فصل 22

XXII

A PICTURE OF THE RECORDING STUDIO Featuring Learned Comments by QUESTLOVE AND A THROWN SHOE

If questlove isn’t the pope of hip-hop, he’s at least a high-ranking cardinal: He’s the drummer of The Roots, the author of the argumentative memoir Mo’Meta Blues, the leader of Jimmy Fallon’s house band, an all-around musical savant. A man of his stature ends up sitting through a lot of pitches from people who want to bring hip-hop to Broadway. These long ago took on a wearying familiarity: “You know, aerosol spray cans, up in da Bronx,’ breakdancing in the first act– that sort of thing,” he says. When people told him about Hamilton, he assumed it had to be another entry in this grim parade. Seeing it at the Public left him shocked. No corny Broadway overacting, no hip-hop clichés, no spray cans. “It sucker-punches everybody that’s ever seen it,” he says–himself included. And it left him asking a question that lingered long after the show moved uptown: “Is this the most revolutionary thing to happen to Broadway, or the most revolutionary thing to happen to hip-hop?”

“It’s been a while since hip-hop has been able to show its brilliance,” he says. “Now it’s sort of coasting. In the mid- to late-‘80s, when hip-hop was a teenager, it was discovering itself, and we were discovering it too. But hiphop is now 40 years old. I feel like Hamilton is hip-hop saying, See, we still got it! We still got some tricks up our sleeve!’ I would neeeever have thought that this is how you would shock people. Only a brilliant nerd like Lin would even think to take a Hamilton book on vacation.”

Lin felt, when he wrote Hamilton, that it could legitimize hip-hop in musical theater. He didn’t want do a rap version of Hair, the show that introduced rock to Broadway. He aimed at having an impact like Rent, which, in his words, “ended the conversation of whether rock music belonged on Broadway. If you look at half the scores on Broadway today, they use rock–it’s just in the DNA now. And this was my injection of hip-hop into the DNA.” (Don’t forget how recently this would have sounded like a provocation or a joke. As late as the summer of 2014–in the wake of the early closing of Holler If Ya Hear Me, a new musical featuring 2Pac songs–two New York Times critics mused in a podcast about whether hip-hop would ever work on Broadway.) Questlove agrees that Hamilton can demonstrate hip-hop’s value, but he puts the show in the context of all of American culture, not merely Broadway. “Just from the way the story is told, I feel like hip-hop is now a legitimate filter–though it’s always been legitimate to me. It’s as vital and important as dancing or poetry or singing,” he says.

Of all the improbable things about Hamilton, the fact that so many Hip-Hop luminaries share Questlove’s affection for the show brings it closest to the realm of science fiction. The greatest and most famous MCs (Busta Rhymes, Q-Tip, Common, Queen Latifah, Talib Kweli, Missy Elliott, Hammer, Chance the Rapper, Jay Z) and producers (RZA, DJ Premier, Salaam Remi, Pharrell Williams) came to see it, and stayed afterwards to tell the cast how much they loved it. “After seeing Hamilton it may be reasonable to put @Lin_Manuel in your top 5 MCs list,” tweeted Peter Rosenberg, the influential radio DJ for Hot 97 in New York. The BET Hip-Hop Awards invited Lin, Renée, and Daveed to participate in a cypher, trading freestyle rhymes alongside Questlove and Black Thought, the lead MC and co-founder of The Roots.

Daveed may be in the best position to appreciate how strange this embrace has been, since he’s not just a fan of these giants but a fellow hip-hop artist. “They’re all people I’ve wanted to meet and interact with,” he says. “If you told me I would get to meet them from doing a musical, I would’ve said that’s ludicrous.”

Questlove came to see the show again and again at the Public, bringing different friends each time. No matter what their background was, they kept loving it. “If I read this quote it would look like hyperbole, but I lived during the Thriller era, and it was almost the same thing,” he says. “Rarely did I see something that could unite demographics that had nothing to do with each other. My English teacher loved Thriller. The rambunctious kids who before November 30th, 1982”–the release date of Michael Jackson’s album–“were calling me racial slurs in the playground suddenly were saying, Teach me how to do the moonwalk.’” He didn’t just sing the show’s praises, he got involved. With Black Thought, he agreed to executive produce the cast album for Atlantic Records.

On a long Sunday, Questlove came to Avatar Studios to hear Lin, Leslie, Oak, Daveed, and Chris record their vocals. It was a day of discovery for those guys. Hearing the music every night through onstage of monitors didn’t prepare them for the full complexity of Lin’s score and Lac’s orchestrations, which the band had recorded the week before.

“Yo this band is cold,” said Daveed when he heard “Non-Stop” for the first time. “This sounds so cold I need a jacket,” said Oak when he heard “Cabinet Battle 1.”

After performing together eight times a week, they knew each other’s rhythms so well that when they went into the booth to record “My Shot,” the Sons of Liberty sounded like an actual rap group. “There’s chemistry there,” Questlove said, admiring the effect. He also admired the way that Lac ran the studio, marveling at how certain he was of the sound he was after, how eloquently he could describe it, and how persistent he was in pushing until he got it. “Wow, he makes me feel like a lazy schlub,” he said.

When it was Leslie’s turn to record “Wait for It,” his castmates stood in the control booth, listening with Lac, Tommy, Questlove, and Bill Sherman, one of the album’s producers. They were so impressed that somebody took off a shoe and threw it at the window, a sign of admiring faux-outrage. Lac told them it was time to record their harmony vocals. “I don’t want to sing shit right now,” said Oak.

If the hip-hop world has a favorite track in the show, it’s probably “Washington On Your Side.” Lin was delighted when Busta Rhymes told him that he loved the old-school way that Burr, Jefferson, and Madison finished each other’s sentences as they concocted a plan to destroy Hamilton. Talib Kweli told New York magazine that when he heard the song, he immediately thought, I want to know who wrote these lyrics. Questlove called it a “tug of war” song, which he has missed hearing in hip-hop lately. (Lac even put a Questlove homage in the song: The kick drum and bass swing way, way back behind the beat, a feel that Lac loved hearing on D’Angelo’s album Voodoo, which Questlove helped to mastermind.) Lin knew the song had the potential to be a blazing hiphop track. When he heard Daveed tearing through Lafayette’s verses, he realized that Lin the Writer didn’t need to abide by Lin the Rapper’s speed limit. It inspired him to write the blistering resignation speech that Jefferson delivers near the end of this song. What’s particularly impressive about the version on the cast album is that Daveed recorded it early on a Sunday, a time when the only actors awake in the whole city might have been in that studio. He was sipping tea and spitting fire from take one.

From the beginning, Lin wanted a cast album that would hold up as a pop album in its own right. He, Lac, and the other producers pursued this goal with the same relentlessness as every other aspect of the show. Most cast albums are recorded in three or four days: Lac insisted on two weeks, to get every vocal and instrumental part exactly right. Most ensembles are recorded in groups, by “miking the room.” Lac and his engineer Derik Lee recorded each performer separately.

He brought in Tim Latham to mix the album (that is, to balance, sharpen, and fine-tune the recorded tracks): Not many mixers have mixed Broadway records but also gotten shout-outs from A Tribe Called Quest, as Tim has. “The BoomBap master,” Questlove called him on Instagram. The most noticeable departure from the Broadway norm may be that unlike many cast albums, where the sound balance might be 70 percent vocals and 30 percent music, Tim estimates this album is 55 vocal and 45 instrumental. It owes a lot to Questlove’s input. As Lac and his team rushed to get the final mixes ready, he and Black Thought came to Atlantic Records to listen and give notes. Some of Questlove’s ideas were subtle, technical–an array of suggestions that encouraged Lac, Bill, and Tim to take more chances. One of them was simple, and was delivered with all the authority that a man of Questlove’s eminence possesses: “Turn the drums up.”

There’s an old complaint around Broadway that pop stars don’t adopt songs from musicals anymore, the way that Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald did. The reception of the Hamilton album made this complaint seem quaint. When it dropped, it charted higher in its first week of release than any Broadway album since Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot more than half a century earlier. Rolling Stone gave it four-and-a-half stars, declaring that it “proves that a cast soundtrack LP can work as a powerful, cohesive, exhilarating pop experience in the 21st century.” Billboard gave the album a five-star review, the first the editors had awarded since instituting the star system a few years earlier.

More intriguing, Billboard declared it the best rap album of the year. (And 2015 was a strong year for rap albums: It included, among others, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, another dazzling extension of what hip-hop can do.) Framing the Hamilton record as a rap album among other rap albums increases the odds that this musical could have the most ridiculous-sounding impact of all: Beyond legitimizing hip-hop on Broadway, and changing the way the public thinks about hip-hop, it might change hip-hop itself.

“This play’s just a baby right now,” says Questlove. “Who knows what it’ll do?”