My rapping debut

I always give a nice printed version of the lyrics as a gift to the victim, or honoree, so I made this fake Playbill to put on the cover of the folder.

When my niece challenged me to write a song for her graduation party I was pumped. Party = Audience. Give me an audience and I will perform. I had two months' notice, which is luxurious but which can also be a nuisance, since song parodies pop out of your head when you least expect them and certainly not on a schedule. If you studied my earlier post, So you wanna write a song parody, you know that the first and most important task is picking the song, and that it needs to be relevant. My niece Rosalie loves Broadway and goes to New York once or twice a year to binge-watch musicals. Like most millennials and other inhabitants of the planet Earth, Rosalie is dying to see Hamilton. We actually have tickets for February of 2018 for Rosalie, my sister Janelle, my daughter, and me. In spite of the fact that we purchased them one year in advance via the online stampede during which you must prove you are not a robot and correctly enter your credit card details within an 8 minute window or be thrown to the back of the line to wait for the next release in 6 months, the four tickets cost just slightly more than my first car. Granted, it was a used car and had a lot of miles, but it was an attractive Saab 99E that served me well for many years and I think it is astonishing that a two hour experience for four people can cost as much as something that can be driven to New Jersey. 

Whether or not they have seen the show, young people seem to have all heard the Hamilton soundtrack and many can sing along with it ... or should I say rap along? Because Hamilton is about 75% rapping. I have never rapped before but I quickly decided that, if Amy Poehler could do it while visibly pregnant, portraying Sarah Palin in a Saturday Night Live bit, so could I. I went to YouTube, where you can hear the complete Hamilton soundtrack for free, and listened to each song, waiting for inspiration to strike. While "My Shot," "The Story of Tonight" and "Satisfied" got my attention, the ultimate winner would be the title song, "Alexander Hamilton." I found out at Rosalie's graduation party that her boss, Mike, who is a big-wig at Padilla, which is the hot shot public relations firm in Richmond where Rosalie works, actually did a rap based on this song a whole year ago. And I think the fact that I mentioned that right here, is what they would call public relations.

Let me tell you, rapping is hard - maybe harder than singing. Unless you can't carry a tune, in which case they are probably about the same. In the real Alexander Hamilton song, there are different singers for each verse. I had to sing them all and it takes a lot of breath to get through it when you're all by yourself. And the Hamilton rhyme schemes are no 4th grader's iambic pentameter. The rhymes are very clever and verses don't always follow a pre-defined pattern. The cadences and off-beat rhythms are what make it sound cool, so it was important for me to keep that same vibe with my parody. In retrospect, I think it's interesting that I stayed so close to Lin-Manuel Miranda's story-telling formula and I think that's what made it work. And I can assure you with a pretty high level of confidence: it worked. I got to perform it not once but twice, because one of Rosalie's friends and his family arrived late to the party. So thanks, Andrew, for calling for an encore. It really sucks to go to all that trouble and only get to do it once.

How I made it

Performing a parody of a Broadway rap presented me with a new challenge: I couldn't play it on the guitar and it really needed backup vocals. I would have to find a karaoke version that had nothing but the music. This isn't always very easy, because karaoke versions usually include backup singing. Since the backup singers would be singing, "Alexander Hamilton" over and over again, I had to be sure the version I found had no vocals whatsoever. I went to iTunes and found a plethora of great no-vocals karaoke made by an outfit called B-Tracks so I bought the Alexander Hamilton version and started writing. 

In his first verse, Lin-Manuel Miranda paints a picture of how his main character grew up, and how unlikely it was for him to become "a hero and a scholar." So I followed that formula, describing how unlikely it was for Rosalie to "grow up to be a baller." Next, Lin-Manuel tells how Hamilton got to where he was going by working "a lot harder, by being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter...." I thought it was really important to keep that hyper-rhyming thing going, so I wrote that she "became a leader and a succeeder, a classical over-achiever working with a fever like a retriever." It's over-the-top, but that was the point. In the third verse, Lin-Manuel talks about how Hamilton wanted to get out of his Caribbean hell hole, and I matched it with Rosalie's desire to leave California for the east coast. By the time I got to the fifth verse I had to figure out a way and a reason for someone to ask the big question, "What's your name?" Because someone has to say, "What's your name, man?" only I would change it to "What's your name, girl?" This turned out to be an opportunity that was ripe for the picking. My darling niece has broken more bones than I can remember, but I would say it is at least seven times and most have included surgery and pins and rods. It's really tragic and I'm so sorry (not sorry) to have to pick on this aspect of her life but it is just so priceless and visual that it could not be avoided. So that important verse ended up being: 

...She'd achieve so many things that you'd think you were gonna hurl except for
Skiing, where every time she did a stupid twirl
She'd wind up lying there, with people asking her,
"What's your name girl?"

Then, instead of saying, "There's a million things she hasn't done" I substituted, "There's a hundred bones she hasn't broke." I tell you, it was brilliant and it got plenty of laughs. And I do think Rosalie is still speaking to me because she is a very good sport, which is one good thing that comes out of breaking so many bones and always getting teased about it.  

The only other thing I had to figure out was how to replace the declarations at the end of the Hamilton song, where the different characters declare, "We fought for him," "I died for him," "I trusted him," "I loved him," and finally, Aaron Burr says, "And me? I'm the damn fool that shot him." I knew it would be a monumentally bad idea to enlist the help of these poor innocent relatives to call our their parts like the players do in Hamilton, so I had to figure a way to do it myself.  I decided I needed to point at people who fit the roles, so I lined them up in advance, only telling them that I needed them to be in my sightline. Pointing at my sister Norah: "We took care of her," at my sister Janelle: "She gave birth to her," at my daughter Lawler: "She rode with her," at Rosalie's friend Stephanie: "She skied with her," and then at Rosalie's father Josh: "And he's the damn fool that taught her." As in, taught her to ski. Get it? I thought that line was hilarious.

My recording studio (a.k.a. my closet)

To make the background vocals, I pulled the karaoke recording into Adobe Audition because it's my favorite audio editor and it's in the Creative Cloud, so I have a license for it. But you could use Audacity, which is an open source audio editing tool. I removed most of the sound of the shot at the very end, since there was no shooting going on in my song. Then I laid down background harmony tracks in the second half of the song, which turned out to be pretty funny when I performed it because they were both unexpected and a little bit cheesy. I also made a recording of the whole thing, mostly to practice with, because it took some practicing to nail the rhythms. I once read somewhere that, if you don't have a professional recording studio on hand, the next best thing is a closet, so be sure you get a look at the photo of my very professional home recording studio. Below you can watch the video performance at the party (with captions), listen to or download the "studio recording" of the song, or click here to read the words. It was the most fun I've had in a long time so I hope you enjoy it too.

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Here's the audio file: