Hamilton: An American Musical

The driving motifs, the emotive journey, the clever wordplay, the absolute top tier vocal performances, the musical range and diverse inspiration, this is the greatest musical ever written and a delight start to finish. Please ignore that I can sing the whole thing from memory.

I don't like to make definitive statements on what should and shouldn't be included because music is subjective and these picks are probably very personal to their respective submitters, but I'm sorry, Hamilton is just a bad pick.

For those unaware, Hamilton is the soundtrack to the theatre musical of the same name, featuring rappers portraying the story of the founding fathers (specifically Alexander Hamilton) through song. This means that A) it's show tune rap, and B) it's very long, 2 hours and 22 minutes to be precise. This means that you're locked into a gimmicky genre for a significant chunk of the waking day, which sucks if you don't like it. There is one benefit however, since it's so damn long and everything is narrated you don't have any missing context like what usually happens with soundtrack albums (see Virgin Suicides and Mewgenics), but really this is the only benefit.

As for the songs themselves, I don't think these are very good, I certainly wouldn't listen to them in my own time and they're clearly a companion piece for the musical rather than something to listen to standalone. This means that if you like the musical, great, you'll probably like this album too, but experiencing this album made me wish I just watched the musical instead. These songs aren't terrible (The Room Where it Happens was actually quite good), but they're so tied to the concept that it feels like listening to the musical with none of the benefits of being a musical, and as a result I can't give it a fair rating.

As for the narrative, it's fine. It obviously has its own theatrical flair which is nice. Around the time the Revolutionary War ended I started tuning the story out however (142 minutes is a long time to hold your attention span!) so I can't accurately rate anything from that point onwards.

I don't think musical soundtracks are necessarily a bad idea, but this was a really bad choice. Love Daveed Diggs though.

Should it be on the main list: No

Top 3 songs: My Shot, Non-Stop, The Room Where It Happens

Instead of listening to the soundtrack I decided to just watch the recording of the musical intead. It's the same length of time anyway and I thought a musical without the rest of the performance was a bit weird.

Anyway, now I know what alll the fuss is about I guess, and maybe I don't get it because I'm not American, but weren't a bunch of these guys slave owners?

Overhyped and genuinely a bit annoying. Diggs is good but otherwise it's a pass for me. It's not helped by the obnoxious fans.

Lin-Manuel Miranda's second-best performance. His best, of course, being when, pre-mainstream fame, he guest starred as House’s annoying roommate in the psych ward (https://youtu.be/gwk6SPZOMy8?t=77&si=Ypoe1c9mgVRucDbA)

I mean I'm making fun of him with that, but also, god, *nobody* is capable of being normal about Hamilton. The theater kids (not normal) ate extremely good and extremely loud on this for two solid years, then Trump won the 2016 election and it's like everyone else agreed to make this thing the face of the Dems' failure and to hound the theater kids for the rest of eternity about it. Just the most obvious scapegoating from people panicked that the wheels were coming off. Now, some of this association was self-inflicted by LMM trying to be an Inspiring Public Figure during this era, doing things like ineffectually calling out Mike Pence when he attended a performance, the stupid tweets book, etc, but America's problems (including centrist liberalism's shortcomings) predate this & run deeper than Broadway's sinister influence.

Anyway, I came super late to this after trying to ignore the hype for a couple years. I eventually listened to the cast recording during a long road trip, and felt like it was pretty alright. I liked the cast, most of the centerpiece songs were landing, and politically...eh it's more willing to depict these guys as unlikable assholes than 1776 was, we can call that progress. The repeated invocation of how Hamilton was an "immigrant" like that aspect of him has much in common with non-white immigrants' experience in 2010s America was extremely goofy. I could definitely understand why the musical theater likers were having a good time, but I was mystified that this became the smash hit that it did. Still am. Most answers I got from the Broadway people in my life were along the lines that it brought rap to Broadway and had an uncommonly diverse cast, which for 2015 is more an indictment of Broadway than anything else.

I'm gonna rate this on the high side (round up the 3.5, let's say), mainly because it makes sense to me to grade this on the curve of Musicals, rather than Hip Hop. I think a lot of people are too quick to ding the musical soundtracks on here for being what they are, and Hamilton in particular carries a lot of cultural gravity that I think is interesting and worthwhile to revisit 10+ years later