This song started with a dramaturgical impulse. song “The Ten Crack Commandments,” and explains why he wrote the song in the first place: I definitely had to take a dramatic license.įor “Ten Duel Commandments,” Miranda lays out the link to the Notorious B.I.G. Angelica, while she and Hamilton are soul mates, she reads him in a second and knows she can’t marry him so she lets her sister marry him to keep him in her life. To me, it’s extremely effective to see the courtship from Eliza’s perspective, then rewind the whole thing and then tell it again. Moreover, “Helpless” and “Satisfied” are a microcosm for the whole story which entirely depends on who tells it. She was married when Hamilton came into the Schuyler sisters lives. And in reality, she was married when they met. But I think that my brain wanted me to forget because it’s stronger dramatically if societally she can’t marry you. I actually forgot that Phillip had 15 children. ![]() He transcends the struggle, and if you look at your favorite rapper, that’s most likely what they did.Īnd here, when Angelica sings in “Satisfied” that she has to marry a rich man because she has to be the heir to her father Philip Schuyler, Miranda admits to eliding reality a bit: Hamilton literally wrote a verse to get him off an island - that’s the most hip-hop shit ever. Croix - the island he was from - he wrote a poem about the wreckage consequently, wealthy people on the island recognized how good the poem was and were like: let’s get this kid an education, he shouldn’t be working behind a desk.Īfter that, I decided I had to write this play. In that chapter you see how Hamilton had this Dickensian early life that consisted of constant trauma.Īfter a hurricane destroys St. I read the “Alexander Hamilton” biography in 2009, and in the second chapter I realized that I was going to turn this into a play. Miranda lays out where both Hamilton and Hamilton originally came from: Some of the better finds in the mix include this note on a section of “Hurricane,” the song where protagonist Alexander Hamilton explains his own backstory in the West Indies. Or you can just look through his own commentary archive and see all his Hamilton notes, not in song order, but isolated from anyone else’s observations. Genius solved for this by highlighting his contributions in green - it’s easy to look through any given Hamilton song and either read all the notes, or just find out what Miranda had to say about it. In the years since, his commentary has been somewhat overshadowed by other contributors, who explain virtually every line in every song in depth. Miranda has always made it clear that writing Hamilton involved an obsessive, nerdy steeping in hip-hop hits and historical sources, and when the play first debuted, he put some of that nerdiness online, annotating his own lyrics at Genius by discussing his sources, references, inspirations, and intentions. At the same time, millions of first-timers are also coming into the fold, driven by curiosity, but possibly lacking any of the deep-dive steeping in Hamil-lore that would help them understand the history behind the show - either the American history it interprets and observes, or the history behind its creation.įortunately, there’s a terrific resource for “ Hamilton lyrics, explained”: the extensive Hamilton notes archive at, particularly the notes from writer, creator, and star Lin-Manuel Miranda himself. ![]() Millions of Hamil-fans who only interacted with the show via the soundtrack, individual one-off performances, and ancillary online material now have plenty of new grist for their fandom mills, and a renewed interest in examining the show. Over the weekend, though, the recorded version debuted to more than 50 million subscribers on Disney Plus - and that’s not even counting the new members who signed up for the service just to find out what all the Hamilton fuss is about. But due to access limitations - the high cost and the way shows are limited to a few cities at a time - only around 2.6 million people have actually seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s historical musical on stage. In the five years since the show debuted on Broadway, it’s been a cultural phenomenon. The arrival of the filmed version of Hamilton on Disney Plus opened the musical up to a vast new audience.
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