So I was like, "today's the day.
"I'm gonna make this video".
So I put on an outfit that I liked,
and then I did my makeup,
and then I was putting on cologne,
and I was like, "why am I putting on cologne?"
In the fictional underwater city of Rapture from the Bioshock Universe,
a city is built outside of the jurisdiction of the nations of Earth
for the express purpose of unrestrained progress of science business and art.
Unrestrained by laws,
unrestrained by morality,
unrestrained by religion,
a libertarian's utopia, where a man in progress is truly free
until it immediately falls into a drug-filled capitalism murder nightmare.
In this city exists a prodigiously sociopathic artist by the name of Sander Cohen.
He does fucked up stuff.
He does quite a bit of fucked up stuff.
He does it in the name of art, and I love him for it.
We love him for it.
He's a dope character and I fuck with him.
I truly do.
Art unhinged cruel insane art,
art that shouldn't be allowed to be made.
This has something to do with 'Hamilton' and 'Borat 2'.
'Hamilton' is a musical where people be rapping.
There's a lot of motific information and moments of emotional intensity...
that, give me chills.
There's this part:
[ "The Schuyler Sisters" Playing ]
There's wildly talented performers.
In addition to this, there is online discourse.
Part 1: Revisionism.
'Hamilton' is so liberal.
It's dripping with filthy lib energy.
Liberal in the leftist sense, but the disdain that Malcolm X spoke of them with.
Signaling progressive values on a service level without
actually doing anything meaningful in the text.
A full cast of people of color about the history of America,
but nothing is presented about slavery at all.
A couple little feminism clapback lines:
[ "The Schuyler Sisters" Playing ] ♪ I'ma compel him to include women in the sequel ♪
♪ Work ♪
But, actually, all three of the women with speaking roles
are love interests for the main character.
Except Peggy with her sad little line.
♪ And Peggy ♪
And whatever you want to call this:
[ "Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)" Playing ] ♪ Immigrants, we get the job done ♪
- Please, clap.
It's your nice mom that doesn't understand they/them pronouns.
It's Joe Biden getting a standing ovation being called a "communist".
It is-- 'Hamilton' is brunch.
It's also good.
It's shit's dope.
Like, the music and the writing and the dancing and stuff.
The performers are the best ones that exist,
the motific work is deep and satisfying,
the emotional climax is like, "Right Hand Man" and "Satisfied", or...
The good.
[ "The Room Where It Happens" Playing ] ♪ I've got to be (the room where it happens) ♪
I know I'm not alone in getting swallowed by the soundtrack for a time in my life.
The art is good, the issues are moral.
Historical revisionism is the practice of challenging accepted historical canons.
It's not a bad thing, it's a thing you have to constantly do,
especially if, like me, from North America,
and your history is written all by white men.
You have to keep going back and finding new sources to challenge your narratives and
expand your understanding of how we tell our stories.
Where it turns into historical negationism is when the past is
purposefully misinterpreted for a variety of purposes.
So 'Hamilton'--
'Hamilton' is a romanticized optimistic rose-tinted reconstruction of American history.
It is on purpose that it tends to be.
By which, of course, I mean, I was researching about this
and I found out Hamilton didn't even know 2Pac.
From what I glean of the cast and creators of 'Hamilton',
they love America.
They want America to be a better place.
They want to go back to the good parts of America and take those
and then see the bad parts and leave them and deconstruct them.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has said a million times in interviews that he knows
about the historical inaccuracies in his show.
- Talking about the creative license that you took...
- Bending... - Yeah, I forgot.
But he doesn't mind because the story is a bit more compelling the way that he put it.
He took creative liberties, happily, to tell a feeling's story.
- I forgot and I think my brain wanted me to forget,
because it's stronger dramatically.
My point is:
They transparently didn't strive to make a bold anti-establishment point about America.
They made a hopeful fantastical interpretation of America's founding,
heightened and mythologized with song and dance.
If you take the show as pure fiction,
it's just a compelling story about legacy and love,
and the trappings of ambition and...
I don't know about you, guys, but I think that this smells like Obama.
It opened during a time where the optics of America and,
I mean, optics.
- We tortured some folks.
Was the face of the modern world incrementally progressing to a better place.
Cool guy president,
cool tech guys making cool new technology,
what could go wrong?
Racism was over, do you remember that?
The dark underbelly of America was surely shunned and dying from a lack of sunlight.
Or maybe it was gonna make a really big comeback.
All of this becomes uncomfortably obvious in the group interview that was released alongside
the live performance of 'Hamilton' on Disney+ when it dropped in 2020.
'Hamilton: History Has Its Eyes on You'.
Robin Roberts interviews the cast and it's...
It's wrong.
I did not enjoy watching these by all accounts lovely people tried to put some
connection between 'Hamilton' as a black event in the Black Lives Matter 2020 protest because
there is not a connection.
Because 'Hamilton' is not a pro-black or people of color text.
Of course making the cast all black and people
of color IS a pro-black and people of color thing to do.
It's a good thing for representation and opportunity to get this,
but you could easily make the whole cast white with no effect on the story.
In fact, you could do about three changes to
the script to annihilate any mention of slavery or sexism for the whole thing.
Leslie Odom Jr. to his credit is the only person that iIfeel like,
really attacked this tension head-on.
Of his own volition, he brings out a young woman's efforts to get in touch with him to
ask him a question and how much work this person put into reaching him,
and finally they got him and the question that she had for him was,
that he says this, right at the camera:
Isn't 'Hamilton' just black people telling more white people stories?
I was like, "damn girl, get his ass".
Because it's true.
'Hamilton' masquerades as progressive with the chic and veneer of rap music
in black people without actually doing anything radical in text whatsoever,
and genuinely not representing any black people's stories in American history.
It's the most gracious interpretation you could imagine.
And Leslie just brings it up!
Instead of doing this kind of uncomfortable tiptoe around like,
"it's black people in the show, but then black people in the streets..."
And he does not say in response, "yes, college age student.
"I will publicly say that this international multi-million hit show that I owe a great deal to
"is white people's stories told by black people."
He kind of dodges the question.
His answer is: "I look forward to the story that you write".
But is that dodging the question?
In essence, what he proposes is we find a place in the canon for 'Hamilton' and
do a better job addressing our historical dramas going forward,
which is a potential answer to the strange tension we have with 'Hamilton' now,
with its Obama era liberalism in the face of a Trump administration
and the rise of white nationalism and hell world America.
'Hamilton' exists, all we have is moving forward.
Or do we want Leslie to flame his own show?
Do we boycott 'Hamilton'?
Is 'Hamilton' cancel?
Part 2: Morally Dubious Art.
Older men. Okay.
In 'Borat 2', regular babysitter Jeanise Jones was deceived into thinking she was
taking part of a documentary about young women who were being groomed into marrying older men.
In reality, it's fucking Borat.
Maria Bakalova with her downright absurd
improv chops conned the fuck out of Jeanise and convinced her that she was this young lady
with her brain completely filled with this abusive sexist rhetoric.
- I'm not showing you anything.
And what's hilarious and surprisingly moving is what happens out of that,
because Jeanise responds in this manner that is so patient, and kind,
and loving, and bold, that it plays as both superhuman and so human it hurts.
- You are pretty.
You are pretty--
Girl, look at yourself.
Look.
Yes... You are beautiful.
Just think because I don't think you need to change.
- I will think about it. - Hey, that's all I want.
That's all I want, I want you to think about it.
That's all I want from you, just to think about it.
She's so nice that the comedy bits in this comedy movie about pranking people
is completely outshined by just the genuine quality of her character.
They eventually use it in the editing bay to be the
turning point of the film for Maria's character,
where she starts to become more empowered.
And we go back to Jeanise a few times as a result.
Jeanise invested a lot of emotional energy
into this fake kid and worried about her for months after the filming was done,
until 'Borat 2' dropped and she's a main character.
According to her own testament,
Jeanise felt hurt and lied to upon the release of the movie
because she'd been months anxious and it was a lie.
It was a complete fabrication.
She experienced real needless pain as a result of
a lie in order for Sacha Baron Cohen to use her to make art.
And the art?
Shit's dope.
Jeanise was essentially used, manipulated and weaponized,
so that the quality of her heart and mentorship was put on shining display
to create a narrative about empowering women and dismantling sexist abuse of rhetoric.
Afterwards, fans of the movie raised tens of thousand dollars for
and Sacha Baron Cohen donated a hundred thousand to her charity,
but that's kind of beside the fact.
This was a messed up deception to partake in.
She genuinely felt betrayed. At least for a little.
She's also not the only one that felt that way about the movie, obviously.
But the shit is dope!
The art's dope, that's not up for debate.
Jeanise's involvement MADE the movie.
It wouldn't work without what they did.
So what do we do now with this good piece of
art that has an element of it that has a deleterious effect?
What do we do when birth of a nation needs to be taught in
schools because of the revolutionary film techniques developed by D. W. Griffith?
What do we do when Michael Jackson is impossible to remove from our contemporary musical history?
All right, just a note.
I would normally put something about Joanne Kathleen Rowling in this part,
but my subject matter is more about the text itself being the issue,
at hand, whereas with Joanne Kathleen Rowling I think it's more about
her influence being used after the fact
like, outside, extracurricular of the text;
even though I know there's issues-- Just watch the Sarah Z's video
and the Lindsay Ellis' video
and that one girl's video that I don't remember, but she did a really good job.
What do we do?
Part 3: Personal Bias.
I discovered things about myself while writing this.
I'm biased towards art.
I like good art.
I like it so much.
I can't stop liking it and it seems like on a gut level more than I don't like
morally dubious things, I seem to like art.
There are many pieces of art that I personally don't like,
but I have an academic appreciation for and a respect,
just because of craftsmanship.
I have some friends that are much farther left than me that are
confident their ability to cut artists out of their consumption on the grounds that:
"_____ shouldn't work anymore",
or "_____ doesn't need my support",
or "_____ should never have been made".
But I can't do it!
♪ My body's tellin' me yes ♪
Gotta clap again.
The fact is Lin-Manuel Miranda didn't set
out to interrogate America's blood-stained racist history.
I'd go so far as to say as the inclusion of an honest depiction of slavery and civil rights
would derail the tone of 'Hamilton' to the point of just unwatchability.
The weight of slavery would break 'Hamilton'.
You can't tell that story in the background just to have slavery.
And Alexander Hamilton's life wasn't about slavery.
If you're going to do an artistic depiction of it,
probably more about legacy and controversy in writing,
which is what it is.
It seems to me that the lens through which 'Hamilton' redesigns American
history was meant to draw a connection from the origins of the country to
the supposed progressive incremental progress of the Obama 2015 administration,
when the musical came out. Meaning:
Let's go back to the canonical story of our founding and humanize that story and
draw connections from it to where we are now, so there's a continuous
narrative line that hopefully will continue on an upwards trajectory.
That's what it set out to do narratively and it did it, it succeeded.
Changing the tone to make much of the main cast as deeply unlikable and realistic as Twitter might demand
would make something probably joyless, and weird, and extremely radical and uncomfortable;
which I'm fine with!
Ah, fuck. How do I say this without getting canceled?
In essence, it's a different show.
People want a different show that isn't 'Hamilton',
but we have 'Hamilton' instead.
So what I see boils down to an argument of whether or not the show should exist.
Does the damage it causes by breathing past grisly details outweigh its value as a piece of art?
How much damage does it do the communist revolution for your
parents to see 'Hamilton' and come home and be like,
"that's the America I know, we need to get back to that.
"Joe Biden!"?
We cannot erase 'Hamilton'.
We can't erase essential pieces of our artistic and cultural history
and that's where 'Hamilton' is.
That's what you call a show this big.
But like, I'm graciously interpreting Leslie Odom Jr.'s opinion:
We can give them different contexts,
So finally, is 'Hamilton' bad?
I'm biased,
I'd rather good art exist.
In some level, I am more offended by bad art than I am from excellent art
with morally dubious messaging or origins.
Which leads me to wondering where my line is.
How far can I push it?
In the case of cancelled, but important musicians, there's the added variety of,
"are they currently alive and taking responsibility?
"Or using their influence to cause more damage?"
I know I made that joke earlier, but I'm uncomfortable listening to R. Kelly today,
but I can't say I blame my kid for going on to listen to R. Kelly in the future.
He is essential to the R&B tradition.
Fucking vibe my unborn child.
And I start to freak out.
I'm like, "where's my line?"
And I think about fictional underwater murder artist Sander Cohen.
- Oh, God, you sick!
Fuck, let me out of there!
And I'm charmed by this fictional character.
I am against murder. Leave a comment if you're against murder.
Or leave a comment if you're pro-murder.
I don't think we should lie to ourselves about our
history or reality just to feel better without working to truly make it so,
but I like 'Hamilton'.
Not to give credit to one of the most massive corporations
in the entire world that's probably going to be the end of us one day,
but what comes to mind is the Disney racist cartoon disclaimer.
"This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.
"These stereotypes were then and are wrong--"
Were wrong then-- There's a typo in my quote!
I copy-pasted it.
"Rather than remove this content,
"we want to acknowledge its harmful impact,
"learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together".
So I don't know.
That's it. That's the end of the video.
No thesis, no conclusions.
I was just here to waste your time.
Can we just admire the makeup for a second?
Because I did a really good job and then I really show--
You can hear my microwave in the background, that's cool.