My Year With Lin-Manuel Miranda; or, How to Find a Hip Hop Icon in Ron Chernow's Hamilton
Entertainment
Lin-Manuel Miranda was reading Ron Chernow’s Hamilton on vacation, goes the fable of the year, when he was struck with inspiration. Later, at the first public performance of a song from his musical, he told his audience at the White House that Alexander Hamilton was “someone I think embodies hip-hop.”
Are you fucking kidding me, I thought, 20 minutes before seeing Miranda’s finished musical for the first time, on its closing weekend at the Public Theater downtown. What kind of maniac would connect those dots, and also expect it to work, given the long history of stodgy classicists attempting to harness hip-hop’s free-wheeling essence and only marginally succeeding at best? I thought about bailing on my friend, who invited me as his plus-one. I went because I didn’t want to be rude, but I still complained when I discovered its length (nearly three hours).
Seven months later, I’m that fuckin guy who won’t shut up about Hamilton; surely you know one, or are one, or have read one (or many) on the internet. But as vehement and true as my adoration for the musical and its creator may be, I still couldn’t fathom how anyone—even a dude who, like me, had grown up on a very specific era of pre-internet hip-hop—would be sitting there on the beach, reading an 832-page tome about a founding fucking father, and be like, oh yeah, eureka, this is a story that should be told through the medium of a rap musical. Sure, sure.
In my quest to understand, I read Chernow’s book (on my phone, which I do not recommend) and took down some parts that felt particularly relevant to hip-hop. Throughout this journey, conducted over half a year, I sought to parse the most illuminating, tangibly hip-hop parts of the book Hamilton by 66-year-old historian Ron Chernow. I’ve focused on the first quarter of the book because that’s where most of my revelations occurred, and also because the screenshots were too numerous to compile in their entirety. (On an iPhone 5, 832 pages become 3941.) All emphasis mine.
On the mother of Elizabeth Schuyler, who would become Hamilton’s wife:
The wary Frenchman decided that it was “best not to treat her in too cavalier a fashion” and concluded that General Schuyler was “more amiable when he is absent from his wife.”
This struck me as analogous to the player narrative that’s such a cornerstone of rap philosophy (later, though, Chernow explains that Mrs. Schuyler was probably just pissed off because she was pregnant with her twelfth child at the age of 47 and well, isn’t that just like a man). The fact that her husband, the General, was “more amiable when he is absent from his wife” seems like a line Future might write, only about himself. Or, perhaps closer to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stylistic leanings, it shares a sentiment Jay-Z expressed about a man 300 years after Mrs. Schuyler wearily popped out her kid. Was Mr. Schuyler another “Big Poppa”?
Earlier in the year, when [John] Laurens had tried to secure Hamilton a post as a secretary to the American minister in France, Hamilton had analyzed his own rejection thus: “I am a stranger in this country. I have no property here, no connections. If I have talents and integrity… these are justly deemed very spurious titles in these enlightened days.” These disappointments only buttressed his belief in meritocracy, not aristocracy, as the best system for government appointments.
In other words: all Alexander Hamilton had were balls and his word—exactly like the Geto Boys, via Scarface, via Scarface—but he had to struggle harder than most because postcolonial America was full of suckas and haters…
“The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sentiments to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not charge me with vanity. I hate congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves… Adieu. A. Hamilton.”
…Or, fools and knaves, in the parlance of the time. Hamilton, in this excerpt, is at a particularly low point during the Revolutionary War, disgusted and disappointed by the state of things. He adopted and accepted a sort of separatist weariness. But his aspiration for the country was never far, and so in both his impulses to isolation and optimism Hamilton was not dissimilar from Nas, particularly in his younger days. “If I Ruled the World” would have practically been Hamilton’s theme song.
Parts of his letter were sophomoric, with Hamilton making bawdy references to the size of his nose—jocular eighteenth-century shorthand for his penis—but much of it was thoughtful, showing that Hamilton had given serious consideration the the elements of a stable marriage:
She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well-bred (but she must have an aversion to the word ton), chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness), of some good nature…
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