Thread by @Tracinski

Because I'm behind the times, I just got around to seeing "Hamilton" now that it has been live-streamed, and I have a few thoughts.

Part of the reason I didn't see it or listen to it before is that it is done in a rap/hip-hop style. I'm a highbrow classical music snob, so this is generally like fingernails on a chalk-board to me. And for the first few minutes, I was kind of gritting my teeth.

It's not just that my musical tastes are stodgy and old-fashioned (though they are). There's a frustrating kind of anti-poetry to hip-hop. In poetry and song, the sound and rhythm of the words is supposed to add to and support the meaning of the words.

Hip-hop has a tendency to undermine this, with jerky-jerky rhythms and excessive internal rhyme that distracts from the content and make it harder to follow. (At least the rhyme in Hamilton is cleverer than usual. In the stuff you hear on the radio, it's mostly doggerel.)

There's a thing in hip-hop--there's probably a name for this--where a line starts in one rhythm and then partway through another cadence takes over and carries you for a while, which is then replaced by another. It produces a logorrheic effect that I found hard to follow.

I found myself thinking, "These lyrics are probably very clever if I could actually take them all in." I usually like dense, clever dialogue that keeps you on your toes, but like I said, the rhythmic qualities of hip-hop tend to undermine rather than enhance this effect.

That said, some of this is probably because I'm middle-aged and can't distinguish rapid-fire speech like I used to, and also because the rhythmic conventions of hip-hop are relatively unfamiliar to my ear. So here endeth the old-man rant. Let's move on.

Grumbling about hip-hop aside, I found it to be mostly the hip, contemporary outer gloss on what is actually a fairly traditional musical that draws from an eclectic range of pop and Broadway styles. So it only really grated on me for the first few minutes.

Now to what I liked. One of the most interesting ideas in "Hamilton" is that the narrator of the whole story is...Aaron Burr. When he's introducing all the characters, he ends with "And I'm the damn fool who shot him." That's an interesting choice.

The plot structure is not tightly focused. The musical tries to cover basically everything that happened to Hamilton, so it's more of a chronicle than a focused narrative.

"Hamilton" evokes comparisons to "Les Miserables," and I see that, but "Les Mis" benefited from Hugo's brilliant plot structure and the way he brings all these seemingly disparate subplots together in one big event. "Hamilton" is more sprawling and diffuse.

But it does do an effective job at the end of drawing out the pathos of two big events that end Hamilton's life: His courageous decision to endorse his lifelong rival, Jefferson, over the unscrupulous Burr. And the fact that he gets killed by one of his old friends.

But the stuff after that kind of peters out, which is kind of typical of the biopic genre. (To take another relatively recent example, I found "Harriet" to be that way. too.)

But there's a lot of immensely entertaining stuff packed in there. I liked the gimmick of presenting Washington administration cabinet meetings as rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson.

BTW, the Thomas Jefferson in "Hamilton" is a colorful and entertaining character created to advance the purposes of the musical, but I hope nobody thinks this portrayal has much of any basis in the real Thomas Jefferson.

And while I'm being the "well, akshually" guy, when Hamilton and Lafayette high-five each other at Yorktown and say, "Immigrants get the job done".... Hamilton wasn't really an immigrant. When he came to America he was just going from one British colony to another.

And Lafayette wasn't an immigrant at all. When the American Revolution was over, he went back to France. The pro-immigrant sentiment is laudable but somewhat inaccurate. But counting historical inaccuracies seems a little beside the point. It's a musical.

I mean, is it any more inaccurate than "1776"--which is a much worse musical, by the way, because it lacks any real sense of the intellectual seriousness of the Founders and of the times they live in. (And its treatment of James Wilson is abominable.)

The biggest problem I had with "Hamilton" is that I didn't come out humming any of the tunes in it. There are some numbers that caught my attention at the time--"I will not throw away my shot," "the room where it happened"--but I struggle to recall the actual melodies later.

This is not normal for me, by the way. I tend to annoy my family by absent-mindedly whistling stray melodies I heard a fragment of hours earlier.

I am sure I will get hate for this, but I found "Hamilton" to be musically undistinguished. It gets by more on the energy and charisma of the performers (particularly Odom as Burr) than on its musical merits. Sorry to say it. Your mileage may vary.

Speaking of great performances, I also want to note that King George III absolutely steals the show every time he appears. It's a combination of good writing, a really great performance, and the need for some comic relief to offset the heavy drama.

Oh, I also want to add that the reason they can't do a really realistic Jefferson in "Hamilton" is that, in the real-life ideological contest between Hamilton and Jefferson, Jefferson ultimate wins. Comprehensively.

It's a problem Hamilton biographers and Hamilton boosters, of which there are many right now, have to struggle with. Jefferson was far more influential than Hamilton in the Founding of America and the shaping of its traditions.

But Hamilton is more in step with our era. Both the Big Government left and the nationalist right are way more comfortable with him. They even overlook the fact that he was an elitist who started the grand tradition of the Treasury bailing out Wall Street.

But since we're talking about the contemporary uses of the Founding Fathers, which is what this is all about, anyway, let's discuss the big animating idea behind "Hamilton."

The central premise or gimmick of "Hamilton" is to cast all the Founding Fathers--all the white guys on the money--with black or Hispanic actors, complemented by flourishes from a musical style associated with racial minorities. And...I heartily approve.

It's not just stunt casting. It has an important idea behind it. Everyone in America should be able to identify with the Founding Fathers on some level and adopt their legacy as their own--because the ideas of freedom and individual rights are universal.

And Hamilton's life story has a universal appeal: the guy who came from obscurity, without "privilege," who succeeded by sheer dint of talent and relentless work.

There is a pro-Americanism to "Hamilton" that we need right now. Only four years separate "Hamilton" and the 1619 Project, but they seem to have an opposite spirit. The one takes inspiration from the Founding, the other portrays it as essentially a wicked undertaking.

This is partly just the mood swing of the mainstream American left, which felt more optimistic when Obama was in the White House and is in a sour mood now that Trump is there. But it also reflects an ideological divide that people need to face up to.

The divide has to do with whether those ideas of freedom and individual rights really are universal. More broadly, it's about whether any truths or values are universal, because there are ideological factions on both sides that want to deny that and build up racial divisions.

So I found "Hamilton" enjoyable, though a bit overrated, but I generally like the spirit behind it.

I'm glad it has also motivated a lot of people to read about the real history of the founding of America.

One more "Hamilton" observation: the prevalence of dueling really puts today's "cancel culture" in perspective.

Sure, there was the First Amendment. But if someone found your political disagreements personally insulting, they could demand it all be resolved by shooting guns at each other.

It makes Twitter look benign by comparison.