The Room Where It Happened

Call me late to the party, but in recent times I've been getting super into Hamilton. I know it came out in 2015, but at that time I was probably in the youthful, snobbish anti-musicals phase that many pretentious indie-boys go through (why would I listen to a musical when I could be listening to Animal Collective?). I do remember listening to the soundtrack a few years later and thinking it was okay, but it never pulled me in beyond the first few listens.

This time, for whatever reason, it hooked me, and I mainlined the whole thing back to back a couple of times. Some of the songs are almost maniacally catchy, and everything with King George is pretty much perfect. But, as someone who now likes it enough that I feel I can slag it off without it being petty, some of the tracks are very much skippable. Most of the ones which feature Hamilton heavily can be sidestepped (there are some exceptions, see Say No To This), because Lin Manuel isn't on the same level as the rest of the cast, vocally.

It seems a bit harsh to say that, but how much better could it have been with someone playing Hamilton who could actually sing? I'm aware of the discourse around the fact that he understood the character so deeply in a way another performer wouldn't have, but wouldn't that statement be true of any writer and their main character? It doesn't mean that they're the best person to play them.

Anyway, that's one gripe, the second is that the plot is pretty boring isn't it? I know there's duels and stuff, but its like how the Phantom Menace was fundamentally about trade disputes. The bits with guns (and ships) don't make the rest of it any less boring. However, this makes my next point a bit easier, because if the plot isn't all that exciting you don't need to keep the filler in when making a slimmed down track listing.

Art is best appreciated in the fullest context, and often endings don't mean as much without the beginnings and middles which came before them, but... how many songs do I need to cut to make the Hamilton soundtrack perfect? Its a tough question, and one I've been working on for about a week. This may be considered sacreligious by some, and symptomatic of a society in which productivity is prized above all else, but I promise you I am not purely doing this to optimise my Hamilton listening experience. I am also doing it so I don't have to listen to the main character sing his own name so many times.

But this sort of optimisation doesn't have to be limited to musical albums either - feel free to crop this blog until you only have the sentences which you like the best (I'm aware that may leave you with a very short blog, but sometimes thats optimal).

If you want to watch the episode before reading the rest of the blog (so you know better which bits can be deleted), you can do so here.

The first starter goes to Right Hand Man Lee, though Rajan corrects his prounciation of Wallachia. They take one bonus on South African geography, before De lLs Reyes White gets Manchester on the board with apoptosis. They then took a full set on films with scores by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Captain Senehedheera was very amused by The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which teammate Grady knew.

Grady takes the next starter too, on the film Forbidden Planet. This earns them a bonus set on cricket, and Rajan rightly chides their guess of Michael Vaughan for a match from 1993. Despicable, indeed. They make up for it with Murali on the last bonus, with Senehedheera fist pumping before he's even given the answer, so sure is he that he's correct.

Epsilon gives Debnath his first starter of the night, then Imperial make a minor blunder on a set about scientists whose names begin with the same letter. Having given Zeeman for the first, and Zwicky for the second, and then mentioning Zimbardo on the third, they plumped for Millgram. Hopefully that doesn't come back to bite them.

The picture starter is on FIFA men's world cup finals, and Lee gives a poor guess of 2002 for a graphic showing the lineups from the 1970 final, which features Pele. I know he was good, but even he wasn't world class at 61. Kullman guesses 1994, which isn't much better, but he picks up the replacement starter, and they scored two on the bonuses (a hat-trick would have been nice, given the subject matter, but a brace will have to do).

Jones recognises The Revolution Will Not Be Televised on the music starter, with gives them a bonus set on spoken word pieces from the 2010s. This results in a brilliant moment when Dry Cleaning's lyrics 'its an Oslo bouncy ball, its a Tokyo bouncy ball...' are played to a quartet of bemused contestants. They're great, and their song about Meghan Markle is a tour de force of cultural analysis.

When Manchester go 15 points clear at 100-85, its all looking rosy, but Kullmann gives Bulgaria rather than Italy on a flag question and Imperial run rampant from that point on.

Manchester are Helpless, and by the time they manage another starter, their opponents have racked up 110 points unanswered. Grady stops the rot on the penultimate starter with Tollen's reagent, but its too little, too late.

Manchester 120 - 205 Imperial

Victory means that Imperial are the first team through to the semi finals - the first quarter of my predicted lineup come to fruition. Manchester need not fret, though, because I also predicted they'd make it to that stage too. To them I say You'll Be Back. To you I say, WhatComes Next? Birkbeck vs Sheffield.

I should really have done more Hamilton puns in the main body of this, but I've gone through and added a couple where it was obvious. I hope you're Satisfied.