Review: Hamilton

and two diary entries of times i listened to hamilton

The first time I listened to Hamilton (2015) was nonconsensual. It was one of the weekly assigned texts in my spring semester 2018 American literature survey class. Maybe it’s strange to see a musical on an English major syllabus, but this class jumped mediums between Hamilton and Thomas Paine and Moby-Dick and Whitman. Hamilton was on the syllabus both as a piece of contemporary American art and art about the American past. We studied it when the survey moved to the American Revolution.

As a twenty-year old male with biological tendencies towards being edgy, I looked down on the class as a whole when I saw Hamilton on the syllabus. I had an image in my head of it as performative woke ethics, formed because of its recasting of major white figures in American history as nonwhite, and it being a rap-musical. I also just don’t listen to musicals. They’re art of course, but they’re art everyone hates when it comes on at karaoke. But this was a required class for my major, so I listened to Hamilton, and instantly liked it more than I thought I would. Nothing specifically changed my mind, and I think my initial hesitations about the performative aspects of it are true. But even on my first listen I could tell Hamilton had more interesting elements than “immigrants: we get the job done” neoliberal woke tone that it’s often reduced to, both in its own promotional material and by its detractors. Six years after this class, I want to write about what I find interesting about Hamilton.

In the second song of the musical, “Aaron Burr, Sir”, where Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr meet, Hamilton first makes a connection with Burr when he realizes that Burr’s parents died when they were young, like Hamilton’s did. 

Hamilton: So how’d you do it? How’d you graduate so fast?

Burr: It was my parents’ dying wish before they passed.

Hamilton: You’re an orphan? Of course! I’m an orphan. God I wish there was a war, then we could prove we’re worth more than anyone bargained for.

This isn’t the only time Hamilton brings up the fact that its main character is an orphan; it comes up over and over again throughout the play. In my final exam for the American literature survey class, I wrote about how Hamilton relishes the fact that the story is about an immigrant orphan, totally divorced from his heritage. I compared that with the last chapter of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael floats alone in the ocean after the death of the rest of the Pequod crew, how that very long novel ends with the word “orphan” describing lonely Ishmael as he’s pulled out of the sea. Sort of a stretch, but it’s the kind of stretch undergraduate TA graders love because it proves you did the reading. I wrote a sentence or two about how American it is to want to build something separate from your parents.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda performed the opening track to Hamilton at the Obama White House on May 12th 2009, when he was in the early stages of writing the play. As he introduces what he’s working on he lays out a crucial thread of what would become Hamilton:

I’m thrilled the White House called me tonight, because I’m actually working on a hip-hop album. It’s a concept album about the life of someone who I think embodies hip-hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. You laugh, but it’s true. He was a born a penniless orphan in St. Croix, of illegitimate birth, became George Washington’s right-hand man, became Treasury Secretary, caught beef with every other founding father, and all on the strength of his writing. I think he embodies the word’s ability to make a difference.

Hamilton is a rap-musical because Lin-Manuel Miranda wants to tie it to rap music as a genre’s aspirations for wealth and fame. Finance bros listen to Future or Drake on their train ride from Murray Hill to FiDi, but it’s the same moral vision as Hamilton. Started from the bottom now we’re here. Lin-Manuel Miranda pulls that thread out of rap music, and strings it back to his character Hamilton. Hamilton goes from orphan immigrant to the founder of Wall Street.

The song Lin-Manuel Miranda performed after this introduction is “Alexander Hamilton”, the very first song of the play. It opens like this:

Burr: How does a bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence impoverished in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

Laurens: The ten-dollar founding father without a father, got a lot farther by working a lot harder, by being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter.

This opening question from Burr is the frame question for the whole play. Though this is the first song in Hamilton, it’s sequentially separate in the narrative; the characters already know what Hamilton will accomplish. Burr wants to know how Hamilton did it. How did this immigrant orphan from the Caribbean build himself from low birth to the top of American power? And Laurens answers him by explaining that it’s because Hamilton worked hard and was smart.

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After that opening song, Hamilton is a traditional linear narrative. The first act is the Revolutionary War. Hamilton builds himself into the highest seats of power from nothing. He climbs his way up social and political ladders to serve as right-hand man to George Washington as America triumphs and wins independence. In the second act, Hamilton is grown up, leading the young American nation through challenges, but facing personal challenges of his own far more difficult than those of his youth. He cheats on his wife, and his son dies. He doesn’t achieve his largest ambitions, but still achieves so much. His rival through both acts is Aaron Burr, who kills him in their famous duel at the end the play. Both Burr and Hamilton want to play a part in the birth of America, but Hamilton is idealistic and selfless while Burr is pragmatic and selfish. They both have ambition, but Burr just wants to have power while Hamilton wants to do something with it.

Lin-Manuel Miranda has some very creative internal wordplay across Hamilton, reusing phrases from earlier in the story in different contexts to twist prior moments into something different. A central one to the character growth of Hamilton between Act 1 and Act 2 is “throwing away my shot”.

Hamilton: I am not throwing away my shot, hey yo I’m just like my country I’m young scrappy and hungry and I’m not throwing my shot. (“My Shot”, Act 1)

Hamilton: If I throw away my shot, is this how you’ll remember me? What if this bullet is my legacy? Legacy. What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. (“The World Was Wide Enough”, Act 2)

In the first act, that’s Hamilton’s rallying cry for his ambition. He has one shot at life and he can’t waste it. At the end of the play, Hamilton throws away his shot when he declines to shoot in his duel with Burr as an act of nonviolent love. It ends his life but it’s noble, preserving his idealism for all time.

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Hamilton’s idealistic ambition is a central part of the play. In Act 1, Hamilton pleads with his boss George Washington that he wants to continue to grow in power after the Revolutionary War, using the phrase “rise above my station”:

Hamilton: I’ll rise above my station, organize your information, til we rise to the occasion of our new nation. (“Right Hand Man”)

Hamilton: Well, I don’t have your name, I don’t have your titles, I don’t have your land, but if you gave me command of a battalion, a group of men to lead, I could fly above my station after the war. (“Meet Me Inside”)

While the play often sides with Hamilton’s ambition, at times it doesn’t. Jefferson flips this same phrase against Hamilton in Act 2, using it to criticize him for his new money lifestyle.

Jefferson: He knows nothing of loyalty, smells of new money, dresses like fake royalty. Desperate to rise above his station, everything he does betrays the ideals of our nation. (“Cabinet Battle #2”)

Is it okay to want better for yourself in a country built on equality? In Act 2, that becomes more of a question. In Act 1, Hamilton is young, and his ambition just takes him upward. In Act 2, Hamilton youthful ambition has led him to a place where he must now build his own world as Treasury Secretary, and he maybe lets the power get to his head sometimes. He’s still ambitious, but now his actions have real consequences, and sometimes the consequences of his ambition aren’t good. Hamilton chooses to stay in New York City working on his economic plans, instead of going upstate for the summer with his family, and that neglect for his family eventually makes him cheat on his wife. But the economic plans he’s working on turn into the Wall Street economic system that fuels the American economy for centuries.

I think the play’s final stance on ambition is that it’s good specifically because Hamilton was building something real. But it still has its costs.

Hamilton: God help and forgive me, I want to build something that’s going to outlive me.(“The Room Where It Happens”)

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For its perception as neoliberal art, Hamilton is pretty politically neutral. Mike Pence saw it, and the cast lectured him a bit, but he probably still had fun. It takes a liberal tone towards slavery, which in 1776 it was controversially liberal to oppose, but being anti-slavery hasn’t been a political stance in the last century. It’s pro-immigrant, but in a vague way that isn’t calling for any specific immigration policy. Recasting famous American figures as non-white is a little political, especially at Hamilton’s initial conception in 2008 when America just elected our first black president, but it doesn’t feel that subversive now, and it the casting isn’t that impactful to perception of the art outside of the theater performances of the play.

The part of Hamilton that feels most political now, nine years after its release and fifteen years after its conception, is that it’s very pro-Wall Street. Wall Street is the place where Hamilton builds his financial system, and the play is pretty positive about what Hamilton built.

Burr: The immigrant emerges with unprecedented financial power, a system he can shape however he wants. (“The Room Where it Happens”)

In the quote above, Burr admires Hamilton for the power his financial system has, in a way that’s intended to make the audience admire that too. But the play also admires the specific good that Hamilton’s power can achieve. Here’s an example from “Cabinet Battle #1”

Jefferson: In Virginia, we plant seeds in the ground. We create, you just want to move our money around.

(Hamilton responds to own Jefferson with facts and logic a little later)

Hamilton: If we’re aggressive and competitive the union gets a boost. You’d rather give it a sedative? A civics lesson from a slaver? Hey neighbor, your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor. “We plant seeds in the south, we create”. Keep ranting, we know who’s really doing the planting.

Hamilton’s financial system is framed as something that can move money around in a productive way to keep America competitive, as opposed to the false economic engine of slavery. And throughout the play that’s the tone taken towards it; Hamilton’s political enemies like Jefferson occasionally question Wall Street but it’s always responded to shortly after.

Despite the explicit pro-Wall Street arguments in the text, Hamilton is admired much more as a writer than he is a finance guy moving money around. Characters in the play constantly ask the rhetorical question “why do you write like you’re running out of time?” to admire Hamilton’s constant desire to create. In my opinion, more likely than Lin-Manuel Miranda holding deep personal pro-Wall Street convictions, the play turned out pro-Wall Street because that’s an intractable fact of Hamilton’s biography. Lin-Manuel Miranda alters other intractable facts of Hamilton’s biography, the history here is not literal, but he keeps the pro-Wall Street elements because it makes Hamilton part of the eternal American story of ambitious people who go to New York City to make something.

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In “The Room Where It Happens”, Hamilton gets his Wall Street economic plan through Southerners Jefferson and Madison by conceding them the nation’s capital in Washington DC. At first, Burr cannot understand why Hamilton would abandon New York City’s chances to hold the US capital, until he realizes that the capital has no power compared to the power of the banks that New York City will forever hold. Hamilton has art-of-the-dealed his way to get what he wanted, and what he wanted made New York forever important.

New York City is frequently referenced in Hamilton. The play’s first lines after the opening song set the scene of the linear narrative with words “1776, New York City”. And then it mentions New York a lot more times. It mentions neighborhoods in New York City, it mentions Columbia/King’s College, and the result is the city becomes the physical place where Hamilton’s ambition can be actualized.

Hamilton: I’ma get a scholarship to King’s College (“My Shot”, Act 1)

Washington: We put a stop to the bleeding as the British take Brooklyn (“Right Hand Man”, Act 1)

Washington: Boom goes the cannon, we’re abandoning Kips Bay (“Right Hand Man”, Act 1)

All three sisters: History is happening in Manhattan, and we just happen to be in the greatest city in the world (“The Schuyler Sisters”, Act 1)

Hamilton: We’ll get a little place in Harlem and we’ll figure it out. (“A Winter’s Ball”, Act 1)

Hamilton: After the war I went back to New York - (“Non-Stop”, Act 1)

Jefferson: I just got home and now I’m headed up to New York. Looking at the rolling fields I can’t believe that we are free, ready to face whatever’s awaiting me in NYC (“What’d I Miss”, Act 2)

Washington: Ladies and gentlemen, you could have been anywhere in the world tonight, but you’re here with us in New York City. (“Cabinet Battle #1”, Act 2)

Burr: Oh, Wall Street thinks you're great. You'll always be adored by the things you create. But upstate, people think you're crooked. (“Schuyler Defeated”, Act 2)

Phillip Hamilton: Meet the latest graduate of King's College. I probably shouldn't brag, but, dag, I amaze and astonish. (“Blow Us All Away”, Act 2)

Martha: I saw him just up Broadway a couple of blocks (“Blow Us All Away”, Act 2)

Hamilton: Everything is legal in New Jersey (“Blow Us All Away”, Act 2)

Ensemble: The Hamiltons move uptown, and learn to live with unimaginable (“It’s Quiet Uptown”, Act 2)

Burr: We rowed across the Hudson at dawn (“The World Was Wide Enough”, Act 2)

Eliza Hamilton: I rely on Angelica, while she’s alive, we tell your story. She is buried in Trinity Church near you. (“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”, Act 2)

These places could not have had the same context they do now, in 1776-1804 America when Hamilton is set. That context has been imbued over a quarter millennium of American rule. But that makes the narrative more important, because this is a story about that empire in its infancy. Hamilton is set in a city that it frames as the magical greatest city in the world, but the story also makes it the magical greatest city in the world. It holds the present and the past together at once.

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I’m going to break from the media criticism for another diary entry. This one doesn’t advance the argument, it’s just a time I felt the art come into my real life. It’s the moment that made me want to write this essay. On December 2nd 2023, I drove from Illinois to New York City in a rental car packed with my objects from home. I moved by myself, like an orphan, because my parents were busy that weekend. I probably could have delayed the move a week, and my parents probably didn’t need to be busy that weekend, but I think both sides privately acknowledged that it was maybe better if I did it alone.

At 8pm, after a long day of driving across half the country, I was in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, and it was dark outside. I was starting to get a little tired, so I put on Hamilton. I sometimes put on Hamilton towards the end of long drives. At a functional level, the same thing that makes people viscerally repulsed by musicals at karaoke keeps me awake while I drive. It’s so sharp and bright. I listened to the entirety of Hamilton as I drove up and down through foggy Pennsylvania hills. Because Hamilton has so much internal wordplay, it’s fun to listen to in its entirety, if you have two-and-a-half hours to spare.

When the album was done I stopped an hour and a half outside New York in the Poconos and slept for a few hours in a hotel. The next morning I drove into New York City. It was still foggy, and lightly raining. I drove to my apartment, where someone from TaskRabbit who would help me unload everything in my rental car into the apartment was waiting. After we were done I drove to the rental car dropoff, which was in the Financial District. I’m used to the wide streets of Midwest sprawl so I was stressed about driving around downtown Manhattan, but Wall Street on a Sunday morning was pretty empty.

I took the subway home from the rental car dropoff. As I was walking through downtown New York to the subway, Google Maps took me past Trinity Church, so I walked by the real Alexander Hamilton’s grave. The church and the grave are old, but around it are the giant modern skyscrapers of Wall Street. It feels like physical proof in the real world of the Hamilton narrative, that Alexander Hamilton deserves a pretty tombstone around these giant buildings because of what he did to make Wall Street happen. I was wet and cold and tired but I stopped to take a picture with my phone.

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Hamilton can seem trite or naive, with its “ambitious American immigrant orphan who goes to New York City and makes it big” narrative. This story has been told before, and with considerably more self-awareness. But I think the naivety is actually vulnerability, and it took bravery to work through the vulnerability. And when I listen to Hamilton, it doesn’t feel trite. Because Hamilton takes place at the birth of America, and because it wears its immigrant orphan story on its sleeve so openly, it feels simultaneously deconstructive and reconstructive of that story. It mines the story out of America’s history to make the story feel eternal.

I don’t sense self-doubt in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s writing in Hamilton, which is rare in art this vulnerable. It probably helped his confidence that he first wrote In The Heights, a similar American New York City immigrant story set in the present, before he made the more grand and historical Hamilton. But regardless of source, I’m always impressed by confidence in art, and Hamilton has a lot of confidence.

Deconstruction and confidence aren’t fundamental proof of good art on their own, obviously. Most importantly Hamilton does a good job on the details of its art. It’s very clever, and clearly made with a lot of care.

Hamilton released in 2015, but it was famously conceived in early 2009, when Lin-Manuel Miranda was on vacation on the Caribbean coast of Mexico, reading Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and presumably thinking about a recent presidential inauguration. Grimes says art is the skeleton that consciousness leaves behind, and Hamilton to me feels like the idealistic world of Obama 2008 preserved forever in amber. Ambitious, nonpolitical, sunny, and a little bit performative. I find it’s very cute to revisit. Do you remember when it was normal to love America?