[Audio: Lin Manuel Miranda]
"Well, the word got around, they said, this
kid is insane, man"
"Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland"
"Get your education, don't forget from whence
you came"
"And the world is gonna know your name
What's your name, man?"
"Alexander Hamilton…"
As that audience response suggests, at the
White House Correspondents Dinner in 2009
when Lin Manuel Miranda first proposed the
idea of a concept album about first treasury
secretary Alexander Hamilton, a man who he
claimed in his introduction 'embodied hip-hop',
it was played for laughs - probably because
when we've mixed white people and hip hop in the past
the result has been…
… yeah.
But the musical Hamilton became uses the parallels
it draws between the two, not as a gimmick
of accessibility as it's 90s high school History
premise might imply, but to amplify and simplify
what Miranda saw as their common ground: adversity,
ambition and a kind of frenetic energy.
[Audio: Hamilton] "I'm just like my country, I'm young scrapy and hungry and I'm not throwing away my shot!"
And through the figure of Alexander Hamilton,
these qualities are tied to the very founding
of the united states - where, just as hip
hop is used thematically, so too do the show's
narrative and history give way to themes and
ideas, two of those themes being
narrative and history.
Because the question of 'who tells your story'
is one that Hamilton asks repeatedly, not
only in its lyrics but in its casting, its
source material, its very existence as a derivative
work - of both history and also its main interpretive
inspiration, Ron Chernow’s biography - which
cast Alexander Hamilton as a heroic figure
unfairly forgotten - and provided a succinct
entry point into America's founding myth and
who else it might be forgetting.
And so Hamilton was the best musical ever
and everyone loved it and racism was over!
[children cheering: "yeaaaahhhh!"]
Weeeeell... no.
In fact, like the historical legacy it draws
from, the musical itself has inherited its
fair share of political complications.
Does Hamilton question or uphold the status
quo?
The answer is… a fucking nightmare to work
out I'll tell you that!
Because the way the founding fathers loom
large over the united states, both metaphorically
and in some cases literally, is arguably a
glorification and perpetuation of the systemic
injustices they held in place - and Hamilton
does indulge in this - but it's through this
preoccupation with origins and legacy - the
circumstances we're born from and into and
how we negotiate that both as an individual
and as a collective - that I think Hamilton
is also able to use its cultural mythology,
not as a way of reconciling with or rehabilitating
the past, but as a way of approaching the
present and the future.
Much like how it's central character's rise
and fall are tied to a singular trait of gumption,
so too are the musical's revolutionary potential
and political flaws both tied up in this singular
tradition of 'Founders Chic'.
A practice that glorifies these individuals
while sweeping their less glorifiable traits
under the cosmic rug of denial.
And even here we can witness that glorification
in this audience's cheer at Washington's introduction
[audience cheer] 
like he's a celebrity cameo in a 90s sitcom.
But while Hamilton does continue this trend,
it's Alexander Hamilton's previous exclusion
specifically from the Founders Chic cannon
that underpins the musical's creation.
Drawing a line between his exclusion from
popular mythology and his status as an immigrant.
Using this to cast at least the character
of Hamilton as an 'other', to make him a cypher
for anyone who is othered by the master narrative
So why isn't Hamilton the revolution I thought
it was - well this is the progressive paradox
its critics are increasingly drawing attention
to, that while the musical dismantles this
narrative with one hand, it's kind of rebuilding
it with the other.
But hang on a second, I thought this was 'What's
So Great About That?'
not 'What's So this thing you like is bad
actually' - and, look, I do love Hamilton
- I'll get to that part - and, putting my
poorly branded channel aside, the thing isn't
necessarily bad, it's just... complicated.
Because as much as I might argue that Hamilton
has less to do with the origins of America
than it does with the idea of origins and
the idea of America - about a state of flux,
about revolution and change, about black and
brown actors confronting a white ruling class
regardless of what historical narrative it
appropriates to do so...
"It’s still white history."
as historian Lyra D. Monteiro explains.
And Hamilton will partly owe the enormity
of its success to the fact that it is white
history, familiar and appealing to white audiences
- continuing in the Broadway musical tradition
described by writer Warren Hoffman as “diversity
within conformity.”
And being both white and British myself, I
can confirm that watching Hamilton as part
of the villain demographic is still a good
time.
Of course it is, anything else would have
been bad for business.
And the racially conscious casting doesn't
subvert that, it enhances it.
Hamilton's public development began and ended
with the Obama administration, from its first
appearance at the 2009 Correspondents Dinner
to its first performance in 2015, two years
before the administration's end - and I think
Adam Gopnik was right in calling it the "musical
of the Obama era,” in the New Yorker - not
just because of its "Yes we can!" optimism
but because, in "cloaking white history in
the talent, bodies, and labour of people of
colour,", as Monteiro argues, it similarly obscures "material inequality with representational diversity."
As Alex Nichols continues in Current Affairs:
"The president will continue to expand the
national security state at the same rate as
his predecessor, but at least he will be black.
… The actual racial injustices of our time
will continue unabated, but the power structure
will be diversified so that nobody feels quite
so bad about it."
And it's what allows a predominantly white
audience to feel good while watching Hamilton.
In one way, people of colour are gaining control
of the narrative by usurping the positions
of historically white people.
But, as this episode of Champagne Sharks points
out, it equally affords a comparison
to Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' [spoilers imminent]
- where black bodies are used as vessels for
white souls once their own white bodies can
no longer support them.
In this case, now that the original sin of
slavery is too apparent to ignore.
So is that all Hamilton is?
A way to rehabilitate the Founding Fathers
now that they're collapsing under their own
racist weight?
This isn't the radical upheaval I was promised!
[clatter]
Well, however unintentionally, I think Hamilton
is doing that.
But what makes it so slippery is its constant
teasing, seemingly always promising that this
isn't all it's doing.
What's potentially curiously subversive(?)
about Hamilton is not in the story it tells
or even just who tells it but... how it tells it.
That while it's narrative might be a conventional
rags to riches story, its presentation is
less straightforward, breaking away from what
Andie Silva and Shereen Inayatulla call "the
tyranny of Western, linear time!" in their
comparison to a more laissez faire alternative.
Here, one song can condense years or expand
a single moment, time rewinds,
past and present tense are used in unison.
And the songs themselves function as much
as a collection as they do a linear progression
where this founding myth is the container
for ideas of change, legacy, agency
action and contemplation, the individual and the
collective - an alternative mode of storytelling
as described by Ursula Le Guin's 'Carrier
Bag Theory of Fiction': rather than taking
the shape of an "arrow or spear, starting
here and going straight there", the "natural,
proper, fitting shape" is "that of a sack,
a bag.
… holding things in a particular, powerful
relation to one another and to us."
Hamilton's narrative hurtles spear-like from
birth to death as brazenly as the character's
own obsessive tunnel vision but its broader
musical meditations mean this narrative becomes
just one of the things held within its metaphorical
container - itself providing a vessel for
examining this prioritisation of the individual
in American culture and mythology.
American mythmaking goes beyond the founding
of the United States, with 'The American Dream'
being just as dominant in Western cultural
consciousness.
This bootstraps style meritocracy that Hamilton
celebrates: "got a lot farther by working
a lot harder, / by being a lot smarter, / by
being a self-starter."
The alluring idea that success is tied only
to hard work rather than systemic advantages
and disadvantages, an idea propped up by these
singular success stories, what Audre Lorde
termed "that false sense of security fed by
a myth of individual solutions."
The assurance that everything is in our control.
But wait, isn't this whole show about how "you have no control, who lives who dies who tells your story"?
About coming to terms with an ultimate lack
of autonomy?
That no matter how hard someone works or how
successful they are their contributions will
be diminished or erased if they don't hold
institutional power?
Do… does this show know what it's doing?
I genuinely don't know.
But even if how much examining Hamilton does
is certainly up for debate, 'who tells your
story' feels like an invitation to reassess
these myths, these beliefs, what we think
we know, to consider that what feels ancient
and immoveable might not be so stable.
This is how writer Jack Young talks about
fragmentary storytelling, not as something
to be pieced into "an illusory wholeness"
but "as possibility.
As openings.
As pathways."
And despite Hamilton's spear-like narrative
offering the ultimate resolution of death,
the show instead chooses at the last moment
to remain uncertain, to deny closure, in Eliza's
final ambiguous gasp.
[Eliza: *gasp*]
And it's not the first time Eliza has been
there to go and make things so complicated.
The way Eliza insists on the importance of
family is reminiscent of those 90s TV dynamics,
which is maybe a third mythology Hamilton
draws on.
Where women would only interrupt the man from
his important man business, essentially being
reduced to a refrain of 'come back to bed,
honey’.
And the absence of women's agency has already
been widely criticised, with the show having
barely more than two female characters 
["and Peggy"]
It's an absence made all the more conspicuous
by the reprise of this refrain in Act 2
["Angelica... Eliza... the Schyler sisters"]
What happened to Peggy!?
Did… did she die?!
And theatre professor Stacy Wolf pointed out
that: "the three women in the musical occupy
the most conventional and stereotypical roles—muse,
wife, whore…"
[clatter]
But.…it still isn't quite that simple.
While Hamilton does reproduce these stereotypes,
rather than treating Eliza's concerns as inferior
or unimportant ala the 90s, it uses her perspective
to highlight the flaws in Alexander's - criticising
his individualistic obsession with his shot, and maybe begins to question just what we value.
Alexander Hamilton himself was far from feminist,
saying of women that: "they are full of weaknesses".
Unlike Alexander, no weaknesses here!
But Eliza's rejection of this spear-like way
of living, this patriarchal colonialist momentum
that pushes us forward, is not evidence of
weakness or an inability to match established
values, but a rejection of these values altogether.
Writer Lillian Smith said: what Freud "mistook
for her lack of civilization is woman's lack
of loyalty to civilization."
A quote that carries its own problematic baggage
like being a woman is this monolithic experience
but we… we don't have time to get into that
right now!
What's relevant here is this idea of loyalty,
that we should examine not only who is included
or excluded from the mythological path but
also the path itself.
To look, not only ahead, but around - and
consider if we might want to change direction.
And, you know, speaking of how experience
isn't a monolith, this blog post from the
quintessential queer talks about how Hamilton
also implicitly confronts how we frame revolutionary
narratives, asking: "Whose rebellion is valued?
Who is allowed to be heroic through defiance?"
Comparing the revolutionaries to anti-racist
organisations and finding that: "violence
is only acceptable in the hands of white people.
… The function of the visual in Hamilton
is to challenge a present in which people
of colour standing up against oppression are
seen as violent and dangerous by the same
people who proudly declare allegiance to the
flag."
““History never repeats itself but it
rhymes,” said Mark Twain."… said John
Robert Colombo in a poem called 'A Said Poem'.
What Mark Twain actually said was that: "History
never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic
combinations of the pictured present often
seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments
of antique legends."
A transformation that's kind of indicative
of the thing it describes, but both variations
feel applicable to Hamilton.
The latter in how the show makes the connection
between the present and those antique legends
visible, and the former in how it does it
in rhyme - eyyyy!
But seriously the fact that Hamilton expresses
itself through music is essential to its potential,
as music has always revolved around themes
and ideas more than narrative.
And it's the medium most accustomed to remixing,
and Hamilton's more recent Mix-tape album
fully embraces this ethos, giving its songs
to various artists for further fragmentation.
And it's a medium befitting of revolutionary
action, the motivation to take action.
I'll defer, as always, to the wisdom of Adventure
Time: "Music is powerful man, it speaks to
a primal pit in our brains.
It makes anyone want to get up and get their
knees going."
Like it can sneak past your brain and get
straight to your soul...
hey... get out of my soul!
"Indeed, emotion is one of Hamilton’s strengths."
says historian Joanne B. Freeman, capturing
"the founding period’s heady feelings" and
transporting them to the present.
I'm not saying Hamilton is starting any kind
of revolution, or that anyone will be moved
to action by seeing it, but it reminds us
that we can take action.
Freeman continues to explain how the Founding is usually taught as "a stream of inevitably  happy endings.
… By emotionally engaging its audience,
Hamilton pushes people past that stopping point."
And while Hamilton isn't here to challenge
the happiness of those endings, it does make
this moment of radical upheaval feel accessible,
makes these foundations feel malleable.
Which is why I actually don't think the show
is at odds with the mass cultural reappraisal
that came at the time of its Disney release.
It's the same emotional realisation that now
makes these monuments feel permeable in a
way they didn't before.
Hamilton foregrounds the founding principal
that, in opposition to Britain's monarchy,
no president will serve beyond a limited term
they literally do a whole song and dance about it
which is thematically consistent
with the shows dedication to change, that
the new will come to supplant the old.
Winning the war of independence is directly
followed by the birth of the main characters'
children - reinforcing this idea of new beginnings,
but also how each generation should continue
to remake the world, to "blow us all away"
[Aaron Burr: "someday, someday"].
And, being a live show, the production itself
will always be changing, remaining open in
a way that, say, film doesn't.
Lin Manual Miranda has said that Disney's
version is "not a definitive production",
only "a snapshot of what it felt like with
that company at the end of June of 2016."
In 'A Carrier Bag Theory of Revolution', Anna
Hundert writes that: "Maybe the only certainty
is revolution: the Earth continues to follow
its path around the Sun.
That perpetual state of revolving is not what
most people first imagine when they hear the
word “revolution”…”
But our planet, "a container for so many brief
and precarious lives, so many antique and
seemingly unyielding structures of power—continues
to revolve."
It's a metaphor that positions constant change
and endless return as central to the human
experience, but it also creates this romantic
image of a unified human experience in the first place.
A notion I know I'm easily seduced by.
But, as writer Samira Nadkarni points out
on twitter, the issue with the idea of a shared
"human" experience" is that it's "largely
coded by a European whiteness".
The kind of coding that treats the war of
independence as a beginning rather than a
colonial continuation.
I mean we haven't even got into the experience
of America's indigenous people because the
show doesn't mention them once...
[clatter]
yeah you... you get it...
It's just that, while we do share this revolution
of the earth, "there is never one geography
of authority, and there is never one geography
of resistance."
As I didn't grow up with the idolisation of
these figures - like, I barely knew who any
of these people were - I think it might be
easier for me to separate Hamilton's ideas
from its history - or to treat history as
just another idea, another thing in the bag.
To see Hamilton as not being about Hamilton
at all but the concept of exclusion - of mythology
and change.
And I still think it's about those things.
I don't want to just come here, whitesplaining
about the experiences of marginalised groups
that I’m not a part of, but I do want to
acknowledge how the show reinforces a colonialist,
meritocratic status quo as much as it subverts
it.
Because who's history it's telling remains
important.
The Founding Father's legacy is like the daddy
of all Daddy Issues - and even if Hamilton
somewhat turns the tables on their history,
we're still sitting at the same table.
But maybe these spinning tables, these recurring
narratives and revolving histories, can provide
a space, if not for progression, than reflection.
A snapshot of where we are now.
Alexander is never allowed to see the bigger
picture.
In the opening, as everyone around him recounts
his life retrospectively, he can only sing
in present tense - just as we can never gain
perspective on our own lives.
We can't know the future.
All we know are these Kaleidoscopic fragments
of antique legends.
And, regardless of ownership, these are the
legends that still shape so much of our present,
that still hold power now.
And I think what Hamilton tries to do is just
make that power feel less absolute, less localised.
Using the show's emotional resonance to convince
us that things that seem impossible, even
laughable, can be achievable.
Whether that's overthrowing monarchical rule
or writing a successful hip hopera about the
first treasury secretary of the united states.
Hamilton is about how every history was once
an active present moment, how every present
is the creation of history - and our history
will be what we make of it.
Audre Lorde told us not to "believe that revolution
is a one-time event, or something that happens
around us rather than inside of us."
And watching Hamilton, we shouldn't be seduced
into only looking back, at a revolution past,
at how far we've come - but take this opportunity to see revolution as still always unfolding, always changing
because, as Ursula Le. Guin again concludes in 'Always Coming Home',
it's all too easy to be deceived into believing the war is over - that we have reached the end,
the final equilibrium of civilisation:
"maybe you’ll say, 
“There it is, that’s it!”
But I’ll say.
“A little farther.”…
“Drink this water of the spring, rest here
awhile, we have a long way yet to go
and I can’t go without you."
In Hamilton we see that this is what we've
inherited,
so what are we going to do with it?
