Word of the Day: Zeitgeber

A zeitgeber is any external or environmental cue that entrains or synchronizes an organism's biological rhythms to the Earth's 24-hour light/dark cycle and 12-month cycle.

Miranda v. Trump

This has been my year of Hamilton.

In January, answering cultural prompts from various sources, I downloaded the musical soundtrack. I listened to it on the plane to a vacation, and Bob, hearing somewhat through the earphones, was dumbfounded. I was listening to hip-hop? What?

Rap: Older White Person p.o.v.

I have nothing against rap (which is easier to type than hip-hop, so that’s what I’m calling it). My only exposure to it is overhearing it in someone’s car, occasional TV shows, and weddings. (For those who don’t know me very well, I like classic rock, folk, singer/songwriters; my idol is James Taylor.)

At Nick and Sarah’s wedding in 2009, the younger people danced for hours on the quarry deck dance floor, covered in neon light jewelry, all of it to rap. They knew all the words. I did learn a few refrains, but it was pretty foreign. Then, wanting to be current, I looked up the songs, and the lyrics seemed to be all about drugs and strippers. So I decided it wasn’t for me. At the same time, I tried to be open-minded and not judge those who did like it.

As it happens, I have a pet peeve about the way people discuss their likes and dislikes. If you don’t like something, I have no problem with you saying so. What drives me crazy is hearing something like, “This music sucks.” Well, you’re not a music critic, and lots of people seem to really like it, so saying it sucks is annoying and prejudicial. You don’t like it; that in itself suggests that you have no frame of reference to legitimately judge its quality.

(I don’t like country music. I have no doubt that much of it is quite well done, but it’s just not to my taste. I don’t like horror movies. But I concede that at least some of them are well-written, -directed, and -acted. I don’t like seafood. Ditto. You get the idea.)

Okay, so my experience with rap music is, I believe, pretty close to that of others in my demographic. Enter Hamilton (she says in parentheses).

Parsing Hamilton

When I downloaded the album from iTunes, the song order was wrong (no idea why). But I didn’t know that yet.

So the first few times I tried to listen, I was not impressed. None of the first six or seven songs had any women in them, which I found really off-putting (to the point where I almost emailed the Fug Girls to ask them how it could be considered so good), and several of the songs in a row were those with the Burr/sir rhyme, which loses its cleverness when it is not part of a narrative. Most important, the story skipped from beginning to end to middle to nowhere.

So finally I thought to check the correct song order, fixed it, and tried again on the plane to Florida. And that is when I officially started my year of Hamilton.

Schuyler Sisters! What did I miss! Oui, oui, mon ami, je m’appelle Lafayette! Burn! and my favorite, Here comes the general! (I have a true singing crush on Christopher Jackson.) Starting with just my first (real) listen, I caught so many references to musical theater that I started writing them down. (I thought I was so clever to get them.) Carefully taught. C’est moi. I am the model of a modern major general. Sit down, John.

The soundtrack is all I listened to, all spring and all summer, especially on the long drives to Pennsylvania and Hanover. I watched every Ham4Ham on youtube. I watched the Tonys just to see some of the staging. I got the Hamiltome (oh, the book, the book—the design alone was a thrill). I watched the PBS special and the Miranda episode of Drunk History.

Then, this weekend, I got the mixtape. This is an album of established music stars singing the songs from Hamilton, and it is much, MUCH rappier than the soundtrack.

I just listened to some of it on the way home from the grocery store, and it is a revelation. Now that I know the lyrics and have gotten used to the cadence, I can actually decipher the new stanzas, even though they are “in” hip-hop. This older white woman can now appreciate a new music form: Hamilton is the gateway rap.

Needle Scratch

But how can this be the year of Hamilton, when all that matters is Trump? Every day since the election is a new harbinger of the mess we are in. Every tweet, every lie, every cabinet appointment of a rich white male leads me further from Hamilton’s elegance and eloquence; the elephant is in the room when you feel Trump’s presidency loom.

Here we have a multiracial, hyperintelligent, history-appreciating, immigrant-celebrating masterpiece. And there we have a white-supremacy-enabling, immigrant-bashing, science-hating, history-ignoring, gaslighting gasbag.

The popular vote is for Lin-Manual Miranda, progressivism, and the value of education. And yet, the next four years belong to Trump.

Split Decision

These two Americas, how do we reconcile? Doesn’t it seem as if the gulf is widening past cure? In the Trump universe, there is no such thing as a fact or a lie. There is no pattern without hypocrisy, no deference to history, no instinct for unity, no respect for the Constitution (history has its eyes on you).

I am on the side of Hamilton, for sure; but I live in a country (soon to be) ruled by men I do not respect or trust. All the ideas for protest and action that we are debating now, sometimes they seem like pipedreams—like we are figures on a stage, acting, never affecting the real world.

This time between election and inauguration, too, is dreamlike. Planning for the worst, hoping we are wrong about the forecast, marking time until our opponents (how sad to view them that way, in this country I love) make their moves and show us where we need to position our forces.

I am not standing still, I am lying in wait.