so in addition to the other bits of video or written lecture and content that i'm providing this week i just wanted to say a couple of things a couple of other things about hamilton and why i think it's interesting and how in some ways it relates to what we were just doing with jolene and how it might relate to some of the things we do going forward and this has to do with genre so hamilton is a musical and typically musicals are considered a certain kind of genre of of performative art um certain kind of genre of theater right it's different from a play because it's got music um hamilton's a little different from some musicals because some musicals you can listen to the the soundtrack the songs and you get some of the story but you don't really understand the whole plot if you listen to hamilton just the album you kind of understand the whole you get it's pretty much the whole story uh in fact lin-manuel miranda i think initially conceived it to be just a hip-hop album and then it it grew into something bigger for him uh but so you know you'll see this i think elsewhere in the module material that lin-manuel miranda got the idea to write the musical hamilton from reading ron chernow's big biography on hamilton and um and manuel miranda just thought that alexander hamilton kind of represented the hip-hop hip-hop spirit so one of the interesting things about hamilton is that much of the musical is done in hip-hop and typically show tunes or theater songs are not the same thing as hip-hop those are different musical genres so uh with lin-manuel miranda bringing hip-hop into the musical context he's really playing around with the musical genre so one of the things that we can think of is how you know and if you don't know a lot about musicals then some pieces of this might be less you know harder to glean than others but if you do know some things about musicals or you've experienced some other musicals you can think about well how does this musical how is this musical different you know how are hip-hop songs different from typical show tunes and one of the things that manuel miranda does is he actually has multiple types of song genres within the musical so a lot of it is hip-hop but he also has some songs that sound more like traditional broadway show tunes and we might think about that why does a certain song get a more traditional type of melody and sound and style and why does another song get uh less traditional uh you know what sometimes with literature we want to think about how the form reflects the content you know if um if language if you're representing someone's speech that's really angry then it might have a lot of short sentences and hard consonants so that the form reflects the content and so we can think about that in hamilton as well how the the the each speaker actually sings and wraps in kind of a different way and how does the form of their singing or wrapping reflect that character and even their politics because of course hamilton alexander hamilton was involved in the american revolution and that's what this musical kind of centers around i actually have in the module a link to a little synopsis of act one of the musical if you're not that familiar if american history feels a little bit rusty to you and you're in the revolution then reading that synopsis of act one could be helpful um but the other thing that we want to think about is um with lin-manuel miranda using hip-hop songs hip-hop songs have a lot of things that are that are are common and conventional across hip-hop songs that we're going to see in the musical uh some of those for example are the fact that well first of all hip-hop hip-hop is a you know it it it came out of a desire to so a community could speak for themselves in ways that weren't conventional that weren't traditional so it kind of bucks tradition and we can see how that makes sense when you're talking about revolutionaries they are also backing tradition but hip-hop songs also have certain conventions that we're used to for example one of them is boasting right in our society um we don't really accept boasting in all contexts athletes can boast um and there are a few other contacts but but in hip hop we're really used to the the rapper boasting and speaking of themselves in ways that are really glowing and positive and so we're going to see so that's a certain kind of convention that we see in hip-hop songs and we're going to see that kind of convention used in the musical but so as you're listening to these songs i want you to be but a lot of you know hip-hop and rap fairly well maybe not all of you but a lot of you do a lot of you more than more even than i do so what you can be thinking about is using what you already know um uh you know if you have some of that con that contextual knowledge to think about well how are they how are these hip-hop songs like other hip-hop songs you know how are the different speakers like alexander hamilton versus aaron burr how is the way they rap how is it different how is you know is one when um when we actually hear from the king of england how does he sound versus how the revolutionaries sound and what things are conventional what aren't what are kind of disrupting the convention in the genre what things aren't but as i said with jolene sometimes it's interesting to think about how a work of art is like other works of art of its kind like how jolene is a cheating song and an other woman song but also to think about how it's different for example jolene doesn't bash the other woman but she praises her how is hamilton different from other musicals but how does it also use traditional conventions so these are some of the questions to be asking yourself as you listen and as i've said elsewhere in the module this week we're only really listening to the first eight songs and then next week we'll we'll work on finishing it out um and and as i've also said elsewhere you know when i first started teaching this i had never even seen the musical so it's it's okay not just not to see it but if you have seen it that's okay too more on that next week okay let me know if you have any questions as you go um a lot of this week's lecture as i've said elsewhere is um is i've written it and so some of you might find that a little text heavy but it's actually really useful when you want to go back and refer to it but if you have any questions please just let me know and i'll see you online