Why Hip Hop Music in Theater?
I am often asked, “Why use hip hop music in theater? What is wrong with the music written by the wonderful composers in years gone by? Take composers like Richard Rodgers or Frederick Loewe, for instance. Why can’t hip hop writers write like them?”
My response has been to point out that a similar question could be posed to someone like Jerome Kern. Why couldn’t he write more like Rudolph Friml?
You Do You
Now, thanks to an interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda just published in The Hollywood Reporter for November 16, 2021, I have an even better response.
Miranda, now directing a film of Jonathan Larson’s called tick, tick…BOOM had this to say:
“The thing that Jonathan Larson did very consciously as a songwriter — which I picked up and continue to do — was not to segregate his musical theater tastes from his music tastes…He really wanted to thread the needle of a satisfying evening at the theater that you wouldn’t be ashamed to pump out of your car radio. I was very conscious of doing that when I started writing musical theater, too, because I thought he was right — particularly in terms of the hip-hop and Latin music and music I grew up listening to. I don’t believe music lives in a silo. We silo things to make sense of them, but music transcends all of that.”
Hip hop artists write musicals using hip hop music because they do not believe “music lives in a silo.”
Don’t you agree?