Hamilton, genius, and genius.com

July 02, 2016

I've been obsessing on the musical, Hamilton, for a couple of weeks. Amazon Prime Music has the whole album streaming and downloadable. Now whenever I go for a drive I put it on and play it. Top volume.

I had forgotten about Genius.com, but a search for a phrase in one of my favorite songs in Hamilton took me there and reminded me. Ahh! Internet. How I love you!

Genius.com bills itself as "the world’s biggest collection of song lyrics and crowdsourced musical knowledge." People put lyrics on the site, and others annotate, comment, and discuss. It's kind of wikipedia for lyrics.

So here's the page for "It's Quiet Uptown" the song that led me there, and my favorite from the show. (I have yet to hear it without bursting into tears.) If you go to the link, and click on the highlighted lines in the page (better on desktop than mobile) you'll see the annotations.

For example, the annotation on the line "there's a suffering to terrible to name" says this:

"There’s a saying that while a person who loses their spouse is called a “widow” or a “widower,” and a person who loses his parents is called an “orphan,” there is no word to name the person who loses a child because the grief and loss is unspeakable."

Also commentary says:

Some possible influence from the line “There’s a grief that can’t be spoken” in “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Misérables.

Reading Genius is like reading the book "Hamilton, The Revolution" by Lin and Jeremy McCarter, but with hyperlinks instead of beautiful bookmaking. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a contributor to genius.com with a verified account. His comments on Hamilton are highlighted specially. For the line I'm only nineteen but my mind is older" he says:

It was a no brainer to put that line in because that is something Hamilton would absolutely say. There’s a lot of ‘90s references in that opening tune; it’s the stuff I grew up falling in love with.Hamilton is just like a ‘95 Prodigy. “Shook Ones Pt. II” by Mobb Deep is one of my favorite hip-hop tunes period.

And the line taken from that tune.Other discussion that leads to the letter Hamilton wrote about the hurricane that led to people paying for him to leave the island and go to New York.Ahh! The internet!