Hip-Hopera Americana
Hamilton, Chi-raq, and the ancient Greek roots of modern verse drama
Hamilton, the Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda that premiered on February 17, 2015, and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, released in theaters in select cities across the United States on December 4, 2015, made fitting bookends to last year’s slate of new dramatic offerings. Both are written almost entirely in verse — in particular the verse of rap and hip-hop — and both share an interest in exploring two issues relevant to American history, namely race and the destructive power of firearms.
In large part because of their use of verse and their historical bent, the two works have been praised individually as “ambitious,” “revolutionary,” even “game-changing,” Yet Hamilton and Chi-Raq are not wholly lacking in predecessors, and some of the most fitting parallels to these two modern dramatic productions can be found in the tragedies that were performed yearly in Athens throughout the fifth century BCE. These ancient works, like Hamilton and Chi-Raq, were composed in verse and often tackled topics of historical import.
Even as Hamilton and Chi-Raq move modern dramatic story-telling in new directions, they thus return to some of the oldest practices of the theater and reignite long-standing debates about the relationship between art and real life. Greek tragedy, meet your latest successor, American hip-hopera.
As an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the plot of Chi-Raq should be familiar to classicists. A rivalry between two fictional Chicago gangs, the Spartans and Trojans, stands in for the war between Athens and Sparta in late fifth-century Greece. In both the ancient comedy and the modern movie, a sex strike initiated by women leads to a cessation of hostilities (for more on Chi-Raq’s borrowing of the sex strike theme from Lysistrata and other places, see Helen Morales’ recent article).
Chi-Raq borrows more from Greek antiquity than just its plot. It also looks to the conventions of the ancient theater for its use of verse, a debt explicitly acknowledged early on in the movie. The first character to speak is Samuel L. Jackson’s Dolomedes, who breaks the dramatic illusion (as he does throughout the film) to gesture toward the Aristophanic background of the movie we are about to watch:
In the year 411 BC — that’s before baby Jesus y’all — the great Aristophanes penned a play
satirizing his day
and in the style of his time
‘stophanes made that shit rhyme.
Transplanted today we retain his verse.
To show our love for the universe.
To someone familiar with Aristophanes’ Greek, Dolomedes’ declaration might at first seem odd, even wrong. Aristophanes’ verse didn’t rhyme. But it was indeed “in the style of his time,” and Dolomedes presents Chi-Raq as belonging to the same tradition, featuring a type of verse that is recognizable and familiar to an audience today.
That verse is rap and hip-hop. Dolomedes’ opening statement serves as a prelude to a performance by local rapper “Chi-raq” (Nick Cannon), “government name” Demetrius Dupree, of his hit “My City.” As Chi-raq spits his lines, his adoring audience does a choreographed dance. After the show, Dupree and his girlfriend Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) return to her apartment where they exchange banter that repackages lines from Tupac and Biggie. Prose is not absent from Chi-Raq — and below I will consider some of the places and ways it is used — but rhyming verse infused with the ethos of hip-hop and rap is the principal mode of delivery in the film.
Hamilton contains, in both absolute and proportional terms, even more verse than Chi-Raq. It is a “sung-through” musical (or perhaps in this case “rapped-through”), conducted almost entirely in sung verse, in contrast to the usual musical pattern of using verse for the songs and prose elsewhere. This makes Hamilton different from other Broadway musicals that have drawn their stories from American history, such as 1776 and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. It is also a boon for those of us who have been unable to see Hamilton in person; almost all of the show is included on the soundtrack, or so I’m told by friends who have both seen the production in New York and listened to the recording.
Rap and hip-hop are the main (although not sole) musical idioms of the show. Once the show’s lyrics were published online, enterprising fans dissected them for their numerous allusions to other rap and hip-hop songs, a project to which Lin-Manuel Miranda has contributed. The soundtrack even ranked as the top-selling album on Billboard’s Rap Chart for the week of November 28, and it has remained in the top 10 since.
In their use of verse, Hamilton and Chi-Raq belong to a beleaguered theatrical tradition. Although verse was central to theatrical performance in the West for millennia, starting in the nineteenth century prose began to eclipse it as the primary medium for dramatic performance. Today verse-drama for the most part languishes in a state of disrepute. When new verse-dramas are staged — something that evidently happens with some frequency according to one counting that identified more 500 English-language verse-dramas composed between 1935–1992 — they often meet with scorn from critics. Charles Spencer, the chief theater critic for The Telegraph for many years, has been particularly hard on them. In 2008, he wrote of his difficulty in “cheer[ing] the current bizarre revival in verse drama,” and, five years earlier, he called one such production “freshly squeezed bullshit” and “as vile a pile of steaming codswallop as it has ever been my misfortune to step in” in a review titled “You Should Fear the Verse.”
Complaints like these about the use of verse in a dramatic production would have made little sense in ancient Greece, where all dramatic works were composed in verse. Ancient Greek playwrights were criticized not for the fact that they wrote in verse (a dramatic work not in verse would have been nearly unfathomable), but when they used verse in unusual ways. It was on precisely these grounds that Aristotle censured Chaeremon’s Centaur. Although the play does not survive today, Aristotle tells us in the Poetics that it was “rather unnatural” because it contained dactylic hexameters, a type of verse that did not belong to the standard repertoire for drama.
Hamilton and Chi-Raq stand apart from other modern verse-dramas through their use of rap and hip-hop. Some of the few previous entrants in this field include the 2001 movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera (which retells Bizet’s opera in the modern day U.S. with rap and hip-hop numbers in place of the original songs), the 2008 Broadway musical In the Heights (also by Hamilton’s creator Miranda), and the short-lived Broadway show Holler If Ya Hear Me (which featured the music of Tupac). We might number in that group also R. Kelly’s serialized Trapped in the Closet, whose 33 installments were released between 2005 and 2012 (according to a recent interview, Kelly has material for still more chapters).
In their use of the verse of rap and hip-hop, Hamilton and Chi-Raq yet again hearken back to ancient drama. Ancient sources inform of us of various different modes of delivery in Greek drama. One mode is entirely unaccompanied by music and is meant to simulate speech even as it is composed in verse. Aristotle calls the meter typically used in these portions of a play, the iambic trimeter, “especially conversational.” There were also portions of the plays that were accompanied by music, usually the playing of the aulos, and sung.
In addition to these two modes, there was a third type of delivery, which occupied a middle position between speech and song. It involved musical accompaniment but was not fully sung, making it closer to speech. Xenophon uses the verb katalegein (“to recite”) to describe this method of delivery, other sources the noun parakatalogē, which is usually translated as “recitative.”
Rap would seem especially close to this third category of ancient delivery. Rap, like parakatalogē (or at least what we’re told of it in a few ancient sources), often has some form of musical accompaniment even while it is not fully melodic and sung. I can’t help but wonder if Kevin Willmott, who co-wrote Chi-Raq with Spike Lee, was envisioning something like parakatalogē when, in response to being asked why he wrote Chi-Raq in verse, he explained:
I was in the play Lysistrata in college and I realized how much it had an African American kind of cadence, it really sounded like black people. I’m talking about literally the Greek Aristophanes B.C. thing. It really lent itself to spoken word, to rap and rhyme.
Chi-Raq leaves little question about its political message. The impetus for the women’s sex strike is Lysistrata’s horror at the death of a young girl, killed as a bystander in a gang shooting. In the movie, the scourge of gun violence afflicts the African-American communities of Chicago, even while other communities — including those with predominately white populations — contribute to it.
Hamilton is concerned with similar issues. Of the prominent male characters who die in the course of the show, all save one, George Washington, do so at the end of the barrel of a gun. No fewer than six of the show’s songs — “Alexander Hamilton” “My Shot,” “Stay Alive,” “Yorktown,” “What’d I Miss?” and “Cabinet Battle #1” — allude to slavery. And the presence of slavery and gun violence in Hamilton is not merely a result of the historical record (Hamilton and others died after being shot; slavery existed). Miranda wanted his musical to tackle these issues. He has called slavery and a culture of gun violence “the two original sins of our country.”
Where Chi-Raq addresses race directly and repeatedly, Hamilton does so in a more oblique manner. True, the topic is broached towards the beginning of Hamilton’s opening song (“And everyday while slaves were being slaughtered and carted/away across the waves”), but this and the other appearances of slavery in the show constitute passing references. While Miranda wrote an entire song on slavery, it failed to make final version of the show. If guns and race can, legitimately, be called the main themes of Chi-Raq, this is not the case for Hamilton, which instead focuses on its title character’s immense ambition and indefatigable drive (here, I am talking about the content of the musical, not the decision to have a multi-ethnic cast portray white historical figures).
It is often a tricky enterprise when a dramatic work wades into the realm of history. This is a lesson that is borne out by Greek tragedy. In 494 BCE, the Persians sacked the city of Miletus, a close ally of Athens located on the Aegean coast of present-day Turkey. Only a few years later, the playwright Phrynichus put on in Athens a tragedy with the title The Sack of Miletus. Although the play does not survive, Herodotus tells us that The Sack of Miletus caused its audience to weep and resulted in the Athenians both fining Phrynichus and forbidding future performances of his tragedy, all because he had reminded them of their “native (oikēia) pains.”
With a spirit similar to the one that prompted the Athenians to punish Phrynichus for his Sack of Miletus, many have criticized Chi-Raq and Spike Lee. When the project was first announced, there were cries, and even an attempted intervention by Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel, for the movie’s title to be changed. A portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, the name is an actual nickname for Chicago coined in response to the overwhelming violence in the city. In the run-up to the movie’s release, Chi-Raq was called “harmful” and a work that “trivialize[s] the suffering of the men, women and children of Chicago’s West and South side.” Despite the involvement of Chicagoans in the production of the movie — including Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother and nephew were murdered in Chicago in 2008 — many of the criticisms against Chi-Raq have come from inhabitants of Chicago itself, the oikos of the pains that are depicted in the film.
In fifth-century Athens, tragedians after Phrynichus avoided his fate by retreating to the world of myth. We know of no tragedy after the late 470s that dramatized a historical topic — although tragedians didn’t shy away from commenting on contemporary events. Euripides put on his Trojan Women, a tragedy about the brutal destruction of Troy by an invading Greek army, around the same time that Athens sent a military expedition to Melos to obliterate the island and its people. It is hard not to detect some resonance between the events of Athens’ history and those portrayed on stage, even if we cannot be sure that Euripides wrote his tragedy with the Melian saga in mind or that he intended an audience to draw those connections.
Chi-Raq, even though it portrays made-up events in a stylized, unreal Chicago, enjoys none of the safety that myth provided Euripides. The movie flirts with and flouts the boundary between art and real life. Towards Chi-Raq’s opening, graphics inform us of, on the one hand, the number of American deaths in Afghanistan (2,349) between 2001 and 2015 and in Iraq (4,424) between 2003 and 2011, and, on the other hand, the number of murders in Chicago (7,365) over the same periods. Soon after these figures are presented, there plays a brief recording of a speech against gun violence delivered by Rev. Michael Pfleger, the Roman Catholic priest from St. Sabina Church on Chicago’s South Side who was the inspiration for John Cusack’s character, Fr. Mike Corrigan. Before the casualty statistics and Pfleger’s voice, we hear and see the lyrics to Nick Cannon’s song “Pray 4 My City,” one line from which declares: “Dis story a fact.” How literally are we to take that claim as Chi-Raq moves from this historical frame to its fictional story?
The lines between fiction and history blur again when Fr. Mike delivers a sermon at the funeral for Patti, the seven-year-old girl killed in gunfire. His speech takes the form of a diatribe that touches on many real life issues: lax gun laws; the NRA and its influence on politicians; mass incarceration, called “the new Jim Crow”; a lack of economic development in poor urban communities; systemic discrimination by political and financial institutions; the culture of “stop snitchin’”; and so on. We can imagine words like these populating actual eulogies for black victims of gun violence.
Spike Lee has said that “the best writing” of the movie is found in this scene. I would disagree, not because of the points that Corrigan makes, but because of how he delivers them. At this moment, Chi-Raq abandons the verse that serves it so well elsewhere, and as a result Corrigan’s speech loses, for me, some of the force it might have otherwise had.
Verse’s potential for confronting complex issues becomes clear in Hamilton. Consider Hamilton’s dismissal, in “Cabinet Battle #1,” of Thomas Jefferson’s arguments that the newly formed federal government should not assume the states’ debts because Virginia has already paid its own:
A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor
Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor
“We plant seeds in the South. We create.”
Yea, keep ranting
We know who’s really doing the planting
If Lee and Willmott chose not to compose Corrigan’s speech in verse because they feared the format was improper for dealing with serious topics, Hamilton proves that such a fear was misplaced. Like Corrigan, Hamilton lays bare some of the causes of racial inequality in the United States, yet he, unlike Corrigan, does so in brilliant, memorable verse.
Today, when we speak of “Greek” tragedy, we refer to an art form that is perhaps best described as “Athenian” or “Attic” tragedy. The thirty-two Greek tragedies which survive intact were written by Athenians for initial performances in Athens. Many of those tragedies, from Aeschylus’ Persians and Eumenides, to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, to Euripides’ Medea, Children of Heracles, Suppliant Women, Trojan Women, and Ion, implicate Athens in their stories in some way or other. The same could be said of other tragedies — Phrynichus’ Sack of Miletus and Phoenician Women, Aeschylus’ Eleusinians, Euripides’ Erechtheus — that are preserved only in fragments. Plato tells us in his Laches (183a-b2) that any tragedian who thinks highly of his work makes straight for Athens to put on his plays. As this claim suggests, although tragic performances could be seen in many locations throughout the ancient Mediterranean, Athens was the center of the tragic universe in antiquity.
Plutarch captures something of the special relationship between Athens and tragedy in his essay “Whether the Athenians were more renowned in war or wisdom.” To make the determination set out in his title, Plutarch compares Athens’ military prowess with its wisdom (sophia), by which he means its excellence in various types of art (technē), including poetry. When turning to this topic, he presents tragedy as Athens’ greatest achievement in the literary and performance arts:
Athens, to be sure, possessed no famous writer of either epic or melic poetry. And for the dramatic poets, the Athenians considered the writing of comedy so undignified and vulgar a business that there was a law forbidding any members of the Areopagus to write comedies. But tragedy blossomed forth and won great acclaim, becoming a wondrous entertainment for the ears and the eyes of the men of that age… (Plutarch de gloria Atheniensium 348b-c, trans. Babbitt)
According to Plutarch, Athens afforded tragedy the environment necessary for it to flourish.
As Athens and tragedy, so America and the new type of dramatic story-telling embodied by Chi-Raq and Hamilton. These two works were written by Americans, tell American stories, (stretching from the country’s founding to its present), and, furthermore, convey those stories through a distinctively American musical style, rap and hip-hop. There’s good reason why the phrase “as American as apple pie” has been used in reviews of both Hamilton and Chi-Raq, and good reason, too, why Chi-Raq has been called “an American movie” and Hamilton’s official subtitle is not, as many suppose, “a hip-hop musical,” but rather “an American musical.”
Matthew Wellenbach is a visiting lecturer in the department of Classical Studies at Wellesley College.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
