Hamilton As Middle Brow Emptiness

 Hamilton as middle brow emptiness.

Its music is bourgeois rap: it’s fake rap, co-opted rap, inauthentic rap, however clever. It’s all clever and bright and entertaining but it’s like Taylor Swift rapping or Michael Bublé. If you want the aesthetics of the best rap, urgency, the pounding sound of the street, authentic recreation of a specific time, place and their conditions, Hamilton’s music is not for you. It’s rap via Chat GTP.

I have no objection to brown and black people playing white people. Just I have no objection to white people playing brown and black people, or, generally, anybody portraying someone whom they’re not. I reject the idea of cultural appropriation while I stand against cultural misappropriation. But when people play whom they’re not as a programmatic thing as in Hamilton, I want to know why. I see it there as making a statement that rings about as true as the founding fathers rapping in clever verse. 

Does it jar me into some special insight, let alone an epiphany? No! Does it make some worthwhile point? No! So then what’s with the casting? It seems as something similar to its music. It’s fake daring, fake “Hey, in your face.” And, worst, it’s patronizing ersatz edginess and fake creativity.

The set is great. The cleverness and the craft in the lyrics are impressive, the performances are formidable. So why do I feel like I’ve seen a massive set of special effects all in service of an emptiness, of an aesthetic vacuum, the lack of a there there, a bauble? It’s like costume jewelry. Behind the cleverness and craft and impressive performances is a resounding hollowness that left me unsatisfied and hungry for something simple or complex that is moving and authentic, say Tracy Chapman singing Give Me One Reason or Othello.

Here for me is the essence of Hamilton: it’s a show that aims at being edgy and avant-garde but isn’t, that pretends to be ground breaking and daring but isn’t, that at bottom challenges neither the imagination nor the moral imagination of its audience. It has this quality as well about it: it aims at making people who use the arts to acquire culture as status feel good about themselves.