The only way I can keep my sanity during the Great Pandemic is to write about musical theatre. If I can't direct musicals for awhile, at least I can still do research and lots of pondering. I spent last year creating some really fun musical theatre novelty books -- a horror anthology, a Christmas carol collection, a children's book (that's not just for kids), and a "civilian's guide." And it was only last year that I published my musical theatre quiz book.
But what really feeds my artsy soul is digging deep into amazing musicals and writing about them. Usually, that's half my directing job; these days, it's my next book, Hamilton and the New Revolution, out sometime in 2021, including chapters on Hamilton, Hadestown, The Scottsdboro Boys, Dear Evan Hansen, A Strange Loop, Come From Away, and other shows.
As is usually the case, my research and my analysis often blow my mind. It's such fun to see how my favorites shows are not just cool, but incredibly well built and structured, with so many amazingly artful choices. Since it'll be awhile before my next book comes out, I just had to share some of what I've found so far, just three chapters in...
So far, I think my biggest surprise has been the incredible complexity and variety of rhyme in Hamilton. What follows is part of my Hamilton chapter, as a sneak preview...
Most theatre lyrics aim to be “in the voice” of the character singing, to sound “natural” in terms of vocabulary, grammar, slang, etc. The writer and their craft is never supposed to be noticed consciously by the audience. But hip-hop is a show-off art form. The artist’s voice and their craft is supposed to be easy to hear; it’s the point. So the lyrics of Hamilton are a different kind of theatre writing, in a poetic language with different values and priorities. Though Miranda establishes individual rap flows for each character, the whole show is unmistakably in his playful, fanboy voice.
So why does it make sense to tell this story in the language of hip-hop? The first obvious response is why not? Hip-hop is an incredibly expressive art form, and it’s seen as an “outlaw” art form, which seems ideal for American Revolutionaries. Adam Bradley writes in his book The Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop:
Rap is public art, and rappers are perhaps our greatest public poets, extending a tradition of lyricism that spans continents and stretches back thousands of years. Thanks to the engines of global commerce, rap is now the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world. Of course, not all rap is great poetry, but collectively it has revolutionized the way our culture relates to the spoken word. Rappers at their best make the familiar unfamiliar through rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. They refresh the language by fashioning patterned and heightened variations of everyday speech. They expand our understanding of human experience by telling stories we might not otherwise hear. The best MCs – like Rakim, Jay Z, Tupac, and many others – deserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry. . .
Hip-hop’s first generation fashioned an art form that draws not only from the legacy of Western verse, but from the folk idioms of the African diasporas; the musical legacy of jazz, blues, and funk; and the creative capacities conditioned by the often harsh realities of people’s everyday surroundings. . .
Rap gave voice to a group hardly heard before by America at large, certainly never heard in their own often profane, always assertive words.
Rapper Common says, “Hip-hop has so much power. The government can’t stop it. The devil can’t stop it. It’s music, it’s art, it’s the voice of the people. And it’s being spoken all around the world and the world is appreciating it.” Because storytelling is about communicating to an audience, the best language for telling a story is one common to both storyteller and audience. Today, hip-hop is that language. Rap is the most streamed genre of music around the world. Harvard has a Hip-hop Archive and Research Institute. It’s time that musical theatre learns how to tell stories in that language.
It’s important to remember that rap is not just rhythmic speaking; it’s rhythmic speaking in counterpoint to a regular beat. It’s the interplay between the voice and the beat that makes rap interesting. The way an MC (i.e., a rapper) creates that rhythmic counterpoint is called their “flow.” Writer Jelani Cobb calls flow “an individual time signature, the rapper’s own idiosyncratic approach to the use of time.” David Caplan says in his book Rhyme’s Challenge: Hip-Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture:
Hip-hop artists dominate the contemporary art of rhyme; they remain most alert to the resources that the culture and the language provide. The effects they achieve are nothing short of astonishing, showing how thrilling rhyme can be, how sexy and appalling. For this reason, most of this book concentrates on their work – more specifically, the kinds of rhymes that hip-hop artists favor: doggerel, insult, and seduction.
Rap and jazz are special because they both “conform” by adhering to a strict beat, and at the same time, they “rebel” by improvising and exploring rhythm through the melody line. As the great composer Arnold Schoenberg said, “Composing is just slowed down improvisation.” There’s a sophistication and adventurousness in today’s rap, and in Hamilton, that is thrilling. As Bradley explains, some of the best known rappers:
have liberated their flows from the restrictions of rigid metrical patterns in favor of more expansive rhythmic vocabularies that include techniques like piling up stressed and unstressed syllables, playing against the beat, and altering normal pronunciations of words in favor of newly accented ones.
Critic Alfred Corn says, “The coincidence of sound in a pair of rhymes is a recommendation to the reader to consider the rhyming words in tandem, to see what meaning emerges from their juxtaposition.” Hip-hop uses many kinds of rhyme, many of the tools and devices of the English language, in new and sophisticated ways. Hamilton uses all these devices. This score is like an encyclopedia of hip-hop poetics, while at the same time, telling a complex story really clearly.
The most common rhymes in rap songs are at the ends of lines, usually rhymed in paired couplets. But rappers also use so many other tools, like chain rhymes, multiples of the same rhyme, all in a row. One famous example is the end of “On the Steps of the Palace” in Sondheim’s Into the Woods score. There are also examples in Hamilton:
Burr, check what we got.
Mister Lafayette, hard rock like Lancelot,
I think your pants look hot,
Laurens, I like you a lot.
Let’s hatch a plot blacker than the kettle callin’ the pot...
What are the odds the gods would put us all in one spot,
Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom, like it or not,
A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists?
Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is!
Also, notice all the interior rhymes in that quote, rhymes within a line, like odds and gods. Here's another example of interior rhymes:
Then I said, “well, I should head back home,”
She turned red, she led me to her bed,
Let her legs spread and said…
Also, head rhymes, another name for alliteration:
Look around, look around at how
Lucky we are to be alive right now!
slant or imperfect rhymes:
A colony that runs independently.
Meanwhile, Britain keeps shittin’ on us endlessly.
Essentially, they tax us relentlessly,
Ten King George turns around, runs a spending spree.
He ain’t ever gonna set his descendants free,
So there will be a revolution in this century.
Enter me!
(He says in parentheses.)
Don’t be shocked when your hist’ry book mentions me.
I will lay down my life if it sets us free.
Eventually, you’ll see my ascendancy…
multisyllabic rhymes:
Thomas Jefferson, always hesitant with the President,
Reticent – there isn’t a plan he doesn’t jettison.
Madison, you’re mad as a hatter, son, take your medicine.
apocopated rhymes, one word rhyming with a just part of another:
…for someone less astute,
he woulda been dead or destitute
without a cent of restitution…
mosaic rhymes, a multisyllabic word rhyming with several shorter words:
Burr, your grievance is legitimate.
I stand by what I said, every bit of it.
consonance, a kind of alliteration inside words (also used, to great comic effect, in the song “Gary, Indiana” in The Music Man):
It says the President’s assembling a cabinet
And that I am to be the Secretary of State, great!
And that I’m already Senate-approved...
assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, regardless of the consonants:
Hey yo, I’m just like my country,
I’m young, scrappy and hungry,
transformative rhymes that conspicuously alter the pronunciation of a word to make the rhyme (found all through Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operas):
I dream of life without a monarchy.
The unrest in France will lead to ‘onarchy?
‘Onarchy? How you say, how you say, ‘anarchy’?
When I fight, I make the other side panicky.
all of those, along with many other devices and tools that have been around for centuries.
One of the hallmarks of hip-hop is wordplay, again so fitting for the story of a master wordsmith like Hamilton. It’s true that wordplay is present in some pop songs, in some theatre songs, but it is in the DNA of rap. There are a million ways to play with words, and rap artists are finding new ways every day. Some of the common elements include simile:
Dark as a tomb where it happens.
metaphor:
Corruption’s such an old song that we can sing along in harmony
puns, playing on different senses of the same word or similar senses of different words:
If I throw away my shot, is this how you remember me?
What if this bullet is my legacy?
homonyms and homophones, words that sound the same:
Washington hires Hamilton right on sight,
But Hamilton still wants to fight, not write.
eponyms, using a famous name in place of a verb or adjective:
It’s the feeling of freedom, of seein’ the light,
It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite!
antanaclasis, the repetition of a single word with different meanings:
And no, don’t change the subject
Cuz you’re my favorite subject.
My sweet, submissive subject,
My loyal, royal subject…
anaphora, the repetition of the same word at the start of several lines:
by being a lot smarter,
by being a self-starter,
by fourteen, they placed him in charge of a trading charter.
epistrophe, the same kind of repetition, but at the end of lines:
Let this moment be the first chapter:
where you decide to stay
and I could be enough
and we could be enough
that would be enough.
apanados, the repetition of a phrase that reverses two subjects or words, and chiasmus, the same repetition and reversal, except of phrases, not just single words:
Are we a nation of states?
What’s the state of our nation?
My life's not gonna be normal for many months yet, but as long as I'm writing about musicals, things do seem next to normal. And for now, I'll take it.
We New Liners would love to go back into rehearsal in August for an October show, but that looks iffy right now. We're pretty confident we can go back into rehearsal in January 2022, for a March 2022 production, which will be the return of New Line's Head Over Heels, the show we were running when the world fell apart. Meanwhile, I'll continue work on my Scottsboro Boys chapter.
Keep your fingers crossed, stay safe, and wear a mask!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
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