How Rap Works in Hamilton: Musical Argumentation Analysis

[00:00:00]How does rap work work in the musical Hamilton?

[00:00:03]Very well. Video essay done. But perhaps we can go a little further and ask, why hadn't there been a big hit rap musical rapicle on Broadway until Hamilton came along? I mean, there's been rap on Broadway before, but not quite like Hamilton, a huge Broadway hit that will probably run forever. What makes it so different?

[00:00:31]First, a brief history of rap and musicals.

[00:00:35]The history of rap and musicals goes back further than you might think.

[00:00:39]Look, what do you talk? What do you talk? What do you talk? What do you talk? What do you talk?

[00:00:42]Where do you get it?

[00:00:43]What do you talk?

[00:00:43]Music man, you have Rock Island, which used rhythmic stylized speech and even had a train chugging as the beat. And if you think this isn't really rap, the Tony Awards would have you convinced otherwise. He's a music man and he sells clarinets and the kids in the town with the big trombones and the tat drums and the big Of course I'm joking. But just to be clear, the music man did not invent rap.

[00:01:06]Okay, cut to Into the Woods. Steven Sonheim gave the witch a rap number which again featured rhythmic stylized speaking with a somewhat syncopated beat. Even though Sonheim calls rap one pathway to the future, he says, "But I was never able to find another appropriate use for the technique." Or perhaps I didn't have the imagination to. But then we started to get people who did have the imagination to use hip-hop in a more extended way.

[00:01:34]Now it's 1992.

[00:01:37]The first hip-hop musical, or as they called it, rap opera, was Graffiti Blues, which actors Ron Mcuina and Misha McCay began as a way for inner city youth to tell their own stories on stage. The production was even invited to perform at a 1993 Bill Clinton inaugural event on the Washington Mall.

[00:01:56]Later, Bring in the Noise, Bringin defunk was a tap dance fantasy about African-American history that had hip-hop numbers. By 2001, you had the landmark Carmen, a hip-hop rub.

[00:02:07]Sweetness flowing like a faucet. Body banging noset. Brothers want to toss it, but they lost.

[00:02:13]An MTV movie starring Beyonce, which gave us the first mainstream attempt at using rap as the main mode of song storytelling. But as far as stage rap, it wasn't until 2008 that Lynn came along to legitimize rap on Broadway in In the Heights, which won best musical.

[00:02:30]While the musical is still mostly centered around traditionally sung melodies, there's still enough rap in it that he cemented rap's potential for storytelling.

[00:02:39]Just a part of the routine. Everybody's got a job. Everybody's got a dream.

[00:02:43]Which leads us to the first truly completely hip-hop musical on Broadway.

[00:02:48]Of course, I'm talking about 2014's Holler if you hear me. It was the first hip-hop jukebox musical, taking songs and poems by Tupac Shakur and staging them in an original story about a man recently released from prison into the slums of an unnamed Midwestern city who gets caught up with a drug gang.

[00:03:06]Really? Holl if you hear me. Now, one thing you'll notice in each of the hip-hop musicals so far mentioned is that they all deal specifically with people of color, namely African-Americans and Latinx people, and have an inner city setting. Graffiti Blues featured kids from disadvantaged parts of Los Angeles. Carmen was set in South Central LA, and In the Heights was set in New York City's Washington Heights. Bring in the Noise takes place only partially in the inner city if only because it covers a wider range of the black experience which includes cities but stretches all the way back to the time of slavery. It seemed that hip hop would forever be destined to tell as Sonheim put it stories which take place in millus where rap might be the natural expression of the characters. Enter Hamilton, a show that utilizes hiphop way outside the millu where rap might be the natural expression of these characters. In fact, before Hamilton came out, you couldn't think of people less suited to rap than the founding fathers. When Lynn first mentioned the idea, it got a laugh.

[00:04:07]I'm actually working on a hip-hop album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. You laugh, but it's true. But in Hamilton's wake, we see that the supposed elements of the hip-hop musical were based on what stories rappers typically have told. But they do not cover what stories hip hop potentially could tell as it continues to grow and evolve. So the question is, how did Lynn write a hip-hop musical about the whitest people ever? people who may have lived in cities but were not in the inner city which is basically a euphemism for city areas with socioeconomic problems that since the 60s is often said as a dog whistle for people of color. No. Politact even quotes a historian calling the founding fathers far from ordinary in terms of income, wealth, education, and social standing. How did Lynn write a musical about those guys yet still remain authentic to the hip-hop experience?

[00:05:06]This is the first in a multi-part video essay about how rap works in Hamilton.

[00:05:11]And in this video, we're going to talk about argument. Let's go. So, before Hamilton used hiphop, what other type of music would you typically use to tell the story about the founding fathers?

[00:05:22]Well, it turns out we know because Hamilton was not the first musical about the founding fathers. 1776 won the best musical Tony for the year 1969.

[00:05:33]1776.

[00:05:36]as well as ran on Broadway for over 1,200 performances. A success by any measure and in fact it's having a Broadway revival in 2021. So look out.

[00:05:46]The musical 1776 is about the writing and passage of the Declaration of Independence where John Adams is the protagonist rather than an unseen inside joke. Like Hamilton in 1776, there are scenes of debates which pit different members of the government against each other. And like Hamilton, 1776 features a loudmouth hero who won't shut up. But unlike Hamilton, 1776 generally does not musicalize those debates. An article by 538 showed that the 1776 cast album featured 2,735 words. Hamilton featured 20,520 words. That's 750% more words. And it wasn't just because Hamilton is a longer cast album either.

[00:06:33]Even going by words per minute, 1776 is at 66 words per minute, while Hamilton comes out ahead with a whopping 144 words per minute. More than double 1776.

[00:06:45]But 1776 doesn't skimp on words. Rather, the show puts more words not in the songs, but in the dialogue. In fact, 1776 is so committed to dramatizing the debates in dialogue that there is even a well-known scene that features no song for over 30 minutes, which is a record amount of time for a musical to go without any singing and is the only known instance where musicians were allowed to leave the orchestra pit mid show for a break. Some people even argue that this is the reason 1776 should have been written as a straight non-m musical play or these days perhaps an HBO miniseries. However, I can't help but think Lynn saw 1776 and decided to tackle the same set of issues, namely how to musicalize a wonky government bureaucratic policy debate and found a completely left field solution, hip-hop.

[00:07:37]You see, rap as a genre is pretty well suited to complex verbal argumentation, as linguist John McCarter writes, "But a confrontational cadence is the warp and woof of rap. Each rhyme at the end of a line implies a so there." Rapping is to an extent sport. This works so well in Hamilton because most of the characters are men in competition. But that sense of competitiveness not only drives the cabinet battles and Hamilton's rise to prominence, but also George Washington's persuasion of Hamilton to join his staff, Angelica's inner conflict between her heart and her family fortune, and all the times that Burr and Hamilton went at each other all the way right down to the duel that ended it all. And while yes, there are around 12 moments of non-m musical spoken dialogue or monologues in the show, they are mostly just there to tell us new information and deliver necessary exposition in order to set up the next hiphop infused argument. The reason Hamilton can rise up in this world is not because he's physically strong, but because he's good with words. He's able to leave the Caribbean and have a chance for success in New York because he wrote a brilliant essay. This one essay was his ticket out. And in New York, he becomes sought after for his debate skills. And it's his use of words and argumentation that make him successful. As Lynn says, Hamilton beef with every other founding father uh and all on the strength of his writing.

[00:09:01]I think he embodies uh the word's ability to make a difference.

[00:09:05]It's this use of argumentative language which hip-hop shares with the founding fathers. Of course, the argument song is a common tradition in musical theater.

[00:09:14]In lay miz, you have a song like confrontation where Jean Va Jean and Ja sing a back and forth well confrontation and then sing over each other.

[00:09:28]But perhaps the greatest master of the argument song is Sondheim whose lyrics for America in Westside Story features a back and forth between the optimistic women and the pessimistic men. America.

[00:09:41]Life is a right in America.

[00:09:43]If you don't like in America.

[00:09:46]Side note, in the stage version, the song is between the optimistic women and one rogue pessimistic woman. And Sonheim took this form to its sublime extreme in into the woods your fault, which pits five characters against each other in an elaborate shifting blame game that is maybe one of the most exciting moments in musical theater writing ever.

[00:10:06]It's his fault.

[00:10:07]It was his fault.

[00:10:08]Yes, it is. It's his, I guess.

[00:10:09]Wait a minute though. I chopped on the bean stone.

[00:10:11]In Hamilton, that type of lyrical argumentation informs the whole show, even from the very first line, which is a 36word question that reads more like a paragraph.

[00:10:21]How does a bastard orphan son of a [ __ ] and a Scotsman wrote in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence and squala grow up to be a hero and a scholar? Were this sung, we'd probably forget the beginning of the sentence before it has even ended. But rap keeps the structure of this line, all of its sub clauses nicely organized with a beat and its incessant rhymes. Of the 36 words in this first sentence, 13 of them are rhymed, which is over a third. By contrast, the opening number of 1776 begins with a sort of argument song, Sit Down, John.

[00:10:59][Music] Thomas, for God's sake, listen to Before the song, there's a great confrontational monologue from John Adams.

[00:11:09][Music] And still, this Congress refuses to grant any of my proposals on independence, even so much as the courtesy of open debate.

[00:11:21]Good God, what in the hell are you waiting for? But rather than taking that monologue and turning it into a song, Sit Down only begins after the monologue, which then musicalizes Congress telling Jon to sit down a total of 10 times over the course of the song.

[00:11:36]In this entire opening number, there are a total of 16 rhymed words, which means Hamilton has almost as many rhymes as 1776's opening song in its opening sentence. So, how does Sit Down get away with having so few rhymes? Well, in a word, melody. Especially melodies which we expect to be repeated over and over.

[00:12:01]Sit Down was musicalized because it's a simple idea that can be repeated with a catchy melody.

[00:12:11][Music] And even when the lyrics change, for example, from sit down John to vote yes for independ.

[00:12:24]The melody stays the same within the new lyrics and are repeated until those lyrics become familiar. Colin Morris in his TED talk describes a method for determining how repetitive a song is based on graphing them the same way scientists graph repetition in DNA sequences. And if you go to Colin Morris's website, you can actually apply that to any lyrics that you input. So when you apply that to Sit Down, we see large sections having a repetitive structure. And this is true for the other fight songs as well because even if people are singing over each other, we understand what they're saying because the melodies have already been drilled into our ears. So in a sense, 1776 does not musicalize John Adams's monologue because his monologue is the opposite of repetitive. It's progressive. Each sentence Adam says builds off the previous one in a logical progression of an argument. Sort of like rap lyrics. Because with rap, lyrics are not limited by the melody needing to repeat, but only by how the rhyme repeats within the beat. Huh. And Lynn himself makes a literal demonstration of the power of rap versus melody in the song Farmer Refuted, where Samuel Sbury repeats his one unconvincing melody over and over.

[00:13:46]I hear not the reels scream revolution.

[00:13:51]But Hamilton is free to interject and interrupt and well refute without needing any repetitive structure allowing him to adapt and comment on things in the moment. So his maximally verbal attack can be based on logical argument rather than traditional song structure which Sabbury is bound to and which Hamilton runs circles around.

[00:14:13][Music] revolution.

[00:14:22]You win.

[00:14:23]But while John McCorder believes that rap is good for argumentation, he also thinks it's not useful for every musical theater situation. He writes, "Rap is an inherently vernacular medium. It arose from the streets." But the vernacular is only one facet of humanity. Translation: Rap doesn't work as well with fancy characters of upper crust mill use.

[00:14:44]However, I might take issue with this.

[00:14:47]Even though it seems like the founding fathers obviously didn't rap, I submit to you the film Ridicule, which takes place roughly around the same time as the events of Hamilton, but in the court of King Louis V 16th of France. King Louie is shown picking and choosing people to enter into his super fancy court at the Palace of Versailles by their reputations as witty, sophisticated people. And how did people prove they were witty and sophisticated?

[00:15:14]Well, one way is they would engage in games of wit where they were given a set of rhyme words and had to choose a meter or beat Alexandra and then use that rhyme to insult their opponent. It's basically a rap battle.

[00:15:30]So, it's no surprise that the cabinet debates between Jefferson and Hamilton become rap battles as well. And this approach is even more appropriate once you realize argumentation itself is a metaphor, which I will talk about in the next video. But before you go, I want to tell you a little bit about a special offer I have with Soundfly. The code HHM Music5 gets you 15% off one of Soundflyy's acclaimed online music courses. Get hands-on personalized coaching from musicians, composers, producers, singers, actors, and other industry people. And the best part is you can learn from anywhere on your own schedule. Not only will you learn more about music, but you'll be helping out this channel. So again, sign up for 15% off with HHM Music 15. Thank you so much for watching. Like, comment, subscribe, and thank you also to two of my newest patrons, Kaihang Tan and Megan McQueen.

[00:16:22]Ring the bell, and stay tuned for the next How Hamilton Works video. Till then, peace.

[00:16:30][Music]