فصل 08

Chapter 8

CONCERNING THE LADY AND THE TRAMP, IN OLDEN DAYS AND OUR OWN, with Reference to “HELPLESS “ AND MANY SONGS THAT FEATURE JA RULE

One cold day in february 1780, Elizabeth Schuyler arrived in Morristown, New Jersey, the winter headquarters of the raggedy American army. She was rich, well-born, lively, pretty–all the attributes of a princess, if the colonies needed a princess. Amid the social swirl of Morristown, she got to know Alexander Hamilton. He was poor, illegitimate, unpolished, unsophisticated–a hustling young officer who was trying, literally, to fight his way into respectability. They made for an odd combination. After barely a month, they were engaged. The musical theater canon offers many ways to depict this courtship: sweeping waltzes, soaring ballads, the conventions of stage romance. Lin had a better idea. Having grown up on hip-hop and R&B, he saw that the story of Alexander and Eliza’s relationship is hip-hop and R&B’s wheelhouse.

From the early days of hip-hop, producers have seen the appeal of putting rappers on records with female pop stars: Melle Mel with Chaka Khan, Rakim with Jody Watley. In the ’90s, when hip-hop was bounding toward the mainstream, these duets became a genre of their own. The breakthrough came when Mary J. Blige released a duet with Method Man, “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By,” that ruled the summer of ‘95. Here was a way for hardcore rappers to stay hard and R&B queens to stay regal, an arrangement that let two people from very different backgrounds bring their best selves together without losing what made them appealing in the first place. When Beyoncé (R&B star, veteran of church choirs) sang “Crazy in Love” with a guest verse from Jay Z (platinum rapper, former crack dealer), they didn’t just achieve the perfect expression of the genre: They made one of the greatest pop songs of all-time. “Helpless,” Lin’s song about Alexander and Eliza, doesn’t riff on this tradition–it is this tradition. Put “Helpless” next to “Crazy in Love”: A sweet girl sings about the boy she loves, then the rough-around-the- edges boy pops up to rap his reply. (In both cases, he doesn’t rap about her, he raps about himself.) Lin uses the conventions of a pop song to help a 21st-century audience understand 18th-century social distinctions. And he does it with the extreme concision that a theater song demands: A meeting, a courtship, and a wedding flit by in four minutes of stage time, in a song that still manages to reach back to the opening number (when the chorus sings “In New York, you can be a new man,”) and to set up the finale (when Eliza introduces herself by singing, “I have never been the type to try and grab the spotlight.”)

If you’re a fan of these R&B/hip-hop duets, or were within earshot of a radio in the early years of the century, you know that their all-time king is Ja Rule. Jennifer Lopez and Ashanti had huge hits thanks to his one-in-a-million voice (a bear roaring at the bottom of a well, approximately). One day, near the end of a very long Hamilton rehearsal, when everybody had gotten a little punchy, Lin delivered the last two lines of his “Helpless” rap in a Ja Rule growl. Anything to keep morale up on a long day, you might think. But a few weeks later, when Lin and his Eliza, played by Phillipa Soo, had begun to perform the song in actual shows for actual audiences, the distinctively gravelly growl was still there. Was it a tribute to the king of the hip-hop/R&B hybrid?

No, Lin said. “I do it because it makes Pippa laugh.” And he was right. When Alexander rumbled through his last couple of lines, Eliza did indeed let out a pretty peal of laughter as he whirled her into their wedding.