Hamilton – The Musical

Comment: There are songs on youtube but basically it’s unlistenable unless you like rap music. And the Venn diagram overlap of people who like rap and people who like American history is very small. It’s not like the tunes are hummable and the complex wordy lyrics would take a lot of effort to memorize.

The main fun of Hamilton is watching all these black and brown people pretend to be the Founding Fathers and knowing that the seemingly erudite lyrics were written by an Hispanic – an update minstrel show as someone said. If Hamilton had an all white cast no one would see it and people would be complaining about white people culturally appropriating rap. If you listen to the songs you can’t really tell the color of the singers so that takes all the fun out of listening to the cast recording. White guy pretending to be Alexander Hamilton rapping to lyrics written by a white guy about the Federal government assuming the war debts of the states – boooring. No one would see it. The whole thing is pure racial virtue signaling just like all the commercials where the pretend doctor/lawyer/financial advisor/scientist is black. It’s sort of the reverse of Hollywood where you see a Hollywood movie about LA and there are all these blond white people and then you step out into the street and all you see are a bunch of Mestizos.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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