Hamilton’s Familiar Sound

The musical ran for four years on Broadway in the early 1980s, and, among its other interventions, made what might seem now like a very unsurprising breakthrough—it used rap. The moment comes about two-thirds of the way through the play, in a nascent hip-hop, funk-derived number called “Jimmy’s Rap,” or simply “The Rap,” depending on which recording you’re listening to. Breaking free from sadness, the character Jimmy takes on what seems like a suppressed James Brown persona, coming into the bravado and more explicit sexuality his previous performing role had neutered with the “sad songs” he’d sung earlier (at the end of the rap, Jimmy drops his pants in front of a full theater audience). In the 2006 film production of the musical, the writers added the line: “sooner or later the time comes around / for a man to be a man and take back his sound.” Jimmy, played