UGLY TRUTH: What Broadway’s Hamilton and Obama Have in Common

UGLY TRUTH: What Broadway’s Hamilton and Obama Have in Common

I visited New York recently and had the opportunity to see Hamilton. Without hesitation, I passed.

Broadway's Hamilton
“All Hope is lost. Let us weep.”

I wrote about why I have no inclination to see Broadway’s Hamilton a while back, as I compared the musical to Cats. I went to see that worthless Broadway drivel three times to figure out what I missed. No, I didn’t pay for it at any showing, thankfully.

The first two times I sat in my seat, perplexed. The last time, I walked out early, as I had seen enough.

The image of Hillary Clinton supporters crying is what I would have felt like, had I paid to see Cats. Thus, I wasn’t going to be fooled by Broadway’s Hamilton – a leftist bait and switch for a white audience. I wrote at the time,

Larry David seems to echo my sentiment of Cats in discussing Broadway’s Hamilton, as he said in an interview with Mike Lupica,

“(Hamilton) was pretty amazing, but I have a feeling there are a lot of white people who are saying they are completely blown away even though they didn’t really understand half of the things the people on stage were saying.”

He continued: “They just want to solidify their liberal bona fides and how cool they are: ‘Yeah, I love Hamilton. Yeah, I get it, I’m hip.’”

By the way, about those records: “Hamilton” received 16 Tony nominations, the most ever for a show. Now I KNOW I won’t go see it. Fool me once!

Hamilton and Barack Obama provide this same empty feeling.

Both represent a ruse on white people, and both find an audience of people willing to overpay for the under-performance.

Well, I’m not the only person who understands the let’s-find-a-white-audience ruse of Broadway’s Hamilton.

In a more in-depth article about the musical, Nicholas Pell of Reason wrote,

I don’t think there’s a slight bit of hyperbole or exaggeration involved when I say that Hamilton, the awful musical that millionaire New Yorkers are required by law to throw away thousands watching, represents everything that was wrong with America in 2016. Allow me to make the case.

First, there’s the music. I’m admittedly not much of a hip-hop aficionado, but I know shit from Shinola. From my perspective the art form has more or less been going downhill since Strictly Business (the EPMD record, not the Tommy Davidson vehicle), but there have been some highlights worth mentioning, mostly thanks to Ice Cube and an army of Wu bangers.

The point I’m trying to make is that, even to untrained ears such as mine, Hamilton is particularly bad. On first take, I thought it sounded a bit like a University of Iowa freshman—the kind who only listens to “real hip-hop”—attempting his first mixtape. One of my Twitter followers corrected me, however. It’s closer to a Braintree elementary school making a rap song for parents’ night. The latter description hints not merely at the simple, formulaic quality of the material, but also the cloying, bourgeois quality of it all. From the reference to “ten-dollar Founding Father without a father” to “when the British taxed our tea we got frisky,” the whole affair sounds more like something made by precocious children than a professional composer.

The bourgeois, cocktail-sipping crowd knows nothing about hip-hop. Thus anything that reminds them of Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight makes them feel like newly minted gangsta hipsters. And, isn’t that what every white person aspires to be. Like this crowd of douchebags at the White House:

But as Pell continues, the I-want-white-people-to-like-me ruse of Broadway’s Hamilton began much earlier, likely learned in the politically-correct confines of whack-ade-mia:

 

hamilton-cast

We have Lin-Manuel Miranda to blame for this cultural atrocity, a scion of a psychologist and an advisor to New York mayor Ed Koch, who attended the same elementary and high school as Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. Sure, he got bullied by Immortal Technique in school, but how much street cred is that really worth? After this he attended Wesleyan University, a top-10-ranked school that costs $65,000 a year, according to Forbes, before making his mark writing jingles for noted prostitute-enthusiast Eliot Spitzer’s 2006 campaign. The original version of Hamilton debuted at a Vassar College workshop. All this is, of course, an attempt to firmly establish Miranda’s street cred, which is unassailable.

The Ugly Truth

Hamilton attempts to fool Americans into thinking the play “honored” Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. Obama duped white people in much the same way.

The success of Hamilton has nothing to do with the play itself, in as much as Obama has a record of success. I’m glad somebody else had the guts to say it.

 

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