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Studies in Musical Theatre
Volume 12 Number 2
© 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/smt.12.2.141_1
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ABSTRACT
Hamilton (2015) celebrates rap as the discursively dense, incandescent language
of American revolution, democracy and individuality, but the musical also, in its
tragic course, portrays rap’s limits, especially when post-revolutionary problems
of governance and family life arise. In giving these dual fates to the show’s central
musical language, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda draws on the history of hip hop
in general and gangsta rap in particular, offering an implicit critique of vengeful
violence through allusions to the allegedly linked murders of Tupac Shakur and
Notorious B.I.G. In its close readings of lyrics, this essay focuses on Alexander
and Philip Hamilton and John Laurens and draws connections between these characters’
development and Miranda’s use of abolitionist and revolutionary history.
The essay also explores the show’s many allegorical attempts to link positions
on the political spectrum with different styles of music, from pop and jazz to the
increasingly intricate rhyme schemes of hip hop.
Hamilton has become synonymous in the popular mind with rap, its major
lyrical form, and among many other celebrity fans, hip-hop royalty have
embraced the work, as evidenced by, among other things, the appearance
of Busta Rhymes, Nas, Chance the Rapper and other luminaries on the
KEYWORDS
hip hop
gangsta rap
violence
Revolutionary War
contemporary music
race
JEFFREY SEVERS
University of British Columbia
‘Is it like a beat without a
melody?’: Rap and revolution
in Hamilton
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Roots-produced Hamilton Mixtape. I argue in this essay, though, that while
Hamilton celebrates rap as the language of America, revolution and individuality,
the musical also, in its tragic course, narrates rap’s excess, failure and necessary
tempering. Rap, in creator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s vision, is a democratic,
incandescent language that those devoted to a new nation must learn in order
to make political progress, but rap, in its reliance on rhetorical aggression and
its embodiment of impulsiveness, also proves inadequate to the nuanced challenges
of post-revolutionary life. Learning the American language of rap is
tied to many contingencies and dangers, especially when the goal becomes
governance of the nation and selfhood that rap’s energy has secured. For these
reasons the show that has become famous as the hip-hop musical ultimately
has its masterful rapping hero depart from hip hop, especially when its inherent
bravado meets with episodes of untamed personal violence. Hamilton and
associates must in effect learn the power of rap – and then learn to give it up.
Focusing largely on the twinned fates of revolutionary John Laurens and
young  ‘poet’ Philip Hamilton, in this essay I study rap’s valorization and
dissolution as Miranda’s narrative works through the portentous question
about the consequences of political violence at the musical’s start: ‘Or will
the blood we shed begin an endless / Cycle of vengeance and death with no
defendants?’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 29). The answer to this question
lies in Hamilton’s theme of managing the rhetorical rashness that is necessary
to the revolutionary forging of representative democracy but destructive
to its careful cultivation. ‘I’d rather be divisive than indecisive’, Hamilton
tells Burr in one of the show’s many illuminating rhymes; the musical as a
whole shows the importance of sometimes being a bit of both (Miranda and
McCarter 2016: 49).
Hamilton’s subtle critique of rap’s aggression, I argue, is also tied to a
second, much more contemporary layer of the show’s meaning: the history of
hip-hop culture, especially its gangsta subgenre and that music’s own ‘cycle of
vengeance’. Miranda, born in 1980, became obsessed with the music as a teen
in the mid-1990s, and the earth-shattering events of this period of hip-hop
history are the possibly linked drive-by murders of two gangsta rap superstars
quoted and played with in Hamilton, Tupac Shakur (in September 1996)
and Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls (in March 1997). Biggie’s murder is
widely seen as revenge for Tupac’s, the by-product of in-song dissing between
the two rappers and of east coast–west coast rivalries between their respective
labels and affiliates. Shakur’s tendency to be  ‘extremely undiplomatic,
publicly calling out rappers he hated’, was a quality that Miranda linked to
Hamilton early in the show’s composition (Mead 2015). I of course attempt
no resolution of these still unsolved murder cases or further conspiracy theories
here; rather, I invoke these deaths by gunfire as a key piece in understanding
how rap, violence and vengeance intersect with the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century history of political passions and impatience in Hamilton.
Explaining his immediate recognition of hip-hop culture in the Ron Chernow
biography of Hamilton that inspired the composition, Miranda has said that
Hamilton ‘caught beef with every other founding father’, using the ­hip-hop
term for disputes like the one between Tupac and Biggie (Gross 2017). I
demonstrate that the dynamics of ‘beef’ are one aspect of Hamilton’s quest
for digestible illustrations of the revolutionary spirit that drove Hamilton and
the duelling culture that determined his end. Moreover, in telling a historical
figure’s history of intellectual development through rap, from the successes
of his youth to his tragic death, Hamilton must, in a sense, also trace the
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genre’s own development in pastiche form, including a central echoing of the
moments when the representational disrespect and violence of the gangsta
mode famously became part of real life. On the level of form and metaphor, I
show that, in the show’s closing moments, this self-conscious encounter with
(and overcoming of) gangsta imagery culminates in Hamilton’s identification
of rap’s beat-driven form with death itself.
The massive success of Hamilton with people from across the political
spectrum (as Galella points out [2015], in addition to the many liberal celebrity
fans the show has been touted by Rupert Murdoch and Lynne Cheney)
is in part testament to how much hip hop has exploded in popularity, diversified
and, in the hands of Miranda and similar artists, evolved away from
1990’s associations with gang violence and cop-killing and the (primarily)
right-wing cultural hysteria that greeted NWA, Ice-T, and songs like ‘Fuck tha
Police’ and ‘Cop Killer’. But these gangsta figurations are still deeply important
to interpreting the various ways of being productively aggressive in
Miranda’s onstage world. At the same time, I hardly seek to participate in the
literalism and simplistic theories of mimesis that have long determined the
reception by conservative critics of rap’s focus on violence. Rather, following
scholarly readers of hip hop, I here regard the gun-wielding gangsta identity
as simply one aspect of the multiform dramatic personae that rap MCs
tend to create. Gangsta narratives boasting of violence, whether against rival
gangs or police, should not be taken ‘straight’. ‘As an audience we have yet to
condition ourselves to understand rap’s tall tales as acts of projection’, Adam
Bradley writes in an analysis of hip hop’s literary sophistication. ‘Rap’s relation
to reality is like an inside joke that much of the listening public doesn’t get.
The joke lies in the MC’s winking assertion of the “truth”of obvious fictions’
(Bradley 2009: 163–64). Such an approach meshes with the winking nature of
Hamilton’s own playful construction of history, what Ariel Nereson calls ‘the
critical interplay between history and historiography that runs throughout the
performance’(Nereson 2016: 1046), as when Hamilton and Burr comment on
how history books will tell their story (or have told it). Hamilton evokes and
quotes rappers on violence in a similar mode, as characters who are themselves
engaging with fictionality, self-criticism and artful despair even as they
draw on gritty autobiography. As Oliver Wang (2013) writes, ‘[N]o American
pop genre celebrates the power of the gun as much as hip hop. What critics
forget is that no pop genre confronts or contends with the consequences of
gun violence as much as hip hop either’.
Thinking through Hamilton’s complex uses of hip-hop history and some
of its major African American stars also adds some unexplored complexities
to the show’s much-discussed racial politics. The main commentary on racial
identity in Hamilton has concerned its daring casting of non-white actors to
play the founding fathers and the ironies of presenting the slave-holding
Jefferson and Washington as black men; but that describes only a few relatively
superficial dimensions of the show’s ideas about race, slavery and immigration
in the early and contemporary republic. Some exceptional voices have
found Hamilton not nearly so progressive as its applause lines about immigrants
getting the job done, its calling-out of Mike Pence and its intertwining
with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would suggest. Galella, for instance,
sees aspects of the show’s belief in the mythology of the American Dream that
are ripe for conservative, neo-liberal and racist exploitation: Hamilton ‘tells a
top-down narrative that celebrates hard work and an innate ability to achieve
success’, an  ‘approach that obscures indigenous and enslaved people who
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did not triumph as Hamilton did’ and ignores ‘very real, material obstacles’
in the path to prosperity (Galella 2015). In perhaps the most extreme critique
of Hamilton yet, Paul Street deems the musical’s egalitarian political message
a gross misreading of Hamilton’s historical elitism and finance-centred principles,
suggesting that Obama’s embrace of the show is representative of the
victory of neo-liberalism under cover of multicultural progress.  ‘Miranda’s
Hamilton is in this sense a perfect cultural wrap up to the ugly neo-liberal
Obama years’, Street writes. ‘It is a brilliant ahistorical monument to Orwellian,
fake-progressive bourgeois identity politics in service to the very predominantly
Caucasian financial elite and ruling class hegemony’ (Street 2016). As
I suggest in the close readings that follow, in looking only to the most salient
features of Hamilton’s racial story and embrace of the American Dream,
critiques like these miss at least some of the conflicted and unresolved stances
roiling beneath the surface. I explore some of these powerful conflicts through
the show’s textured relationship to varied legacies of hip hop, particularly at
points where eighteenth-century slavery politics, the show’s non-white casting
of white founding fathers and the fitfully improvised creation of rappers’
personae all converge.
At its core, Hamilton takes its celebration of the immigrant’s American
Dream (familiar territory for Miranda from In the Heights) and filters it through
links to rappers’ narratives. As Nereson writes, the musical from its opening
number portrays Hamilton ‘as saved from a life of poverty and insignificance
largely by his skill with words’, and ‘bolstered by the music, it is easy to hear
the connections between Hamilton’s back story and popular narratives of
social mobility through rapping’(Nereson 2016: 1046). In making this connection,
Miranda (as his notes confirm) refers to some great moments of hip-hop
self-assertion, such as Tupac’s ‘Holla if ya hear me’in Hamilton’s ‘I gotta holler
just to be heard’, or the verbatim quoting of ‘Only nineteen but my mind is
older’ from Mobb Deep’s ‘Shook Ones Part II’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016:
26, 26n1, 26n2). From its title to its complex rhyme schemes, ‘My Shot’ also
echoes what has become the great popular statement of the need to embrace
fleeting ‘opportunity’, Eminem’s ‘LoseYourself’. More specific resonances with
contemporary rappers occur in Hamilton’s repeated references to the 1772 St.
Croix hurricane that led the teenage Alexander to write a poem that brought
him his first fame and support for his education – or as ‘Alexander Hamilton’
puts it, ‘Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain, / And he wrote
his first refrain, a testament to his pain’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 16).
Miranda, commenting on Hamilton’s transcendence of circumstances through
writing, notes connections to ‘Jay-Z, Eminem, Biggie. Lil Wayne [a native of
New Orleans] writing about Katrina!’ (Binelli 2016). In another context, he
uses more blunt terms:  ‘Hamilton literally wrote a verse to get him off an
island – that’s the most hip-hop shit ever. He transcends the struggle’by writing
about it in poetry (Beggs 2015).
Yet Hamilton, in depicting its title figure’s verbal genius and drive, also
explores foils who have yet to learn rap or who miss its impact (both musical
and political) entirely. Miranda uses subtle allegories to situate characters
along a timeline of musical/political history, with hip hop and a newborn
democracy as the twin points of telos. King George exists outside American
musical idioms, invoking the sounds of the so-called ‘British Invasion’ in his
Beatles-inspired ‘You’ll Be Back’. As the one character the play calls for casting
as white, King George brings together, in one figure, oblivious whiteness,
political oppression and resistance to musical diversity and innovation
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(Herrera 2017: 29). Appearing directly after King George in ‘Right Hand Man’,
George Washington must of course be an excellent rapper, dexterously narrating
the Continentals’ early losses with many stacked rhymes. Another future
president, Thomas Jefferson, away in France until the 1789 opening of Act
2, arrives singing in a smooth jazz style that, while missing King George’s
goofy singsong quality, is just too smooth, compared with the jaggedness
of rap. Suffused with a clichéd nostalgia (‘Virginia, my home sweet home’),
Jefferson’s singing seems tied to the historical figure’s acceptance of slavery,
on display in the accompanying dancing (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 152).
Paralleling Hamilton’s lightning-speed development between  ‘Alexander
Hamilton’ (where he does not yet rap) and ‘My Shot’, Jefferson soon ‘learns’
the improvisatory force of hip hop, making a worthy opponent for Hamilton
in ‘Cabinet Battle #1’.
Aaron Burr, noted for his reticence and willingness to wait, draws on a
precursor of rap, dance hall, and largely refuses urging from the central foursome
to ‘Give us a verse, drop some knowledge!’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 25).
Burr raps often and extensively in his narration but, in the diegetic action, cuts
himself short; notice too that, in the sinuous rapping of ‘Washington on Your
Side’, Jefferson (who will out-manoeuvre Burr politically in the election of 1800)
does all the extended riffing while Burr only joins in for single-line responses
and choruses. Burr’s adherence to an older musical form seems to exemplify his
political outsiderhood, best encapsulated in the dance hall ‘The Room Where
It Happens’. Eliza Hamilton, a chastening influence on her husband throughout,
notably never raps (rapping is left to her sister Angelica, who in ‘Satisfied’
expresses an impulse for transgression that is deeply appealing to Alexander).
These large-scale musical allegories with the most prominent figures have
a potent reflection on the micro-level of ‘My Shot’. Hamilton’s three revolutionary
comrades in Act 1 – Laurens, Lafayette and Mulligan – appear in the
bar scene preceding this song as embodiments of ‘early’ rap, both in terms of
their individual talent level and the history of the form. Laurens begins, ‘I’m
John Laurens in the place to be’, and continues with simple, end-rhymed lines
with no variation (‘be’, ‘three’, ‘me’, ‘free’), reminiscent of an early rap hit like
Kurtis Blow’s ‘The Breaks’in 1980 (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 25). Lafayette
and Mulligan add some in-line rhymes (such as Lafayette’s ‘afar’and ‘bonsoir’)
but remain stuck on simple themes of braggadocio and vulgar masculinity
that evoke the longest-standing rap tropes: Lafayette is ‘the best’, while the
hyper-sexed Mulligan uses the adolescent taunt of ‘ya mother’ (Miranda and
McCarter 2016: 25). Lafayette’s nascent English skills in ‘My Shot’, dramatically
improved by the time of the warp-speed ‘Guns and Ships’, suggest what
is going on for the entire trio: their rapping needs a formal revolution too.
As Miranda explains in an interview, Laurens and the others start out, like
early 1980’s rappers, ‘rhyming at the end of the line […] And then here comes
Hamilton. And suddenly you’re getting a lot of internal assonance and a lot of
internal rhyming’, as Hamilton formally demonstrates ‘his intellect and ambition’(Gross
2017). As the three learners answer Hamilton’s example with their
later verses in ‘My Shot’, Laurens goes from calling the British ‘cops’ he will
simply shoot to a big-picture understanding of abolitionism and revolution as
programmes that must be aligned; Lafayette (while he comically has trouble
pronouncing it) uses not only a multi-syllable rhyming word with ‘anarchy’
but a complex concept of political philosophy; Mulligan brings in class mobility
as motivation to rebel, identifying the revolution as his ‘chance / To socially
advance’(Miranda and McCarter 2016: 27).
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As  ‘My Shot’ comes to a climax, intricate multi-syllabic rhymes underscore
the yoking of rap skill to political ideals and rhetoric. For instance, when
Hamilton rhymes,  ‘A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists? /
Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is!’ the moment both
verbally dazzles and holds the rebels to the high standard of making black and
white freedom the objectives of their violent work, extending Laurens’ ideals
(and marking a huge leap ahead of his initial ‘I will pop chick-a pop these
cops till I’m free’) (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 27, 25). Articulating American
political discourse, Hamilton continually implies, requires the drive and verbal
density of rap. As Miranda has said, rap is ‘uniquely suited to tell Hamilton’s
story’ because ‘it has more words per measure than any other musical genre.
It has rhythm and it has density. And if Hamilton had anything in his writings
it was this density’(Rose 2015). In the show, Hamilton’s condensation of
complex policy decisions into catchy lines and vivid images repeatedly wins
the day for a time, as when he declaims on ‘a new line of credit, a financial
diuretic’in ‘Cabinet Battle #1’and, in ‘#2’, depicts a beheaded King Louis XVI
saying ‘Uh … do whatever you want, I’m super dead’(Miranda and McCarter
2016: 161, 192). In both cases, his position wins out.
By the time these moments of successful rap-rhetoric occur inAct 2,though,
Hamilton has introduced other crucial arenas in which rapping, whether a fully
developed talent or not, leads towards peril and tragic ends. In fact, in Act 2,
after the military battles are won, rap proves a largely inadequate language
for the mature challenges Hamilton faces, summarized in Washington’s pithy
formulations: ‘Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder’ and ‘Winning was
easy, young man. Governing’s harder’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 64, 163).
To get at the stakes of this development for rap, violence and racial identity,
let me focus in particular on the dual (or duel) arcs of John Laurens and Philip
Hamilton. One actor plays both roles, heightening a juxtaposition of Act 1
and Act 2 duel scenes that foreshadow Alexander’s ultimate fate. In Act 1, the
colonials endure in-fighting when Washington appoints Charles Lee as his
second-in-command, as chronicled in ‘Stay Alive’. The following song, ‘Ten
Duel Commandments’, is Hamilton’s most extensive and intricate hip-hop
homage, echoing in title and counting structure Notorious B.I.G.’s  ‘Ten
Crack Commandments’, a set of rules for drug dealers. Laurens wins this
duel, shooting Lee in the side, but news of his death in South Carolina will
reach Hamilton by letter near the end of Act 1 in  ‘Tomorrow There’ll Be
More of Us’(a non-musical scene, left out of the cast recording). In ‘Ten Duel
Commandments’, the reference is not really to Biggie’s drug-dealing; rather,
his ultimate fate – murdered in 1997 in a possible act of vengeance for the
killing of Tupac – comes to shadow the formalized practice of revenge and
resolution in eighteenth-century duelling. In annotations of his lyrics on Rap
Genius, Miranda explains his use of ‘Ten Duel Commandments’as an attempt
to illuminate the ‘codified […] ritual’ and order of duelling: ‘It was like legal
arbitration […] with guns […] “Ten Crack Commandments”is a how-to guide
for illegal activity in the 90s. And this is a how-to guide for illegal activities in
the 1790s’(Miranda 2015a).
But as with so many other anachronistic nods in the show, from immigration
and ‘big government’ issues to the connections between Hamilton’s
debt plan and the 2008 financial crisis, the historical is also interpreting the
contemporary here: the 1790s are being used to illuminate the 1990s and
after. In this context, Laurens becomes a vexed and somewhat awkwardly
constructed amalgamation, occupying an intriguing nexus of concerns in race,
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rap, violence and various forms of historical licence. As with all the revolutionary
figures, Miranda’s casting notice for Laurens calls for a ‘non-white’ actor
(Herrera 2017), and Laurens/Philip has been played in the Broadway production
by Puerto Rican-born Anthony Ramos and African American Jordan
Fisher. As Brian Herrera argues in anatomizing the controversy surrounding
Hamilton’s casting calls for non-white actors and their perceived possible
illegality, Miranda’s casting call ‘strategically flips the script of those casting
conventions that purport neutrality while actually privileging variations of
whiteness as most neutral, versatile, or universal’(Herrera 2017: 30).
In Laurens’ particular case, though, we must add to these challenges to
the power of whiteness the role played by eighteenth-century anti-slavery
politics for the white historical figures being portrayed. Throughout Laurens’
career in the narrative Miranda emphasizes the man’s abolitionist activism,
which contributes to the show’s egalitarian themes and brings out, in contrast
to Washington and Jefferson, a progressivism in the story of Hamilton.
Laurens’ fighting and his writing with Hamilton on slavery add bulk to the
latter’s smack-down of Jefferson on southern slavery in ‘Cabinet Battle #1’.
Contrary to Street’s critique of  ‘Miranda’s distortion’ of Hamilton’s record
on race and equality (Street 2016) and Galella’s claim that the show ‘exaggerates
the significance of abolitionism in the American Revolution’ (Galella
2015), Chernow – not only Miranda’s major source but a consultant to the
production – writes that Alexander, never forgetting the brutalities of the slave
trade in St. Croix, ‘expressed an unwavering belief in the genetic equality of
blacks and whites […] that was enlightened for his day’(Chernow 2004: 210).
Discounting claims that Hamilton himself bought slaves (these were, rather,
paid black servants) and attending to his attitudes towards the Schuyler
family’s slave ownership, Chernow continues,  ‘Few, if any, other founding
fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than
Hamilton – a fact that belies the historical stereotype that he cared only for the
rich and privileged’(Chernow 2004: 211–12).
But portraying Alexander as an anti-racist crusader as often as Hamilton
does may indeed be a convenient exaggeration, and in the proportion of
actions an audience sees unfold onstage, Laurens’ noble relationship to the
racial ideology and genocidal violence of his day seems somewhat overshadowed
by associations with the personae and battles of gangsta rap – associations
that seem to be not entirely under Miranda’s authorial control. After
the strong assertion regarding  ‘those in bondage’ in  ‘My Shot’, Laurens’
abolitionist fighting in South Carolina receives brief mentions in  ‘Stay
Alive’, ‘Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)’, and the moment of his
death, but no onstage scenes. And in ‘Ten Duel Commandments’ he mainly
becomes a vehicle for setting up the tragic trajectory of duelling in Act 2 (as
I explain in greater detail below). Laurens’ early line, ‘And I will pop chickapop
these cops till I’m free’, connects him with Tupac, who in ‘Soldier Like
Me’ raps, ‘I’m poppin’ at corrupt cops / Them motherfuckers catch a hot one’
(Shakur 2004). Laurens’ connections to Biggie and Tupac become part of
Hamilton’s muted lament of the killings that ended the careers of two of hip
hop’s greatest performers and added to the genre’s reputation for intense
glorification of violence (scepticism of which Hamilton reinforces by turning
from a celebration of revolutionaries’ bayonets in Act 1 to the tragedy
that attends duelling pistols in Act 2). Jeremy McCarter, writing alongside
Miranda’s annotations in Hamilton: The Revolution, calls Smalls the ‘predecessor
who gets sampled the most in Hamilton’and a man whose ‘enormous
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shadow […] proved useful too, as his story [including his death] helps to
collapse the distance between the revolutionary era and our own time’
(Miranda and McCarter 2016: 95). Again, I would emphasize that, far from
just being a tool performing this ‘helpful’ role, Biggie (and much more of the
gangsta genre) imports into Hamilton troubling issues of the politics of rap
and revenge.
In broader historical terms, the post-revolutionary  ‘cycle of vengeance’
that  ‘My Shot’ warns against transpires in national politics only in limited,
manageable terms as Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington and Burr hash out
the new nation’s policies and rap-battle without real violence (until the
end). There was, indeed, no second American war as the eighteenth century
ended and the new republic found its footing, something the revolutionaries
of 1776 could not have foreseen with any certainty – and something that
would turn out very differently for the French after 1789. Chernow is again
Miranda’s likely source on the musical’s worry about recriminations and
vengeance. In his biography, examining a 1775 event in which Hamilton saved
a Tory opponent from an angry revolutionary mob, Chernow writes that the
moment ‘presaged a recurring theme of [Hamilton’s] career: the superiority
of forgiveness over revolutionary vengeance’ (Chernow 2004: 64). Hamilton
was  ‘a committed revolutionary with a profound dread that popular sentiment
would boil over into dangerous excess’ and even ‘mob rule’ (Chernow
2004: 64–65).Yet, these complexities of channelling revolutionary fervour and
denying impulses cannot make their way onto Miranda’s stage; the obligation
of Hamilton to reduce complex history to sung narration ends up making
the violent cycles of gangsta rap a relatively important means of assessing the
theme of vengeance, not just a way of enlivening a distant historical conflict.
The show’s association of rapping with violence and death becomes
clearer and stronger when Laurens is transformed in Act 2 and the actor
playing him returns as not just a hip-hop neophyte but a literal child. Philip
Hamilton enters as a nine-year-old desiring to imitate his father’s advanced
rapping: in ‘Take a Break’, echoing Laurens in ‘Aaron Burr, Sir’, Philip the
fledgling rapper sings haltingly to his father, ‘My name is Philip. / I am a
poet. / I wrote this poem just to show it. / And I just turned nine. / You
can write rhymes but you can’t write mine’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016:
169). Nine is a deeply symbolic age here; when the number appears earlier
in ‘Take a Break’, as Philip learns French from his mother by counting at
the piano, a sour note is struck on ‘nine’, and nine will return as the allimportant
moment before the tenth pace in a duel (when the dueller decides
whether to fire on his opponent or throw away his shot). By counting to
nine Philip also mimics the Chuck D sample at the beginning of ‘Ten Crack
Commandments’, again bonding Laurens/Philip with that song and milieu.
Counting, a key skill for the rapper’s building of beats, bars and compelling
flow, has dark undercurrents throughout Hamilton, not just in the duel
scenes: consider Eliza describing herself as ‘down for the count’in ‘Helpless’,
when she first meets and falls in love with Philip’s future father (Miranda
and McCarter 2016: 71). In ‘Blow Us All Away’, once he has grown to teenage,
Philip follows Laurens in duelling, challenging George Eacker (a Burr
supporter) when he dishonours Alexander in an 1801 speech. Philip acts
on the advice of his father, throws away his shot and dies when Eacker fires
early. The fact that one adult actor plays Philip at nine and nineteen reinforces
the audience’s sense that, in spite of bravado, Philip is highly vulnerable,
initiated into an order he cannot handle; adding to this sense is his
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callback to his childhood rapping as he prepares for the duel: ‘My name is
Philip / I am a poet / And I’m a little nervous, but I can’t show it’ (Miranda
and McCarter 2016: 246). His rhyming retains a beginner’s simplicity
throughout ‘Blow Us All Away’, a marker, in Miranda’s vocabulary, that he is
unprepared to defend himself rhetorically or physically.
The willingness to confront death is another ubiquitous motif of hip hop,
especially gangsta rap, and let me conclude my close readings by attending
to Alexander’s coupling of rap’s formal features and his constant courting of
death. Biggie’s debut album in 1994, to cite just one example of this trope, is
named Ready to Die. Hamilton picks up on this motif early on, in ‘My Shot’:
I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
When’s it gonna get me?
In my sleep? Seven feet ahead of me?
If I see it comin’do I run or do I let it be?
Is it like a beat without a melody?
See, I never thought I’d live past twenty
Where I come from some get half as many.
Ask anybody why we livin’fast and we
Laugh, reach for a flask,
We have to make this moment last, that’s plenty.
(Miranda and McCarter 2016: 28)
Miranda calls this verse ‘the Rosetta Stone of Hamilton’s brain’ and says
it took him ‘the better part of a year to write’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016:
28n12). Part of the Rosetta Stone, I would suggest, lies in the meta-musical
translation of ‘Is it like a beat without a melody?’ The ‘it’ being directly
discussed here is death, but the line also offers a succinct definition of
rap. ‘Divorced from most considerations of melody and harmony, rap lyrics are
liberated to live their lives as pure expressions of poetic and musical rhythm’,
Bradley explains. ‘Even when rap employs rich melodies and harmonies […]
rhythm [in Hamilton’s terms, a beat] remains the central element of sound’
(Bradley 2009: xv–xvi). Without a beat (or without the beat-boxing Miranda
often asks hosts to perform when he is asked to freestyle on talk shows), there
can be no rap.
Miranda returns to the Rosetta Stone verse twice more, multiplying its
meanings: first, in ‘Yorktown’, when death is overcome and the revolutionary
spirit of Act 1 is at its moment of greatest triumph. Notably, the ‘beat without
a melody’line is not repeated there. But it does appear, reworked, when death
does arrive for Hamilton, in his duel with Burr. Hamilton’s killer recapitulates
the counting of ‘Ten Duel Commandments’ with a listing of ‘ten things you
need to know’, but the bravado that marked the Biggie-inspired earlier number
is now displaced by Burr’s fears and doubts and (on the cast recording) Leslie
Odom Jr’s cracking voice (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 272; Miranda 2015b).
With the bullet fired, the orchestra is silent: Hamilton’s words are accompanied
by no music, only desolate whispers of wind (Miranda 2015b).
I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.
Is this is [sic] where it gets me, on my feet, several feet ahead of me?
I see it coming, do I run or fire my gun or let it be?
There is no beat, no melody.
(Miranda and McCarter 2016: 273)
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If rap’s beat was identified with danger and death when Hamilton was
a headstrong youth, now, with death looming and a bullet (represented by
a dancer) coming towards him, even the beat has dissolved and abandoned
him – something shown in both the semantic content and the halting rhythm,
the poor flow, of these lines. Throughout Hamilton, the regularity of hip hop’s
beat-driven structure has provided a suitably urgent order for Hamilton’s and
others’intricate thinking, yet here the form has totally collapsed. The hip-hop
beat sustained revolutionary actions, but the beat’s collapse suggests that it
was only ever a contingently reliable structure, not something around which
to build a whole life.
The lines later in Hamilton’s final speech make ironic, despairing variations
on earlier bits in the performance (for example, ‘I’m running out of
time’;  ‘Wise up. Eyes up’;  ‘Teach me how to say goodbye’), and his form
becomes repetitive and chaotic as no verses cohere and five straight lines
end with ‘the other side’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 273). But perhaps all
music, not just hip hop, abandons Hamilton in this eleven o’clock number,
and many meta-musical meanings become available: for instance, the orchestra’s
silence reinforces the suggestion that the audience of this show must
now carry forward Hamilton’s ‘legacy’, for later lines say, ‘I wrote some notes
at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me. / America, you great
unfinished symphony’ (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 273). The image echoes
Walt Whitman’s famous claim that ‘The United States themselves are essentially
the greatest poem’ (Whitman 1996: 741). In Hamilton, the American
poem has required a beat – but also the awareness to avoid letting that beat
determine and make precipitous every action.
‘Just you wait’, Alexander sings in Hamilton’s opening number about
the ‘million things’he will accomplish (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 16). He is
insisting that others wait for him, but the story shows that he would do well
to take his own advice and balance his beautiful fervour with some Burr-like
deliberateness. Amid many more obvious references to the history of musical
theatre (such as South Pacific’s ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’, The Pirates
of Penzance’s ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’and 1776’s ‘Sit
Down, John’), one that I have not seen noted is to the My Fair Lady number
titled ‘Just You Wait’. The connections between Hamilton and Eliza Doolittle
are not obvious but are, upon close inspection, also not superficial: like My
Fair Lady, Hamilton is also a story of learning to speak well through singing,
or, more precisely, learning to discourse thoughtfully but aggressively through
rapping – a hip-hop turn on the Pygmalion myth that Miranda focuses
through the lens of American class mobility, immigrant striving and revolutionary
fervour. In Hamilton, speaking like a true American means not getting
vowels and consonants  ‘right’ but finding the brash words and surprising
rhymes that improvise a unique identity on the spot, meanwhile also embodying
founding ideas about freedom and the symbolic and actual violence that
attempts to secure it.
Rap itself essentially grows up onstage in Hamilton, passing through a
pastiche of phases as its practitioners, applying the art form to their development
of democracy, learn to deploy, tame and reflect on the music’s revolutionary
fire. Miranda, explaining Washington’s insight into the difference
between winning the war and governing the nation, cites Mario Cuomo’s
famous assertion, ‘You campaign in poetry.You govern in prose’(Miranda and
McCarter 2016: 163n8). In the Hamilton I have described here, you revolutionize
America in rap, but you govern your life and passions by other means.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Severs, J. (2018), ‘“Is it like a beat without a melody?”: Rap and revolution
in Hamilton’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 12:2, pp. 141–152, doi: 10.1386/
smt.12.2.141_1
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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Jeffrey Severs is associate professor of English at the University of British
Columbia. He authored David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of
Value (Columbia, 2017) and co-edited Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted
Pilgrim’s Guide (Delaware, 2011). He has also written articles on John Edgar
Wideman, Suzan-Lori Parks and Barack Obama and published in, among
other journals, Critique, Twentieth-Century Literature, MELUS and the Review
of Contemporary Fiction.
Contact: Department of English, University of British Columbia, 397-1873
East Mall,Vancouver BCV6T1Z1, Canada.
E-mail: jeffsevers@gmail.com
Jeffrey Severs has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.