Probably about ten years ago, I read an article about music identity. The author worried about the fact that people were going to stop identifying as 'punks' or 'rockers' or what have you because easy and cheap access to music was opening up more doors. For most of the history of pop music, people had limited funds as to what they could purchase. They would buy the albums that worked in the genre they loved. They would build their musical identity around this.
The author wondered what kind of people would emerge out of a world where musical genre lines were blurred. What would happen when people could download a hip-hop song and have it in a mp3 file next to Queen or Nine Inch Nails or Elvis or Dolly or Miles Davis or Mozart? How would so much open access alter us as musical listeners, consumers, and creators?
A decade later, I think we see one glorious answer to this question. Lin-Manuel Miranda.
I watched a roundtable discussion with the cast of Hamilton. One of the questions posed to Miranda was how fans of hip-hop and fans of musical theater responded to him blending it together. He said that while there are some people who ONLY like hip-hop or ONLY like musical theater, most people are more interested in finding music that is GOOD, no matter what the genre.
Mind you, music, like food, has always been a constant blending and reblending of cultures and influences. What Miranda is doing is well within the tradition of how music evolves. It feels fresh because it's the first time in a long time someone has done something that is not only well blended but also brilliantly and sublimely composed. In this one soundtrack, hip-hop and traditional musical theater are woven together with Industrial music, with ragtime, with Motown, with Top 40 pop, with classical, with probably a little bit of everything else.
So what happens when we lose our narrow musical identities? We find new ways to be amazing.
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