فصل 11

Xi WHEREIN MOBB DEEP IS SAMPLED AND THE IMMORTAL BIGGIE SMALLS IS REVIVED

“I want to add a sample,” lin said. He had come to the theater early one morning to listen to Alex Lacamoire’s soundcheck with the band. He was a little bleary-eyed and was standing at the front of the nearly empty theater wearing his “REHEARSAL IS THE BEST PART “ hoodie.

“We cleared it,” he told Lac. “Let’s use it.” He propped his laptop on the edge of the stage, and played the song that he had cleared–that is, that he had gotten permission to quote in the show: “Shook Ones, Pt. II” by Mobb Deep, one of the grimy classics of ’90s New York hip-hop. He had incorporated one of the song’s best-known lyrics in “My Shot.” Now he wanted to evoke the distinctive siren effect that opens the track: a sharp rising squeal, a sound of trouble on the way. Lac cocked an ear toward Lin’s laptop, staring into the middle distance. If he had heard this song before, he didn’t say so. “That’s cool,”he said after listening a few times. He wondered if they should use a snippet from the actual record. Lin said he would rather not. Before making Hamilton, he co-wrote a new musical version of the movie Bring It On, which Lac music-directed. The experience taught them how tricky it can be to blend prerecorded samples and live instruments in a theater. They ended up using Ableton to supply some of the sounds in Hamilton: record scratches, the rewind sound effect in “Satisfied,” some of the drum loops, etc. But wherever possible, they tried to generate every sound from within the 10-person band. Lin thought there might be a way to evoke the Mobb Deep squeal that way. “Steampunk sampling,” he calls it.

Alex explored up and down his keyboard, trying to find the note. “Let’s do it with a violin,” Lin suggested. “With crazy vibrato.”

Alex described to the four-person string section what he was looking for. A violinist began to scrape away, looking for the right tone.

“It’s subtle,” said Lin, “but Mobb Deep fans will love it.” Alex decided he was ready to try it. The band tore into “My Shot,” with Lin rapping along. When he got to the Mobb Deep line–“I’m only 19 but my mind is older”– one of the violins unleashed a shrill, dissonant tone that slid higher as it went.

The hip-hop fans in the room laughed in recognition. Lin beamed, and threw a couple of triumphant middle fingers in the air. Hamilton is laced with these shout-outs to the traditions that birthed it, both hip-hop (DMX, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) and musical theater (South Pacif ic, The Last Five Years). These serve, in part, as invitations, a signal to people from diverse backgrounds that the show is meant for them. When Lin rapped, in the opening number of In the Heights, that “It’s gotten too darn hot, like my man Cole Porter said,” he was creating a crossroads for himself, where much of his subsequent work has appeared, Hamilton very much included.

In this show, though, the shout-outs have a subtle second meaning. They’re another way of saying that American history can be told and retold, claimed and reclaimed, even by people who don’t look like George Washington and Betsy Ross. Alexander Hamilton, who spent his life trying to live down his lowly origins, knew better than the other founders that even something as unprecedented and revolutionary as the United States would carry traces of many tangled traditions–the same way that “My Shot” carries the DNA of “Shook Ones,” which in turn sampled Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, who had their own constellations of riffs, quotes, inspirations.

The predecessor who gets sampled the most in Hamilton is the Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the King of New York, the greatest rapper of all time. Lin’s annotations throughout this book reveal the many subtle ways that Biggie influenced the show. In one song, “Ten Duel Commandments,” the influence couldn’t be more direct or profound.

Lin and Tommy wanted to explain the rules of the code duello in the first act. That way, when the show rose to its second-act climax, the Hamilton-Burr confrontation, they could skip the mechanics of dueling, and focus on the question that has tortured historians for two centuries: What happened on that cliff in Weehawken? What were Hamilton and Burr doing up there?

Biggie’s song “Ten Crack Commandments” gave Lin the template he needed. The rules of dueling slip neatly into spots originally occupied by the rules of selling crack. The enormous shadow of Biggie himself proved useful too, as his story helps to collapse the distance between the revolutionary era and our own time.

How, you think, could someone with the brilliance and the survival instincts of Alexander Hamilton find himself looking down the barrel of a gun, giving his friend-turnednemesis a chance to put a .54-caliber bullet in his spine? It’s not so hard to imagine. Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G., etc., etc.) was a lyrical genius, a master storyteller, an inspiration to millions, and nobody’s fool. He was shot and killed at 24. The murder still hasn’t been solved.