@ajroach42 have you heard the OBCR? The bootleg audio is not great and it'll be very confusing if that's your intro

@phire I have heard the OBCR a few times.

The bootleg I have is not the other one I've seen floating around? There were two video files. One is an audience recording. The other is some official video + a different audience recording + the OBCR audio?

The sync wasn't perfect on the audience recording bits, but it was totally watchable.

@phire ((at least, from the fifteen minutes or so I watched.))

@ajroach42 I have both and the one that's all audience recording is better imo.

@phire Thanks for that! I'll keep that in mind when I sit down to watch it. (maybe tomorrow?)

@marko I am here for any and all hamilton feelings and doubly so for LMM

@phire like I think it's really impressive and effective on a lot of levels, but there's a corniness to musical theatre that feels sort of at cross-purposes with what I think of as the ethos of the rap music that it's also trying to apply to a sort of apologia of a specific, complicated person who then gets universalised as like "immigrants, we get the job done" in this really uncritical way and it's really hard to disentangle that stuff from its obviously really good intentions?

@marko Those are really good points and I think a lot of that is common to any piece of art that hits a really mainstream audience because then people start ascribing Meaning to it in a way that does not necessarily do it service. I love love love everything about it but I am very uncomfortable with how it's become a rallying cry for The Left in a way that I think is really telling about the facile liberalist ethos of the left.

@marko And it's become kind of impossible to be a fan of it in public without a bazillion disclaimers, like yes I realize Hamilton was an elitist PoS and no it does not address slavery and yes the audience is mainly white and the performers mainly black in a way that is uncomfortably minstrel-like and no it's not actually very advanced rapping, but any public conversation is necessarily contextless otherwise.

@phire yeah and it's not like I listened to it once and immediately formed those feelings, it's hugely enjoyable and except for being this massive cultural moment wouldn't have generated the takes that made me go "oh yeah, that is weird," the only thing that's suffered formally after hearing it a billion times is the slightly awkward rapping, "i am hercules mulligan" etc.

@marko I am very slowly working my way through the original biography and apparently a lot of people are also mad at Chernow for being whitewashy in the first place with both Hamilton and Washington and it does make me wonder if a different starting point would have made for a different show.

@marko have you heard In The Heights? It's a much simpler story and less sophisticated in its musical construction, but also very purely sweet in a way Hamilton now can't really be because of its massive status

@phire I haven't, I think I've felt at maximum LMM saturation for a while but I'll check it out it if I can find it somewhere

@marko im happy that u do even tho i dont have those

@phire A random observation: I saw the first tour company in San Francisco last week. One Last Time used to make me, like pretty much everyone else, sad. Watching it post-inauguration day, I realized it just makes me really angry now.