From 2016 (a bit has changed), but just got a video…
[Video]
[4.57]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: That one of the most widely popular and critically acclaimed works of art in recent times involves minorities and rapping should be a cause for excitement. And for many, it genuinely is. Personally, I can’t shake the depressing irony of how exorbitant ticket prices essentially bar the working class from seeing Hamilton. Such is the nature of Broadway, but equally inherent is the wholly unremarkable rapping that would have to be present in an art form whose audience is primarily older, affluent white people who don’t enjoy much rap. Virtually every track sounds like something a high school student would make for their history class if they chose the “create a rap song” option in lieu of a typical presentation (never more clear for me than when I saw this). The Hamilton Mixtape isn’t nearly as egregious, and its existence allows for the masses to hear music that touches on undoubtedly important topics. Unfortunately, “Immigrants” suffers in a similar way to the musical: the prioritization of clarity, both in the message and its delivery, leads to a song that’s only conceptually interesting. And for how many words these four rappers want you to hear, I’d be hesitant to call “Immigrants” lyrical; there’s no impressive wordplay or thought-provoking images, just corny lines that act as the song’s entire wellspring of impassioned rallying cries. The artists merely “get the job done.”
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Alex Clifton: By far the best track from The Hamilton Mixtapes, based on one of my favourite lines from the musical, “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” is more prescient and timely than ever. It’s an eclectic bunch but nobody feels awkwardly shoehorned in; the verses are stunning, representing perspectives from all over (Somalia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Puerto Rico). As we battle a xenophobic, racist president and nationalist movements around the world, we need more media reminding us all that freedom isn’t free. “It’s America’s ghost writers, the credit’s only borrowed” is a phenomenal line: let those ghosts be heard, their voices amplified.
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Alfred Soto: I’m embarrassed for the four artists credited. Good intentions in this dark time produced this grotesque, horribly rapped manifesto. I know more than a few conservatives who like Jay-Z and Future.
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Lauren Gilbert: This is unsubtle in the same way as Hamilton is — another immigrant coming up from the bottom. It’s not intended to be subtle, but a shot across the bow, a Statement of Purpose and of #resistance. And yeah, it’s easy enough to be cynical about that; are we really going with “all you have to do / is see the world with new eyes”? Is that all it takes? But as I listen to K’naan here, I keep coming back to one passage in Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns. City of Thorns is a biography not of a person, but of a place: Dadaab, the second-largest refugee camp in the world. And K’naan holds a place of honor in the residents’ eyes; K’naan is a hope, that one can be Somali and something more than a footnote, forgotten by the rich countries who occasionally remember to send some of their largess to Dadaab. In the words of Tawane, one of the residents, “we are not vulnerable people, we are super humans. Refugee is a state of mind. Look at the examples of Madeleine Albright, of K’naan.” Tawane arrived at Dadaab in 1992 when he was seven years old. He is 32 now, still striving to become “implementing partner” in his own life. And no matter how hard he tries — or how often he says “I will be in the White House” — it is likely he will stay in Dadaab for the rest of his life, hoping for a relocation or a chance at a life where he is a citizen, not just a temporary resident. And he will watch this video, and his friends will watch this video, the same way some of his friends in the camp watch Manchester United and dream of a life playing soccer. I think of him, and the Somali refugees now banned from the country that was still “the lodestar in the refugee firmament, the model, for better or worse,” and I can’t hold the heavy-handedness of “who these fugees / what they do for me / but contribute new dreams” against the track. It feels like this song isn’t for me — white, native-born, celebrating fireworks earlier this month in a country that has nurtured me even as it has excluded so many others. This track is for the kids who will never have that life, and for bleeding-heart donors who might kick a few dollars to organizations that support them. There are worse things than wide-eyed optimism, than trying to bend the arc of history towards justice, one $10 donation and one (pretty fire) verse from Snow Tha Product at a time.
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Thomas Inskeep: I like the intent of this. And K’naan, Residente, and especially Riz MC are all awesome rappers. (I’m not as big a fan of Snow Tha Product, just because something in her voice rubs me wrong; that said, she has some of the best lyrics here.) The problem is Residente’s main man behind the boards, Trooko. “Immigrants” has a slow, sludgy, militaristic feel, and it’s not any fun to listen to. So while I applaud this, I don’t actively enjoy it.
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Jonathan Bradley: In Hamilton, this title is a quick-witted applause line in an energetic account of the American Revolution. As a hook for this derivation, it becomes a mantra, not a victory dance, which drains it of much of its verve: the sober voice of millions of people demanding dignity and rights, not the exultant Hamilton and Marquis de Lafayette dunking on the English. The translation from celebration to seriousness and Broadway to mixtape treads a rough path and not always a felicitous one. Hamilton is a hip-hop-inspired musical, which is something different to a hip-hop record (the churlish types upset by its dissimilarity to their fav rap album haven’t really considered that, likewise, Illmatic is a crappy piece of musical theater) and it’s fun to hear its songs given over to their creative roots. To my ears, the Spanish verses from Snow Tha Product and Residente come closest to the thrill of “Yorktown” in the pop-song form. From the mixtape, though, what you really want is Ashanti doing “Helpless” and Kelly Clarkson’s crushing “It’s Quiet Uptown.”
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Micha Cavaseno: The ascendance of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton as cultural icons are thanks in part to an audience who likes the idea of rap in theory but want it without the perceived “sullying” of rap culture, drastically removed from any tropes that inspire discomfort in dealing with cultural or ideological dissonance. If Barack Obama had posed next to Shawn Carter or Kanye West while they freestyled about America in a YouTube video, 2016 or not, we’d still see all kinds of complaints about who the president forced upon us. With the Hamilton Mixtape we now also have this bizarre world where rappers are allowed to express themselves and be considered stars — so long as they occupy the sanitized conventions of this bright and shiny Artistic Work, which their own discographies might not be anywhere close to. And while I’m not “a fan” of the works of most of the cast of this song, I know that individually they deal with greater political and identity-based questions in a way that honestly tends to appeal more to that crowd. Yet they still will find possibly some of the biggest success in their careers propping up this musical’s legacy, rather than their own.
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