rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2016-02-06 03:20 pm
rachelmanija) wrote2016-02-06 03:20 pm
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Hamilton - that song
I really think this song works best if you hear it the first time not knowing it's coming. So I'm spoiler-cutting the entire entry. Once again, "Hamilton" refers to the character in the play, not the historical person, unless I say otherwise.
The song I wrote about in the previous post as writing my soul into a song was “Hurricane.” In the context of the play, it’s about an impending scandal. But it’s also the song that’s most directly about Hamilton as writer, and how he creates his life by writing it into existence. But it starts on a completely (well, or at least seemingly) different note and subject:
In the eye of a hurricane
There is quiet
For just a moment
A yellow sky
In the delicate, hushed melody (the peace in the eye of the hurricane) the first time they’re sung, I find them the most beautiful lines in the entire play. They’re so simple and so absolutely perfect. “A yellow sky”— just three words, but so evocative, beautiful and terrifying.
The verse makes me think of haiku in its deceptive simplicity. It seems easy but it isn’t. Simple and perfect is hard— often harder than complexity and cleverness. I wonder if Miranda also thought of haiku. It doesn’t have the right syllables, but it has the feel, the short lines, the short verse, the seasonal reference, the delicacy, the immense emotion hitting harder because it’s unspoken, and the themes of mortality and humanity’s helplessness before death and nature.
Tabi ni yande
yume wa kareno o
kakemeguru
Falling ill on a journey
my dreams go wandering
over withered fields
- Matsuo Basho
And then Hamilton puts himself back into the picture, no longer an onlooker but an actor, and an actor in a very specific way. The music becomes fiercer, determined, frantic, arrogant - he DID write his life into existence, of course he can do it again. That's what he does. That's who he is.
I wrote my way out
I wrote my way out of hell
I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance
I literally did that. Exactly that. I wrote my way out of hell. I wrote letter after letter, one a day for six months until I won my own deliverance with a pen, like Hamilton, writing my way into America.
If anything defines me, it’s that. I write my way out. I write the life I want into existence. I don’t create new financial systems, but I wrote myself a very successful small business. I wrote my way into college. I wrote my way into grad school. I paid for grad school with writing. I wrote my way into television. As a therapist, I help people write the stories of their own lives. I am still trying to write my life back into existence, writing descriptions of my illness with just the right balance of detail and pithiness, clear and easy to read, in the hope of helping doctors see a narrative, a mystery with all the clues laid out, just waiting for the right detective to sort through the red herrings to find the solution.
I heard this song and it blew me away. I have never heard anything so much about me that I didn’t write myself. I believe that every work of art has its ideal reader— the person whom it speaks to as if it had been written just for them— and I am the ideal listener for “Hurricane.” Which is not to say that I am the only ideal listener. There could be lots of us. But I am one of them.
Of course, the irony of the song in context is that while writing his way out has always worked for Hamilton before, it’s disastrous here. “Wait for it, wait for it” reappears in chorus, now meaning both “audience, wait for the disaster you see coming” and “Hamilton, wait, don’t write a confession, if you wait it will blow over (like a hurricane) and your career won't die.”
It was the wrong thing to do (He’s never gon’ be president now!) but it was true to himself. To do anything else would have been out of character. Hamilton doesn’t burn letters, he writes more letters.
Once you die (and even in life, sometimes) you have no control over who tells your story. But the historical Hamilton wrote enough for Ron Chernow to have plenty of primary sources for his story. And then Miranda told his story, but also made it into Miranda’s own story, the story of a writer who needs words like he needs oxygen, who uses words like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail. And by doing that, he told my story too.
In an interview, Daveed Diggs said he'd never felt American until he played Thomas Jefferson. He was connecting with a completely different aspect of the play that I connected with, but what makes Hamilton an amazing work of art is its ability to do that in so many ways, to so many people, just like Miranda read a biography of Alexander Hamilton and thought, "He's an immigrant:" to make us see ourselves unexpectedly in a tale about people with whom we’d always been told we had nothing in common.
The song I wrote about in the previous post as writing my soul into a song was “Hurricane.” In the context of the play, it’s about an impending scandal. But it’s also the song that’s most directly about Hamilton as writer, and how he creates his life by writing it into existence. But it starts on a completely (well, or at least seemingly) different note and subject:
In the eye of a hurricane
There is quiet
For just a moment
A yellow sky
In the delicate, hushed melody (the peace in the eye of the hurricane) the first time they’re sung, I find them the most beautiful lines in the entire play. They’re so simple and so absolutely perfect. “A yellow sky”— just three words, but so evocative, beautiful and terrifying.
The verse makes me think of haiku in its deceptive simplicity. It seems easy but it isn’t. Simple and perfect is hard— often harder than complexity and cleverness. I wonder if Miranda also thought of haiku. It doesn’t have the right syllables, but it has the feel, the short lines, the short verse, the seasonal reference, the delicacy, the immense emotion hitting harder because it’s unspoken, and the themes of mortality and humanity’s helplessness before death and nature.
Tabi ni yande
yume wa kareno o
kakemeguru
Falling ill on a journey
my dreams go wandering
over withered fields
- Matsuo Basho
And then Hamilton puts himself back into the picture, no longer an onlooker but an actor, and an actor in a very specific way. The music becomes fiercer, determined, frantic, arrogant - he DID write his life into existence, of course he can do it again. That's what he does. That's who he is.
I wrote my way out
I wrote my way out of hell
I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance
I literally did that. Exactly that. I wrote my way out of hell. I wrote letter after letter, one a day for six months until I won my own deliverance with a pen, like Hamilton, writing my way into America.
If anything defines me, it’s that. I write my way out. I write the life I want into existence. I don’t create new financial systems, but I wrote myself a very successful small business. I wrote my way into college. I wrote my way into grad school. I paid for grad school with writing. I wrote my way into television. As a therapist, I help people write the stories of their own lives. I am still trying to write my life back into existence, writing descriptions of my illness with just the right balance of detail and pithiness, clear and easy to read, in the hope of helping doctors see a narrative, a mystery with all the clues laid out, just waiting for the right detective to sort through the red herrings to find the solution.
I heard this song and it blew me away. I have never heard anything so much about me that I didn’t write myself. I believe that every work of art has its ideal reader— the person whom it speaks to as if it had been written just for them— and I am the ideal listener for “Hurricane.” Which is not to say that I am the only ideal listener. There could be lots of us. But I am one of them.
Of course, the irony of the song in context is that while writing his way out has always worked for Hamilton before, it’s disastrous here. “Wait for it, wait for it” reappears in chorus, now meaning both “audience, wait for the disaster you see coming” and “Hamilton, wait, don’t write a confession, if you wait it will blow over (like a hurricane) and your career won't die.”
It was the wrong thing to do (He’s never gon’ be president now!) but it was true to himself. To do anything else would have been out of character. Hamilton doesn’t burn letters, he writes more letters.
Once you die (and even in life, sometimes) you have no control over who tells your story. But the historical Hamilton wrote enough for Ron Chernow to have plenty of primary sources for his story. And then Miranda told his story, but also made it into Miranda’s own story, the story of a writer who needs words like he needs oxygen, who uses words like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail. And by doing that, he told my story too.
In an interview, Daveed Diggs said he'd never felt American until he played Thomas Jefferson. He was connecting with a completely different aspect of the play that I connected with, but what makes Hamilton an amazing work of art is its ability to do that in so many ways, to so many people, just like Miranda read a biography of Alexander Hamilton and thought, "He's an immigrant:" to make us see ourselves unexpectedly in a tale about people with whom we’d always been told we had nothing in common.
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I also loved the focus on Hamilton as immigrant. One of my favorite surprise moments, which I'm glad I wasn't spoiled for was the intro to "Guns and Ships," where Burr sings about "an immigrant you all know and love," making us all think it's Hamilton, but it's "America's favorite fighting Frnchman, Lafayette!" (Not sure that Lafayette was technically an immigrant - I would call him an expat - but close enough). I'm not technically an immigrant either (I'm whatever Lafayette was) but I've certainly had aspects of the immigrant experience even though I don't identify as one.
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Privilege is important but it isn't everything, and most people are privileged in some ways and not in others. Everyone's got their own pain and their own story.
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Luckily for HIM, he genuinely liked it.
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May I know more about the part of your life where you wrote a letter a day for six months to achieve your deliverance?
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Then my father fell for another woman at the ashram (also American) and they ran off together, back to America, leaving me behind with my mother. I knew my mother wasn't going anywhere. (Thirty years later, she's still there.)
I wrote to my father every day for six months, begging him to let me come live with him, making arguments for why this would benefit him, guilt-tripping him, demanding, coaxing, etc. Finally he couldn't take it any more and told me I could come live with him in America.
I was twelve.
To be fair to him, he told me later that he had always intended to collect me at some point. However, 1) if so, he sure didn't tell me, 2) he had no reason not to tell me because my mother didn't object to me leaving, 3) the first time he told me that had been his intent, I was thirty-five. So I kind of doubt it. I think I wrote my way out.
(America turned out to not be the haven I imagined, or at least not until I turned eighteen and could do my own thing. But it was one hell of a lot better than where I'd been. And also, I had a future there, which I sure hadn't at the ashram.)
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Wow. My goodness. Thank you so much for sharing this story with me. And my commendations on your achievement!
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Our man saw his future drip-dripping down the drain
Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain,
And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain…
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I so badly needed that kind of fundamental understanding, which all the "I still think it's a really good novel, it just didn't work out this time" pep talks couldn't give me.
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Why do you write like you're running out of time?
Write day and night like you're running out of time?
That's why.
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That's why.
Yep.
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Also the "I am not throwing away my shot" phone cover.
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But yes - this song. So many of these songs, but 'Hurricane' in particular - I wrote my way out of my own mind's hell and I keep writing ways out (and the growing core hoard of what I've written shows me how to get out when the words won't come fresh).
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(and you will write yourself into an amazing happily ever after, too; i'm absolutely sure of it.)
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Re; your wishes: I sure hope so.
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Also, this line:
They passed a plate around
Total strangers
Moved to kindness by my story
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And I love the very writerly trick of placing it in such an ironic context, as Hamilton's use of writing, for the first time in his life, is not helpful but ruinous. I assume that in historical context the Reynolds Pamphlets were a bafflingly self-destructive act for such a bright man, so what I think Miranda is doing is explaining them by pulling out the big guns, artistically speaking, to give the audience a completely satisfying answer: people will do what's most themselves, even if it destroys themselves.
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Hamilton is first saved, then destroyed, by his courage and his writing. (I mean, okay, you could argue that he was destroyed by his impulsivity and bad judgment in sleeping with Mrs. Reynolds in the first place, or that he was destroyed by his weakness in succombing to blackmail instead of confessing to Eliza at the time. But it's really the Reynolds Pamphlet that sets the final tragedies in motion.)
He's an absolutely amazing tragic hero. And so is Burr, for that matter.
(The other big writer anthem: Non-Stop. I love Burr's mix of admiration and disgust. That's the song I played for Molly when I was thinking that she'd really like Hamilton, and she's now obsessed.)
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(And I am completely bummed that is it impossible to get tickets. A new block went on sale a few days ago - within 5 minutes, they were all gone and a lot of them are being bought by robo programs and then resold at outrageous prices. It's horrible.)
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I'm hoping it brings some attention to the way tickets are scalped in general.
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("Wait for it" is also Burr, waiting his turn, the right time to strike.)
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I also love the repetition of the things that don't discriminate, but take and take and take - love, death, life - and squirming into the middle is Hamilton, who takes and takes and takes but (by omission of the "doesn't discriminate") just takes for himself, the personal thorn in Burr's side that he could maybe do something about rather than a vast, impersonal force that you can do nothing but wait for.
I see a lot of Sondheim influence in that song. He's also a master of repetition, using the same phrase in different contexts until it suddenly punches you in the gut.
One that immediately comes to mind is "The Ladies Who Lunch."
Here's to the… starting off each verse, with its variations getting darker and darker:
Here's to the ladies who lunch.
And the first line that's going to repeat with variations… but he's going to make you wait for it:
Everybody laugh.
Lounging in their caftans and planning a brunch.
On their own behalf.
Caft/behalf is one of those all-time genius rhymes. It's almost too clever, but that suits the character. She's always the smartest in the room, and it got her absolutely nowhere.
And then the next toast:
And here's to the girls who play smart-
Aren't they a gas?
This time, no command to everybody, though the audience might be waiting for it; the first verse set up an expectation that it would be repeated. But it isn't.
Third toast:
And here's to the girls who play wife-
Aren't they too much?
Again, no "everybody." I think at this point the audience decides that's not going to repeat and forgets about it.
Fourth toast, the most bitter:
And here's to the girls who just watch-
Aren't they the best?
When they get depressed
It's a bottle of scotch,
Plus a little jest.
Final toast:
So here's to the girls on the go-
Everybody tries.
And the "everybody" is repeating at last, just so it can do this:
Look into their eyes and you'll see what they know.
Everybody dies.
There's the huge, unstoppable forces beneath all the trendy, surface-y things the ladies are clutching, trying to hide behind, trying to cover their eyes with. And it concludes:
A toast to that invincible bunch.
The dinosaur surviving the crunch.
Let's hear it for the ladies who lunch-
Everybody rise!
Rise!
Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!
Rise!
…I need a Hamilton icon. I already have lots of Sondheim icons. Anyone want to make me an icon of "I wrote my way out?"
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His analysis of his own lyrics is fascinating, particularly where he's critical of them. (Also, seeing the things which were cut or changed allows a deeper understanding of how shows get constructed.)
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