YOU SHOULD BE TERRIFIED THAT PEOPLE WHO LIKE “HAMILTON” RUN OUR COUNTRY:
benedictatorship:
sinbadism:
zerosuit:
mangoestho:
In 2012, Captain Dan and his Scurvy Crew, a four-man hip-hop ensemble trying to cement “pirate rap” as a tenable subgenre, appeared on America’s Got Talent. The quartet had clearly put some thought, or at least effort, into the act; their pirate costumes might even have passed historical muster were it not for the leftmost crewmember’s Ray-Bans and Dan’s meticulously groomed chinstrap beard.
The routine itself went precisely in the direction one might have expected:
Captain Dan: When I say yo, you say ho. Yo!
Scurvy Crew: HO!
Captain Dan: YO!
Scurvy Crew: HO!
The group managed to rattle off two-and-a-half stilted lines before the judges began sounding their buzzers. Howard Stern was the last to give them the red “X,” preferring to let the audience’s boos come to a crescendo before he cut the Scurvy Crew off. Stern seemed to take great pleasure in calling the group “stupid,” “moronic,” “idiotic,” and “pathetic” on a national stage (Captain Dan grimaced through his humiliating dressing-down while his bandmates laughed it off, exposing a gap in emotional investment in the project between captain and crew, one that likely led to some intra-group tension during the post-show commiseration drinks).
Howie Mandel: They have restaurants like this—like Medieval Times—where you go and you get a pirates thing and you get a chicken dinner. We didn’t get a chicken dinner with this.
In 2012, everyone (save for Captain Dan himself, along with people whose tastes range from “music from video games” to “music about video games”) was in agreement that performing high-school-history-project rap in Colonial Williamsburg garb was culturally unconscionable. Right?
Wrong. The world in which we live now includes Hamilton, a wildly successful “hip-hop musical” about the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America.
Now, perhaps the America’s Got Talent audience isn’t an accurate sample of the American population as a whole. Perhaps they actually thought “when I say yo, you say ho” was clever , but were directed to boo by an off-screen neon sign. Or perhaps something happened in the past four years that made everyone really stupid.
But what if the American public’s taste hasn’t devolved? What if Hamilton’s success is the result of something else altogether?
Brian Eno once said that the Velvet Underground’s debut album only sold a few thousand copies, but everyone who bought it started a band. The same principle likely applies to Hamilton: only a few thousand people could afford to see it, but everyone who did happened to work for a prominent New York/D.C. publication.
The media gushing over Hamilton has been downright torrential. “I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show,” wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times. “But Hamilton… might just about be worth it.” The hyperbolic headlines poured forth unceasingly: “Is Hamilton the Musical the Most Addicting Album Ever?” “Hamilton is the most important musical of our time.” “Hamilton Haters Are Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” The media then got high on their own supply, diagnosing all of America with a harrowing ailment called “Hamilton mania.” The work was “astonishing,” “sublime,” the “cultural event of our time.” Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune said the musical was “even better than the hype.” Given the tenor of the hype, one can only imagine the pure, overpowering ecstasy that must comprise the Hamilton-viewing experience. The musical even somehow won a Pulitzer Prize this year, alongside Nicholas Kristof and that book by Ta-Nehisi Coates you bought but never read.
One of the publications to enter swooning raptures over Hamilton was BuzzFeed, which called it the smash musical “that everyone you know has been quoting for months.” (Literally nobody has ever quoted Hamilton in my presence.) BuzzFeed’s workplace obsession with the musical led to the birthing of the phrase “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack.” That three-word monstrosity, incomprehensible to anyone outside the narrowest circle of listicle-churning media elites, describes a room on the corporate messaging platform “Slack” used exclusively by BuzzFeed employees to discuss Hamilton. J.R.R. Tolkien said that “cellar door” was the most beautiful phonetic phrase the English language could produce. “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack,” by contrast, may be the most repellent arrangement of words in any tongue.
Those of us unfortunate enough not to work media jobs can never be privy to what goes on in a “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack.” But the Twitter emissions of the Slack’s denizens suggest a swamp into which no man should tread. A tellingly ominous and thoroughly representative Tweet:
“When the Buzzfeed #Hamilton slack room has a heated debate about which Hogwarts houses the characters belong to” —@Arielle07
“Nerdcore” music (Wikipedia: “a genre of hip hop music characterized by themes and subject matter considered to be of general interest to nerds”) has always had trouble getting off the ground. The “first lady of nerdcore,” rapper MC Router (responsible for the song “Trekkie Pride”), never achieved the critical success for which she had seemed destined, instead ending up on the Dr. Phil show after an acrimonious dispute with her family over her unexpected conversion to Islam. Similarly, the YouTube series “Epic Rap Battles of History,” however numerous its subscribers may have been, has consistently been unjustly robbed of the Pulitzer. Now, finally, nerd rap has apparently found in Hamilton its own Sgt. Pepper, a lofty, expansive work that wins the hearts and minds of previously skeptical elite critics.
One should have no doubt that “expensively-staged nerdcore” is a perfectly accurate, even generous description of Hamilton. Doubters need only examine a brief lyrical snippet. Consider this, from “The Election of 1800”:
Madison: It’s a tie! …
Jefferson: It’s up to the delegates!…
Jefferson/Madison: It’s up to Hamilton!
Hamilton: Yo.
The people are asking to hear my voice ..
For the country is facing a difficult choice.
And if you were to ask me who I’d promote …
Jefferson has my vote.
Perhaps marginally less embarrassing than “when I say yo, you say ho.” But only ever so marginally.
One could question the fairness of appraising a musical before putting one’s self through its full three-hour theatrical experience. But if nobody could criticize Hamilton without having seen it, then nobody could criticize Hamilton. One of the strangest aspects of the whole “Hamiltonmania” public relations spectacle is that hardly anyone in the country has actually attended the musical to begin with. The show is exclusive to Broadway and has spent most of its run completely sold out, seemingly playing to an audience comprised entirely of people who write breathless BuzzFeed headlines. (Fortunately, when you can get off the waitlist it only costs $1,200 a ticket—so long as you can stand bad seats.) Hamilton is the “nationwide sensation” that only .001% of the nation has even witnessed.
There’s something revealing in the disjunction between Hamilton’s popularity in the world of online media and Hamilton’s popularity in the world of actual human persons. After all, here we have a cultural product whose appeal essentially consists of a broad coalition of the worst people in America: New York Times writers, 15-year-olds who aspire to answer the phone in Chuck Schumer’s office, people who want to get into steampunk but have a copper sensitivity, and “wonks.” Yet because a large fraction of these people are elite taste-makers, Hamilton becomes a topic of disproportionate interest, discussed at unendurable length in The New Yorker and Slate and The New York Times Magazine, yet totally inaccessible to anyone besides the writers and members of their close social networks. When The New Yorker writes about a book that nobody in America wants to read, at least they could theoretically go out and purchase it. But Hamilton theatergoing is solely the provenance of Hamilton thinkpiece-writers. The endless swirl of online Hamilton-buzz shows the comical extreme of cultural insularity in the New York and D.C. media. The “cultural event of our time” is totally unknown to nearly all who actually live in our time.
Given that Hamilton is essentially Captain Dan with an American Studies minor, one might wonder how it became so inordinately adored by the blathering class. How did a ten-million-dollar 8th Grade U.S. History skit become “the great work of art of the 21st century” (as the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik says those in his circle have been calling it)?
To judge from the reviews, most of the appeal seems to rest with the forced diversity of its cast and the novelty concept of a “hip-hop musical.” Those who write about Hamilton often dwell primarily on its “groundbreaking” use of rap and its “bold” choice to cast an assemblage of black, Asian, and Latino actors as the Founding Fathers. Indeed, Hamilton exists more as a corporate HR department’s wet dream than as a biographical work.
The most obvious historical aberration is the portrayal of Washington and Jefferson as black men, a somewhat audacious choice given that both men are strongly associated with owning, and in the case of the latter, raping and impregnating slaves. Changing the races allows these men to appear far more sympathetic than they would otherwise be. Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda says he did this intentionally, to make the cast “look like America today,” and that having black actors play the roles “allow[s] you to leave whatever cultural baggage you have about the founding fathers at the door.” (“Cultural baggage” is an odd way of describing “feeling discomfort at warm portrayals of slaveowners.”) Thus Hamilton’s superficial diversity lets its almost entirely white audience feel good about watching it: no guilt for seeing dead white men in a positive light required. Now, The New York Times can delight in the novel incongruousness of “a Thomas Jefferson who swaggers like the Time’s Morris Day, sings like Cab Calloway and drawls like a Dirty South trap-rapper.” Indeed, it does take some getting used to, because the actual Thomas Jefferson raped slaves.
“Casting black and Latino actors as the founders effectively writes nonwhite people into the story, in ways that audiences have powerfully responded to,” said the New York Times. But fixing history makes it seem less objectionable than it actually was. We might call it a kind of, well, “blackwashing,” making something that was heinous seem somehow palatable by retroactively injecting diversity into it.
Besides, you don’t actually need to “write nonwhite people into the story.” As historians have pointed out, there were plenty of nonwhite people around at the time, people who already had fully-developed stories and identities. But none of these people appears in the play. As some have quietly noted, the vast majority of African American cast members simply portray nameless dancing founders in breeches and cravats, and “not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play.” (Although Jefferson’s slave and mistress Sally Hemings gets a brief shout-out.)
Slavery is left out of the play almost completely. Historian Lyra Monteiro observes that “Unless one listens carefully to the lyrics—which do mention slavery a handful of times—one could easily assume that slavery did not exist in this world.” The foundation of the 18th century economic system, the vicious practice that defined the lives of countless black men and women, is confined to the odd lyrical flourish here and there.
Miranda did consider adding a slavery number. But he cut it from the show, as he explains:
There was a rap battle about slavery, where it was Hamilton and Jefferson and Madison knocking it from all sides of the issue. Jefferson being like, “Hey, I wrote about this, and no one wanted to touch it!” And Hamilton being very self-righteous, like, “You’re having an affair with one of your slaves!” And Madison hits him with a “You want to talk about affairs?” And in the end, no one does anything. Which is what happened in reality! So we realized we were bringing our show to a halt on something that none of them really did enough on.
Miranda found that by trying to write a song about his main characters’ attitudes toward slavery, he ran into the inconvenient fact that all of them willfully tolerated or participated in it. That made it difficult to square with the upbeat portrayals he was going for, and so slavery had to go. Besides, dwelling on it could “bring the show to a halt.” And as cast member Christopher Jackson, who plays George Washington, notes: ‘‘The Broadway audience doesn’t like to be preached to.” Who would want to spoil the fun?
Instead, Hamilton’s Hamilton is what Slate called simply “lovable—a product of the play’s humanizing focus on Hamilton’s vulnerabilities and ambitions.” The play avoids depicting his unabashed elitism and more repellent personal characteristics. And in the brief references that are made to slavery, the play even generously portrays Hamilton as far more committed to the cause of freedom than he actually was. In this way, Hamilton carefully makes sure its audience is neither challenged nor discomforted, and can leave the theater without having to confront any unpleasant truths.
Just as Hamilton ducks the question of slavery, much of the actual substance of Alexander Hamilton’s politics is ignored, in favor of a story that stresses his origins as a Horatio Alger immigrant and his rivalry with Aaron Burr. But while Hamilton may have favored opening America’s doors to immigration, he also proposed a degree of economic protectionism that would terrify today’s free market establishment.
Hamilton believed that free trade was never equal, and worried about the ability of European manufacturers (who got a head start on the Industrial Revolution) to sell goods at lower prices than their American counterparts. In Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufactures, he spoke of the harms to American industry that came with our reliance on products from overseas. The Report sheds light on many of the concerns Americans in the 21st century have about outsourcing, sweatshops, and the increasing trade deficit, albeit in a different context. Hamilton said that for the U.S., “constant and increasing necessity, on their part, for the commodities of Europe, and only a partial and occasional demand for their own, in return, could not but expose them to a state of impoverishment, compared with the opulence to which their political and natural advantages authorise them to aspire.” For Hamilton, the solution was high tariffs on imports of manufactured goods, and intensive government intervention in the economy. The prohibitive importation costs imposed by tariffs would allow newer American manufacturers to undersell Europe’s established industrial framework, leading to an increase in non-agricultural employment. As he wrote: “all the duties imposed on imported articles… wear a beneficent aspect towards the manufacturers of the country.”
Does any of this sound familiar? It certainly went unmentioned at the White House, where a custom performance of Hamilton was held for the Obamas. The livestreamed presidential Hamilton spectacular at one point featured Obama and Miranda performing historically-themed freestyle rap in the Rose Garden.
The Obamas have been supporters of Hamilton since its embryonic days as the “Hamilton Mixtape song cycle.” By the time the fully-fledged musical arrived in Washington, Michelle Obama called it the “best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life,” raising disquieting questions about the level of cultural exposure offered in the Princeton undergraduate curriculum.
In introducing the White House performance, Barack Obama gave an effusive speech worthy of the BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack:
[Miranda] identified a quintessentially American story in the character of Hamilton — a striving immigrant who escaped poverty, made his way to the New World, climbed to the top by sheer force of will and pluck and determination… And in the Hamilton that Lin-Manuel and his incredible cast and crew bring to life — a man who is “just like his country, young, scrappy, and hungry” — we recognize the improbable story of America, and the spirit that has sustained our nation for over 240 years… In this telling, rap is the language of revolution. Hip-hop is the backbeat. … And with a cast as diverse as America itself, including the outstandingly talented women — (applause) — the show reminds us that this nation was built by more than just a few great men — and that it is an inheritance that belongs to all of us.
Strangely enough, President Obama failed to mention anything Alexander Hamilton actually did during his long career in American politics, perhaps because the Obama Administration’s unwavering support of free trade and the tariff-easing Trans-Pacific Partnership goes against everything Hamilton believed. Instead, Obama’s Hamilton speech stresses just two takeaways from the musical: that America is a place where the poor (through “sheer force of will” and little else) can rise to prominence, and that Hamilton has diversity in it. (Plus it contains hip-hop, an edgy, up-and-coming genre with only 37 years of mainstream exposure.)
The Obamas were not the only members of the political establishment to come down with a ghastly case of Hamiltonmania. Nearly every figure in D.C. has apparently been to see the show, in many cases being invited for a warm backstage schmooze with Miranda. Biden saw it. Mitt Romney saw it. The Bush daughters saw it. Rahm Emanuel saw it the day after the Chicago teachers’ strike over budget cuts and school closures. Hillary Clinton went to see the musical in the evening after having been interviewed by the FBI in the morning. The Clinton campaign has also been fundraising by hawking Hamilton tickets; for $100,000 you can watch a performance alongside Clinton herself.
Unsurprisingly, the New York Times reports that “conservatives were particularly smitten” with Hamilton. “Fabulous show,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch, calling it “historically accurate.” Obama concluded that “I’m pretty sure this is the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have agreed on—during my entire political career.” (That is, of course, false. Other points of agreement include drone strikes, Guantanamo, the NSA, and mass deportation.)
The conservative-liberal D.C. consensus on Hamilton makes perfect sense. The musical flatters both right and left sensibilities. Conservatives get to see their beloved Founding Fathers exonerated for their horrendous crimes, and liberals get to have nationalism packaged in a feel-good multicultural form. The more troubling questions about the country’s origins are instantly vanished, as an era built on racist forced labor is transformed into a colorful, culturally progressive, and politically unobjectionable extravaganza.
As the director of the Hamilton theater said, “It has liberated a lot of people who might feel ambivalent about the American experiment to feel patriotic.” “Ambivalence,” here, means being bothered by the country’s collective idol-worship of men who participated in the slave trade, one of the greatest crimes in human history. To be “liberated” from this means never having to think about it.
In that respect, Hamilton probably is the “musical of the Obama era,” as The New Yorker called it. Contemporary progressivism has come to mean papering over material inequality with representational diversity. The president will continue to expand the national security state at the same rate as his predecessor, but at least he will be black. Predatory lending will drain the wealth from African American communities, but the board of Goldman Sachs will have several black members. Inequality will be rampant and worsening, but the 1% will at least “look like America.” The actual racial injustices of our time will continue unabated, but the power structure will be diversified so that nobody feels quite so bad about it. Hamilton is simply this tendency’s cultural-historical equivalent; instead of worrying ourselves about the brutal origins of the American state, and the lasting economic effects of those early inequities, we can simply turn the Founding Fathers black and enjoy the show.
Kings George I and II of England could barely speak intelligible English and spent more time dealing with their own failed sons than ruling the Empire —but they gave patronage to Handel. Ludwig II of Bavaria was believed to be insane and went into debt compulsively building castles — but he gave patronage to Wagner. Barack Obama deported more immigrants than any other president and expanded the drone program in order to kill almost 3,500 people — but he gave patronage to a neoliberal nerdcore musical. God bless this great land.
@fandomshateblackpeople
this is the most thorough and merciless takedown i ever could have asked for
A few things that piss me off about this article:
- The example used from the musical
Oddly this article writer seems very snobbish about the quality of the writing, deliberately picking a part of the musical that seems, on the page without the context of the musical and emotional impact beneath, juvenile. What this ignores is the references to other rap music, the blending of many genres of rap and hip-hop throughout the musical - fast, beautiful, poetic language elsewhere such as:
Legacy. What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see
I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me
America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me
You let me make a difference
A place where even orphan immigrants
Can leave their fingerprints and rise up
I’m running out of time. I’m running, and my time’s up
Wise up. Eyes up.
To pick a tiny random example off the top of my head. It also quotes Washington’s beautiful, intricate resignation speech with lines such as
“I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.”
So it’s just a really bad argument, and it’s own special brand of elitism, to pick a random few lines that include the word “Yo” and cite it as an example of the whole musical being bad writing.
It’s devaluing on a form of music created by and for POCs under the guise of critiquing quality. It’s saying “look at these stupid people rhyming simply and using the word ‘yo’ in a single moment of what’s supposed to be a piece of high quality art, how dare they. How dare this call itself art.”
Oh hey look! This is Act I Scene I of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:
ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
SAMPSON I do bite my thumb, sir.
ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
SAMPSON [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay?
GREGORY No.
SAMPSON No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.
How terrible! How repetitive! Look how many times he says “bite my thumb”, he repeats it loads, without poetry it’s just simply prose, what awful writing, right? Shakespeare’s a hack.
Of course, this ignores anything and everything else about the play not to mention the fact that, what isolated and without context looks idiotic, is actually genius within the context of the scene.
- It ignores the soundtrack which is widely available and has been bought and/or streamed online by millions
“When The New Yorker writes about a book that nobody in America wants to read, at least they could theoretically go out and purchase it. But Hamilton theatergoing is solely the provenance of Hamilton thinkpiece-writers”
“One could question the fairness of appraising a musical before putting one’s self through its full three-hour theatrical experience. But if nobody could criticize Hamilton without having seen it, then nobody could criticize Hamilton.”
Yes it’s nigh-on impossible to go see Hamilton in the theatre but what this completely ignores the millions of people who have downloaded the album and/or listened to it on free platforms such as Youtube or Spotify - a large part of the phenomenon of Hamilton is its many many fans who have never seen the show and may never get to, but have grown to love the soundtrack, and many have done so without having to pay a penny.
That soundtrack has a life of its own beyond the show, entire podcasts, discussion groups (probably including most people in that dreaded Buzzfeed Hamilton Slack), web forums, thinkpieces (including by the sound of things, this one) exist on the subject of Hamilton from people who have only heard the soundtrack and enjoy imagining what the show itself might be like.
So it’s perfectly possible to criticize Hamilton’s soundtrack, as, it seems, you are doing. But you have conveniently glossed over its existence in order to hold up your elitism point…
- The example of Hamilton’s opposition to free trade
Dude. It’s really weird that you just pick this one example. There are so many things Hamilton believed at one time in his life that would be nigh on unthinkable by today’s standards. For example, at the constitutional convention he spoke for eight hours and he basically proposed re-instating a constitutional monarchy.
If you’d read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton doubtless you could’ve picked out many, many more things that the musical didn’t include - because it’s a fucking musical. It’s about telling the story of a man in the most compelling and entertaining way possible, it’s not doing to dwell on every single one of Hamilton’s opinions, mostly because the guy had a shit ton of them - the man had a ridiculous output of writings, thousands and thousands of pages, and many other anonymous missives that have been attributed to him.
Viewing every one of his policies by the standards of modern society (“Obama believes in free trade! Hamilton didn’t!” Yeah. IN 1790 HE DIDN’T. Oh and also don’t forget the USA was a brand new country, the constitution was a piece of paper some dude wrote recently not this god-like un-amendable biblical text it is today, the US were still at fucking war with Britain, the French revolution was happening - it was a different damn world) is a dangerous failure to contextualise & historicise and an attempt to stamp modern sensibilities on a different fucking world. It’s an over-simplistic way to criticise a flattering portrayal of the man.
(Also y’know in my opinion it’s also a weird example because “Hamilton believed that free trade was never equal” seems like a no-brainer to me. Of course it isn’t equal. But that’s a whole other debate.)
- The idea that this could be a world without slavery
Slavery runs like a motherfucking freight train throughout the musical. You argue that making the founding fathers black or other POC lets us ignore the issue of race at the time.
No, it makes the racial issues impossible to ignore.
The reason the slavery debate at the time doesn’t need its own song is yes, as LMM says in that quote, for narrative reasons. It didn’t move the story along because nothing was done at the time. But it’s also that voicing that debate would be redundant, because it’s underscoring every single damn line of the play.
Every time Thomas Jefferson talks about Monticello “we know who’s really doing the planting”, when Laurens declares he will lead the first black batallion, asks “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom” and a black President George Washington replies “Not yet”.
These are just a few examples off of the top of my head where race comes to the fore directly in the text, but at every other moment it’s always ever present, in the casting and in the musical’s genre of music.
We all know slavery exists in this world. That is a massive part of the subtext of every scene. And subtext is the most powerful thing in theatre.
We know a black man could not have been George Washington, would not have had a hope of being President, and seeing a black man portray him underscores that fact. It confronts you with it and doesn’t ever let you ignore why that might be. At the same time it shows us how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve yet to go, “does this really mean freedom?” “Not. Yet.”
The thing about theatre is that it’s dialectical. Unlike other mediums it can do and say several things at once. It doesn’t have to have one unilateral “message” (and if it does it’s likely bad theatre), it’s not about presenting a parable with one clear moral, it’s about making us think and question for ourselves about what we see and hear. Putting before us a series of, sometimes contradictory, ideas and images. The dissonance between the casting and the text says something loudly and clearly about how shit things were for POC then, about how far we’ve come, but also how far we still have to go. And yes it can do all these things at once because theatre is dialectical that way.
What you’re also ignoring is the deliberate casting of King George as a white man. This isn’t an entirely black cast - it’s confronting you with its racial casting choices. It’s begging you to ask the question why, to see the dissonance of these white people being played by the POC they oppressed.
You also cite the ensemble, a good example of slavery’s portrayal in Hamilton. A silent, moving and subservient, ever-present group. Sometimes those “silent” characters speak the loudest on stage. Seeing Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote “all men are created equal” waited on hand and foot by the ensemble at his Monticello plantation inherently draws attention to the issue of slavery without having to say a word, and is added to with a throwaway reference to Sally Hemmings, the slave that he definitely had children with and probably raped. Just because it isn’t said doesn’t mean the hypocrisy isn’t patently clear from the on stage action.
I believe many of your criticisms are fundamentally flawed, “turning the founding fathers black” as you put it, I would argue doesn’t just let us off the hook and allow us to ignore these atrocities, but confronts us squarely with them at every moment. Hamilton himself didn’t own slaves, found the practise abhorrent and was a member of the New York manumissionist society, so I’m really not quite sure what your source is for his “ambivalence” on the issue. And sometimes I found you downright dismissive of hip hop as a form that could possibly have any artistic worth, not to mention ignoring the convenient fact that a soundtrack exists that can be listened to by anyone for free, so that you can further stress your point about elitism. There may be some valid points in there somewhere, but I feel they got lost under these fundamental flaws.