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LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: I want it to feel like characters not saying super-clever planned
things at each other that they spent years at home writing, but I want it to feel like
just, y'know, horsing around with your friends on the corner.
[Music]
So. 2002, 2003, we're working on Heights in the basement of the drama book shop. One of
the other back house founders, Anthony Viniciali loves free styling. He's just crazy about
it and on breaks from Heights rehearsals he would get in the room with me and Chris Jackson
and be like. Let's rap about our day. Let's rap about our day! What did you do? And we
would free style and it was the first time that I ever really seriously did it. We used
to do it with like a beat machine in the background or pre-recorded beats. We were lucky enough
to be found by this guy Chris Sullivan, a.k.a. Shock Wave who's one of the best beatboxers
in the world and who became part of the collective and we do this improvised show. So we start
with a verb and that gets us going and then we do a bunch of other sort of songs, it's
all based on audience suggestions, every show is very different, and we end by doing the
day in the life of someone who is—an audience member. They talk us through their day and
then we do the hip hop musical theater version of their day and y'know it's really thrilling.
It's really jumping off a ledge and it has been for many years sort of the thing I did
while working on Heights and in a lot of ways, Heights and free style, for me, are very psychically
linked. I think the things I learned by rapping on a stage having no idea what was going to
come out of my mouth next really informed some of the songwriting in that show because
I wanted it to feel like that. I wanted it to feel like characters—not saying super-clever,
planning things at each other that they spent years at home writing, but I want it to feel
like just, y'know, horsing around with your friends on the corner. I wanted it to feel
that conversational and that improvisational. Like music theater, hip hop is a bunch of
art forms that coalesce together to create this really culture. Y'know, it was sort of
born out of ashes of the south Bronx. Robert Moses had burned down half of it to make his
Cross-Bronx Expressway and in his wake this burnt out part of New York people started
having parties. And people started scratching records and people started break dancing and
this beautiful culture was born. So in, like musical theater, it is not just one art form,
but it's a lot of sort of art forms mashed together. The difference in song-writing between
hip hop and musical theater there are similarities and then there are really clutch differences
and I think the key to the success of Heights was really understanding the difference. I
think that musical theater places a very pure emphasis on pure rhyme. Not rhyming moon with
doom, that's not a real rhyme. But moon with june and that real rhyme whereas I think hip
hop the reward for the listener is often the unexpected rhyme. It's Biggie rhyming awning
with mourning because of the way he says it. It's Jay-Z saying "Don't let me get Al Sharpton
in it cuz I'm dark skinned in it" y'know it's playing with words. It's sometimes casting
off their meaning or putting a triple entendre in the meaning and really fitting them to
fulfill their purpose and the unexpected turn of phrase winning over a pure rhyme winning
and so y'know with Heights, every lyric was me threading that needle so that someone that
came in who could care less about musicals saw this as authentic hip hip music because
we're doing this here with the language and this here, but a musical theater enthusiast
can come in and say there's not pure rhyme here, but he's doing fifty other things craft-wise
y'know through Sunday to y'know—this guy knows what he's doing.
[Music]
I read a great book by Ron Chernow, it's sort of the definitive biography of Hamilton. I
finished the first chapter and said this is a hip hop musical. I think it touched on a
lot of issues that I wanted to write about but I didn't have a way in on particularly—not
even with hip hop culture—but just in general. The fact that Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant
who came from another country and saw America as a way forward for himself and fell deeply
in love with making it the best country possible. The fact that most of our country economically
is based on this guy—it was built by this guy who y'know was working for a trading charter
at age fourteen. He was an orphan by then and also caught beef with every other founding
father. I mean, really walked into every room thinking he was the smartest guy in it. The
only problem was that he was walking into rooms with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,
George Washington, John Adams. These were all very smart guys. So they hated him. And
he hated them and those fights—his fights in the cabinet under Washington are the fights
we have as a two party system in this country today. We are still fighting the Jeffersonian
leave us alone form of government versus Hamilton's government can be a force for good argument.
I mean, we have that fight every day. How fascinating would it be to see rap battles,
not about your mother did this, I'm better than you for these fifty reasons, but what
is this country going to be? And if you don't think that countries should be this, you should
be shot because you do this and this and this. Rap battles for real, for real stakes.
Hi, I'm Lin-Manuel Miranda. You're watching THNKR.