[Music]
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.