I think most critiques of Hamilton miss the core fact that it is literally bourgeois propaganda. It literally diversifies the gentry and gentrifies diversity. It is self-consciously broad and emotionally manipulative. That’s the point!

If we take seriously Tupac or Dead Prez or others’ contentions that Hip-Hop is a revolutionary aesthetic partially developed in resistance to racial capitalism, then this pop-musical version of Hip-Hop being used to endear people to a bourgeois revolution of slaveowners is ...

Remember that LMM is bourgeois to his core, growing up with wealthy and connected parents and going to NYC magnet schools and his Dad doing political work that’s... bad https://thenewinquiry.com/disaster-act/ 

And 21st century bourgeois propaganda is weird! It’s captured and gentrified huge swaths of resistance art and counterculture. It’s about a post-tabloid respectability politics that loves “diversity”, tattoos, punk rock but normalizes Amazon, fast-fashion, “community service”

So we get reactionary pop-history biography, stripped of most redeeming informative detail, set to slick hooks with melodrama that is brought to life by absurdly charismatic, beautiful, talented performers of color who are understandably enthusiastic about a show with so many POC

But to see a settler colonial bourgeois coup presented as a heroic tale of principled struggle by troubled geniuses dressed up in approximations of “diversity” and pop culture is to observe nationalist recouperation marketed to a contemporary mass of consumers

It is fascinating to see how the Disneyplus steaming of Hamilton lands in this moment of a global uprising against police and anti-blackness amidst an emerging economic crisis and a pandemic causing racialized mass death at a shocking rate

“Sir do we not fight for freedom?”
“Sure when the French figure out who’s gonna lead ‘em”
“The people are leading!”
“The people are rioting, there’s a difference”

Spend some time today attending to this instead https://twitter.com/the_red_nation/status/1279198069423312902?s=21 https://twitter.com/The_Red_Nation/status/1279198069423312902

This matters because, regardless of undoubtedly diverse intentions, the current release of Hamilton on streaming functions as part of the “hearts and minds” efforts of counterinsurgency during this uprising https://mronline.org/2020/07/03/anatomy-of-a-counter-insurgency/

If you’d like to think about this further, this is pretty well cited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda