(no subject)

[cahn]

You guys, I've been listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton cast recording basically nonstop today and it is AMAZING. I don't even understand how a hip-hop rap musical about Alexander Hamilton even got MADE, but it DID and I don't even known anything about either hip-hop or Hamilton and it is completely awesome and I have been tearing up a little over it (though maybe that is breastfeeding hormones), and I just went and reserved the Chernow biography from the library. (Miranda apparently read the Chernow biography on vacation and thought, wow, that would make a great hip-hop musical! AND THEN HE WROTE IT. How cool is that?!)

Link here, I suspect it's only good until Sept 25, when the recording becomes available. ETA: Link is still good. Also, Amazon Prime is streaming it free for Prime members.

I want to see this so badly!

ETA: CABINET DEBATES AS RAP BATTLES. GREATEST THING EVER.

Comments

Re: (K)

[cahn]

Yeah, I can't do proper technical work at all while listening to this. The last couple of days at work I've been listening to it while chasing down software bugs and doing relatively mindless project management stuff, and still I had to turn it off sometimes.

I can pick up a lot of the rap-style spoken words (which is rare for me) but only if I turn up the volume pretty high. I have seen that video! I do kind of get the idea that Miranda is a bit of a nerd :)

I, uh, have totally been playing this in the car with E and A. Though partially because I'm pretty sure E can't follow any of the words at all (and I'd like her to be able to).

I... don't agree with B at all, actually. I think it's cultural fusion (with Broadway/musical traditions and others) rather than appropriation (...also, can it be appropriation if Miranda is actually from that culture?), and I see this as a strength rather than a weakness. (It's also riffing off of not only hip-hop, rap, and musicals, but also pop traditions, I think; I think King George is supposed to be Beatles-ish parody.) It can't be any faster than this to be sung in a large-auditorium venue where the words generally need to be understandable (...I don't, as I said, know anything about hip-hop, but I don't think it's generally performed in large resonant auditoriums?) and in addition, I don't find the rap parts all that different from the rap I used to listen to (although of course a lot of that was twenty years ago).

I might also be biased because I can't follow anything faster than Hamilton is sung. I've tried several times, for example, to listen to Janelle Monae's SF hip-hop, which a lot of people think is totally awesome, but I just can't even make out the words at all and it makes me lose interest halfway through one song.

I also would love good examples of the wit of good hip-hop. To me this is incredibly witty (how can you not think a song called Farmer Refuted isn't witty??), but then I haven't been exposed to much hip-hop.

(Or is B complaining about using hip-hop to tell the story of Old Dead White Guys? See, personally, I think the fact that there's a Hispanic playing Hamilton and a black guy playing Jefferson, singing a mix of styles drawn from several different places, is fantastic and an awesome way to reclaim this history as vibrant and relevant to those of us who don't happen to be white, while still acknowledging that, hey, these guys did some amazing things. /poc-pov)