That's fair, I think both themes are there and it's reasonable to disagree about how the balance between the two ideas communicated the themes. For me, freedom is an amorphous enough concept, and my natural tendency against violent revolution is strong enough, that without a heavier emphasis on the harms caused by the monarchy earlier in the show, the song comes across too much as being about Hamilton's ambition, and even some of those lines about freedom start to seem pretextual.
really disagree with this? This is presented as completely antithetical to Hamilton's approach, and more importantly Burr's approach is presented as negative - when he's using it to campaign politically, it's shown as being appealing for the wrong reasons.
Immediately after the first deployment of "Talk less smile more" in "Aaron Burr, Sir", we get this lyric: "Fools who run their mouths off wind up dead", which is what happens to Hamilton! To me that weighs on the scales a lot. Throughout the play Hamilton makes political mistakes and after each one, the talk less, smile more theme comes back. And even something like "How can you write like you're running out of time", which starts out as an expression of astonishment and admiration, in its final runnings has turned into a lament about Hamilton's inability to restrain himself from expressing his true feelings. The show admires Hamilton more than Burr, but to me it come out on the side that Burr is more right than Hamilton about how to govern.
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Date: 2020-07-16 02:41 pm (UTC)That's fair, I think both themes are there and it's reasonable to disagree about how the balance between the two ideas communicated the themes. For me, freedom is an amorphous enough concept, and my natural tendency against violent revolution is strong enough, that without a heavier emphasis on the harms caused by the monarchy earlier in the show, the song comes across too much as being about Hamilton's ambition, and even some of those lines about freedom start to seem pretextual.
Immediately after the first deployment of "Talk less smile more" in "Aaron Burr, Sir", we get this lyric: "Fools who run their mouths off wind up dead", which is what happens to Hamilton! To me that weighs on the scales a lot. Throughout the play Hamilton makes political mistakes and after each one, the talk less, smile more theme comes back. And even something like "How can you write like you're running out of time", which starts out as an expression of astonishment and admiration, in its final runnings has turned into a lament about Hamilton's inability to restrain himself from expressing his true feelings. The show admires Hamilton more than Burr, but to me it come out on the side that Burr is more right than Hamilton about how to govern.