By Steve Sailer
07/08/2020
From my new review in Taki’s Magazine:
‘Hamilton’: The Obama Administration on Stage
Steve SailerJuly 08, 2020
Before I finally watched Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s colossally popular Broadway musical depicting the Founding Fathers as rapping Men of Color, I had never heard that it’s so childish. I don’t know how to judge hip-hop, but after a while the endless rhymes about the Constitutional Convention started sounding less like Eminem and more like Dr. Seuss. Hamilton is like if The Butter Battle Book took two hours and 45 minutes to recite.
My guess is that Miranda originally conceived of Hamilton as filling a market niche for parents who don’t want their sons to ruin the family’s costly evening out at the theater by constant eye-rolling. While girls naturally adore musicals, there’s normally barely anything on Broadway that boys would want to sit through.
So why not invent a musical about a boyish hero rising through war and politics only to die in a duel, a true story about the ambitious young man whose face is on the ten-dollar bill? (Granted, judging by that portrait, Hamilton, with his nose so sharp it could carve roast beef, was just about the whitest man ever. But who cares about racial reality?) In an age when Disney Princesses are vastly monetized on Broadway, why not a Disney Prince story about the first Treasury secretary?
So, Miranda left out of his musical most of that girly stuff like melody and harmony, and retold the rivalry of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr as a Tupac vs. Biggie beef about New York City not being big enough for the two of them.
Read the whole thing there.
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