In 2023, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed Resolution 331, which established November as Hip-Hop History Month.
In 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton opened on Broadway, a musical that used hip-hop to explore history, making history in the process.
And now Hamilton has returned to Straz — just in time for Hip-Hop History Month! — as part of our Broadway Encore Series, running through Nov. 8. For tickets or more information, visit our website or call 813.229.7827.
The musical’s Original Broadway Cast Recording was executive produced by Questlove and Black Thought of The Roots, a duo that will shore up anyone’s hip-hop bonafides. Questlove in particular is an authoritative voice on hip-hop from its history to its cultural impact to the science of the beats and the rhymes and the samples.
The Hamilton album topped Billboard’s hip-hop chart, the first cast recording album to do so. Some reviewers questioned whether Hamilton qualified as a hip-hop album, and while hip-hop certainly is the dominant musical style the numbers incorporate jazz, rock and R&B as well, backed by a pit orchestra rather than a DJ.
Whatever categories it fits in, hip-hop was essential to Hamilton. It’s the structure on which the musical is constructed. It was the only genre that could tell the story Miranda wanted to tell.
Alexander Hamilton was a prolific writer, and Miranda incorporated his writings into the lyrics of Hamilton. Hamilton’s writings, though, didn’t lend themselves to the structure of a typical Broadway number. Hamilton had a way with words and he used a lot of them. Hip-hop has long valued tongue-twisting lyrical skills like these and Miranda needed a way to use as many words as he wanted without making the musical three hours long.
“I think it’s appropriate that we would need a musical style that transmits more words per minute than any other genre,” Miranda told the New York Times.
Hamilton also contains many lyrical and musical callbacks to hip-hop numbers. The title “Ten Duel Commandments” explicitly references The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments.” “Cabinet Battle No. 1” borrows the cadence of Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s “The Message.”
With Questlove, Miranda created The Hamilton Mixtape, with songs from the musical performed by hip-hop and R&B artists such as Common, Nas, Alicia Keys, John Legend and Chance the Rapper. He also posted a playlist of music that inspired Hamilton, the score of which he calls his “love letter to both hip-hop and musical theater.” If you’ve ever wondered if Gilbert and Sullivan and Andrew Lloyd Webber can coexist with Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar, here’s your chance to find out.
Earlier musicals have incorporated hip-hop, including Miranda’s In the Heights. In Hamilton, though, hip-hop is baked in, essential to the work and almost unimaginable without it. With Hamilton, Miranda has made hip-hop history, as well as musical theater history, not to mention American history. Amazing what a “young, scrappy and hungry” descendent of immigrants can accomplish. Descendents of immigrants — they get the job done, too.