically, if you're watching this musical (or listening to the album), a good rule of thumb is that most of the things in the musical are loosely based on a historical event, but nothing is accurately portrayed.
But I think most people are willing to forgive this.  After all, we all understand that Hollywood movies can't be expected to be historically accurate.  There's just not enough time.  You have to compress events and create composite characters in order to fit everything into 2 hours.
So if a Hollywood film can't be expected to be historically accurate, how much lower must our expectations be for a Broadway musical, in which the entire runtime is taken up by the characters singing about their feelings.  You couldn't possibly get into the real history.
Perhaps the most egregious example of over-simplifying history is making King George III into an evil cartoon villain.  As history, it's appalling.  But as theater, it works brilliantly.  One of the best moments of the musical is when King George finds out that John Adams is going to be the next president.  "That little guy? That poor man, they're gonna eat him alive!!  They will tear each other into pieces. Jesus Christ, this will be fun!"
Hopefully, everyone understands that this isn't real history.  If this musical serves to get people interested in the real history, and causes them to do their own research, then it will be a positive.  If, on the other hand, people go around quoting this musical as if it were real history, then we'll all be in real trouble.  But I'm optimistic it will be the former.

As for me, I think I'm going to add to my TBR the Alexander Hamilton biography that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda in the first place: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (W).  (Although I've got a long TBR, so it could be a while before I get around to this.)

One last note...
There's a Youtube clip of Lin-Manuel Miranda talking about the Reynolds Affair on Drunk History:

Alexander Hamilton’s Salacious Sex Scandal (feat. Lin-Manuel Miranda) - Drunk History

I'm posting this here for two reasons: One, I really love Drunk History, and this clip is really funny.  But two, it's interesting to see all the differences between this and the musical.  

James Monroe is not in the musical at all, but again, I understand that they had to make composite characters, so in the musical Jefferson, Madison, and Burr have to stand in for Hamilton's antagonists at every historical juncture.

But also, it's interesting to see in the Drunk History clip how aware Lin-Manuel Miranda appears to be about all of Hamilton's faults.  Much different than the figure he romanticized in the Broadway musical, and he knows it.
(Wait... did I just use an episode of Drunk History to fact check the historical accuracy of a Broadway musical?  Truly,  I need to give up all my pretensions of being a serious intellectual historian, and just accept myself for the low-brow dabbler that I am.)

Final verdict: I definitely like some of the songs on the Hamilton album.  And I found it very entertaining the first couple times listening through.  Upon repeat listenings, I've decided I'm not wild about the album as a whole.  Too many depressing songs.  But if you haven't checked it out yet, it's worth checking out.  And there are a few really bopping songs on the album that I still really like.

Addendums:

* I mentioned above that my co-worker also mentioned Chicago as the other musical he really liked.  I actually had some frustrations with Chicago.  I liked the music well enough, but it was so frustrating to watch the movie the first time.  I was involved with the story, and kept wanting the story to move forward.  But they kept stopping the story to do more songs.

Well, that's the problem with musicals, right?

To Hamilton's credit, though, they rarely stop the story to do a song.  The songs are the story.  Each song advances the story.  (Mostly--until we get to the second act, and then there are a lot of sappy songs that stop the story.)

* I don't really have a project for reviewing music on this blog, so I'm going to classify this one half under "Sharing Music I like"...even though I've decided I'm not wild about all of the songs on the album.  But I at least like most of it.  And also I'll classify it under my reviews of Youtube series, because it has been entirely through the Youtube videos linked to above that I've been able to experience this musical.

Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below:



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