#inspired by the fact i think Lin Manuel Miranda would be a funny choice for Gabriel's voice

[melsimps]

Gabriel: *drops something*

Gabriel: Oh, blathering blatherskite...

Miguel, sobbing: please... just say Shock!

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I know this is an extreamly petty hill to die on, please read the whole post before you argue with me. OFMD is not like Hamilton at all and Ill fight anybody who says it.

Disclaimer: It is fine to not like either of these shows because of the historical figure's they are about I'm not saying that please don't take me out of context

The main difference is that Hamilton does a lot of work being historically accurate or whatever and gives the illusion of that where as OFMD doesn't give a single fuck about being historically accurate it only gives a fuck about being a romcom. Hamilton says "lets learn about the founding fathers with rap music, this is more or less what happened." OFMD says "who cares what these guys were actually like? They're dead. You wanna watch funny dilf theater gays kiss? One of them's dressed like a biker." they're opposite approaches to historical story telling.

I also do tend to think that they're different because one is about founding fathers and the other is about pirates. Pirates are criminals who didn't document their lives very thoroughly and had exaggerated stories told about them even when they were alive. That's not to say that their crimes don't matter but it is to say that the cultural figure of Blackbeard is already pretty fictionalized. Additionally the founding fathers have all of this political baggage that comes with them because the far right in the US likes to venerate them as infallible gods and the school system's history curriculum plays into that. Nobody says Caribbean pirates during the golden age of piracy were good actually. People might hold up Black Ceasar or Anne Bonny and Mary Read as historical examples of powerful black people/women/queer people but nobody relevant tries to pretend that they're good people. Pirates don't have that political baggage

Like I'm critical of the choice to tell sympathetic stories about historical slave owners, and even if I had been struck by the same inspiration that David Jenkins or Lin Manuel Miranda were I would not have made either show because of the fact that it's about that guy. But if you are going to do it there are different methods of doing it and saying they're all the same feels like bad media analysis to me.

Disclaimer: I'm not accusing anyone who doesn't want to watch ofmd or Hamilton because of it of bad media analysis. I think it's a perfectly valid reason to not want to watch something. My gripe is with people who say these two bits of media are the same.

[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

In 2015, Hamilton and The Force Awakens remixed essential American myths

A decade has elapsed since Lin-Manuel Miranda told President Barack Obama and a room full of White House guests that he was writing a concept album about “the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.” It was May 12, 2009, and the first time Miranda had performed the project’s opening number. Watching that video, you can see that Miranda knows the laugh is coming. He not only knows, but welcomes it with open arms. It’s clear that even then, he knew his angle was a good, even brilliant one, that the skepticism conjured by the apparent absurdity of describing one of the Founding Fathers of the United States as embodying hip-hop would vanish once people understood the reasons why. They could laugh. Maybe they should laugh. Then they’d listen, and that would be the ball game.

“I’ll be playing Vice President Aaron Burr,” he says, to audible giggles. “Snap along if you like.”

...

Much of Hamilton’s success is due to its writer’s keen understanding of two American art forms, as well as his formidable gift for language. But the real key to unlocking the greatness of Hamilton is this: Lin-Manuel Miranda looked at the life of Alexander Hamilton—at its particulars, not just some marble bust. He saw the story of an immigrant, of someone who used language and hustle and boldness to make a place for himself in a world that would otherwise have shut him out. He saw an audacious loudmouth, a genius who didn’t know when to shut up, a trait which dazzled and backfired. He saw feuds and sex and swagger. And then he did something both simple and revolutionary: He wrote it exactly that way. He reflected the world in which we live. He told the truth, and it will live on.

Inspired by Ron Chernow’s bestselling 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton is, unequivocally, hip-hop—just not in the form of the concept album described in the White House in 2009. When the musical’s songs were compiled into an LP, a Billboard review dubbed it the best rap record of 2015. Busta Rhymes sat in the front row, grinning, when the show played the Public Theater in New York, its home before the inevitable Broadway transfer; he was later one of many artists to appear on The Hamilton Mixtape, a list that includes Ja Rule, Nas, Wiz Khalifa, Common, Miguel, Queen Latifah, and Chance The Rapper. After seeing the show, Questlove, who would later produce the original cast recording with Black Thought, found himself asking: “Is this the most revolutionary thing to happen to Broadway, or the most revolutionary thing to happen to hip-hop?”

And that’s because Hamilton is just as unequivocally a musical, with choreography, costumes, an intermission, scenework, a massive set, and a few powerhouse ballads. It’s a sonic experience, but a dramatic one as well. It’s not a musical about hip-hop; that is simply the form it takes. As all great hip-hop artists do, Miranda places Hamilton in conversation with other great artists by quoting and sampling their sampling their work—it’s just that he’s as likely to cite Jason Robert Brown as Mobb Depp and Biggie Smalls. The lyrics contain more than 20,000 words, far, far more than your Evan Hansens or your Hadestowns—just as, say, your average Busta Rhymes track would have far more words than something by Dolly Parton.

And it’s not a gimmick. “This music is the only way you can tell this guy’s story,” Miranda told Grantland in 2015. “You could do a Les Mis-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long.”

And so a story about the founding of the United States—previously captured in films like The Patriot, television shows like the miniseries John Adams, and musicals like 1776—was told again, by pairing one American art form with another. It’s a choice that this time in a way that reflected the country’s diversity. George Washington (Christopher Jackson) was Black. Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) was Black. Hamilton, initially played by Miranda himself, was Puerto Rican. Thomas Jefferson was Black, played by a biracial rapper (Daveed Diggs) who went to Hebrew school and would win a Tony for his Broadway debut. King George (Jonathan Groff) was white, deliberately so; his menacing, wickedly funny, Beatles-inspired songs sound unlike anything else in the score. The other named characters, and the vast majority of the ensemble, were all people of color.

This isn’t “colorblind casting,” the kind of thing where you sit down to see Hamlet and the fact that a Latinx person is playing Claudius is never acknowledged. This is “color-conscious casting,” an indispensable element of the show, operating—as most things in Hamilton do—on multiple levels. It elevates and enlivens the story, kicking preconceptions about what this period of history should look and sound like to the curb; in doing so, “you rob it of its inevitability, you rob it of its sort of plaster sainthood,” Miranda said in 2018. It’s also a practical artistic consideration: “I wanted to write a hip-hop, R&B musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton,” he added; “If it had been an all-white cast, wouldn’t you think I messed up?”

But it’s another element that most lingers. It pops out in lines like “And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’m ’a compel him to include women in the sequel,” and, most famously, shines through in “Immigrants: we get the job done.”

Read the rest here.