Hamilton and Obamacore cringe

Hamilton is turning Hamilton. If you're the one person who doesn't yet know what their show's about, here's a synopsis. So, Hamilton is the story of an orphan in the Caribbean, born in the 1750s, who comes to the United States to make his name and fortune. Helps to lead his country through the Revolutionary War and get appointed Secretary of Treasury in the new country. Treasury. Let's go. And then in Act 2, it all falls apart, tries to set up an economic plan. I can't stop till I get this plan through Congress. And gets mired in a financial scandal that becomes a sex scandal. At his own house. Damn. And he's so embroiled in partisan rancor that he ends up getting shot in a duel by his enemy. To celebrate a decade, Hamilton is in movie theaters across the United States for the very first time, and to celebrate on today, explain from Vox, we're going to ask if this play is now cringe. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew, well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer find more on Facebook. I'm Archmanning. I'm Madison Skinner. I'm Eva Jovich. I'm Decorian Moore. Want to train like a Red Bull athlete? Tell us your fitness goals this summer to enter the Red Bull Athlete Challenge. You'll get to try each of our workouts for a chance to win an ultimate Red Bull experience. Think you have what it takes. And the world's gonna know your name. What's your name, man? I'm Daniel Pollock Pelsner. I teach English and theater at Portland State University, and I'm the author of Lynn Manuel Miranda, the education of an artist. How much time have you spent in the last several years thinking about Hamilton? God, this feels like that, like, meme about how often do you think about the Roman Empire? Daily. Kind of hard to avoid this phenomenon for the past 10 years, but the musical is 10, of course, and the streaming version of Hamilton is 5, but now that's coming to theaters for the first time, and that's why we have an excuse to talk about how this musical feels different in 2025 than it did in 2015. Your thoughts? So Hamilton has these two acts, and I felt like we got to live in Act 1 Hamilton for a while where we had this hope of a country that was welcoming immigrants into a coalition that was going to dream of a better future. And for the last few years, I feel like we've been living in Act 2 Hamilton, which is, is it all going to fall apart? Are we going to become so polarized that we end up in a state of political violence and is everything that got built before going to collapse?

Where did this even come from before we talk about the politics? So Lin-Manuel Miranda, 28 years old, won of Tony Award for his first musical in The Heights and takes a vacation in 2008. And he's a fast reader, so he brings along one really big book to sustain him on vacation, which is Ron Cherno's biography of Alexander Hamilton. And as he is lying on a hammock in the beach of Playa Del Carmen, he tells me that he has... these like three insights. Number one. One is he didn't know that there was a founding father who was born outside the continental US in the Caribbean. He was sort of... our proto-immigrant story. I mean, really came here on a scholarship to get his education and ended up shaping the world. And Hamilton's own journey from impoverished orphanhood on this little island to becoming an architect to the American government reminded Lin-Manuel of his own father, who was born in Puerto Rico, got a scholarship to come to NYU and became an important political figure in New York and national politics. So he starts to envision the... parallels between Hamilton's story and the world he lives in. And his second insight is that Hamilton story is a hip-hop story. It's got everything. It's got sex. It's got politics. It's got genius. The rise of a wordsmith from humble beginnings. to making a name for himself and turning his own impoverishment into success is a story that mirrors the 90s hip-hop artists that Lin-Manuel grew up loving, Biggie and Tupac especially, and that Hamilton shared their ultimate faith of pissing people off and getting shot. And then the third insight was that this show, Lynn Manuel, originally conceived of, as a concept album like musicals like...

that would be sung through on a record, and he got started and he premiered what became the first number of the show at the invitation of the White House in the East Room 2009. I'm actually working on a hip-hop album. It's a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. You laugh, but it's true. And over the next six years, built up the whole arc of Hamilton's life with his collaborators, and it opened in 2015. How big did this show get? When was Peak Hamilton? I think it's coming past, yeah? Well, it just keeps getting bigger. I mean, it started as a kind of, I would say, elite cachet phenomenon where celebrities and political leaders were bragging that they could get what were scalped with very expensive tickets. The best seat in the house at... current right now will take you back almost $900 a pop. I paid $725 for my ticket. But the musical is also doubling the number of $10 tickets. It's making available via same-day lotteries. But by the time the cast recording came out in the fall of 2016, it became a mass phenomenon. And the album was on top of the Billboard Charts. And this week, Hamilton became the first cast recording to spend 500 weeks on the Billboard 200 record charts. Taken Broadway by Storm, captivating the entire country, winning tons of awards, turn musical haters into diehard fans. It was even on top of the rap charts. The show won all the awards, the Tony's Grammy Pulitzer Prize. And it became a conversation beyond even Broadway geeks like me so that people who just cared about American culture more broadly and how we tell American stories had an opinion about the show. Okay, now let's talk about how, for a while, it felt like we were living in the Act 1 of Hamilton. How directly was this show entwined with... the Obama administration and the promise of hope for America. It was pretty intimately connected, Sean. So not only was the White House the venue for the initial performance of the first number. This is definitely the room where it happened, right here. But Obama's own speeches helped to create a kind of template for some of the show's musical numbers. So Lynn Manuel loved the way that Will I Am or the Black IPs set Obama's Yes We Can speech to music and turned it into a music video. Yes we can. It's opportunity and prosperity. Miranda thought that would be a cool way to musicalize George Washington's farewell address. And that after 45 years of my life.

So then the latest chapter in the saga is that Hamilton was supposed to have an upcoming performance at the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center in Washington, B.C. But after Trump got rid of all of the Democratic members of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center's board, Miranda and his producers pulled their show, saying that they didn't want Hamilton to appear at a Trump puppet venue. Has Trump seen Hamilton? Do we know? Not that I know of. I think his favorite show is Evita. A show that has nothing to do with the rise of populist fascism and stardom and service of authoritarian government. That was a joke. I like jokes. Has the effectiveness of the message of Hamilton dwindled over time? Back when I was just the... little baby boy from Queens. I was just the founding father from 1893. Whether it's people of color playing these white colonists or not, it's still a story about white colonists and trying to sympathize with them. I'm not doing that. Some guy with an undercut just called me soy boy. Oh, don't worry, Greg. It's a nice safe space where you don't have to pretend to like Hamilton. I like Hamilton. Sure, you do. We all do. I just wonder, like, over time, has Hamilton come to feel kind of cringed people? Too hopeful? Too in love with the United States and the American Project? I mean, man, the things that feels most dated about it to me, Sean, is the notion that having a sex scandal would ruin your political prospects. But when I return to this show, what really strikes me is that it's a tragedy. It's set up from the start of how did this horrible thing happen, which is that one friend and political rival murdered another one. And that tragedy hangs over the whole show. And so when I see it, I guess I see less this kind of celebration of America and more a sense of how. quickly the American dream can fracture. One thing I keep remembering, Sean, is that the show starts with a question. How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spotting the Caribbean by Providence and Poverist and Squalma, grow up to be a hero and a scholar? And it ends with a question. Find eyes, who tells your story?

And I don't think this show provides a single answer to those questions. I think it leaves those as open questions, and they're questions that are open for us in America today. Lynn Manuel Miranda, the education of an artist. That's the name of Daniel Pollock Pelsner's new book. It's out next week. Hamilton is in theaters right now if you're looking to kill three hours with some open questions about America this weekend. And maybe Hamilton isn't cringe. But some Obamacore culture certainly is. We'll discuss next on today explained. Wait for it. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform, no messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs and, best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odu.com slash vox. That's odio.o.com slash vox. So good, so good, so good. New markdowns up to 70% off are at Nordstrom rack stores now. Stock up and stay big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories, and more must-haves for summer. Join the Nordi Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Hey friends, Olivia from Ollie. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Ollie comes in. Start your mornings off right with multis made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stuck up on ollie.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Today is explained. Today. Explained. That today is going to be explained.

Today, explained Sean Ramos from here with Nate Jay Jones, who's a feature writer at New York Magazine and Vulture. And not so long ago, one who wrote about something called Obama Corps. Is that right, Nate, for Vulture? Yes, yes, indeed. It was last August 24, which, you know, only a year ago, but perhaps longer than that emotionally. Right. And what exactly is Obama Corps for those who have never heard the term? I mean, Obamacore is the pop culture and the general culture that was sort of spurred by Obama's election. It was an outpouring of positivity and a belief that the future would always be as good as the present and a belief in institutions. just kind of a general idealism and a sincerity and an earnestness that was kind of borne out of the sense that, yeah, the arc of history was always bending towards justice, and we'd kind of arrived at this sort of key marking point, and things are just going to keep getting better from there. And obviously, you know, that didn't happen. And so now when we look back on it with the distance of 10 to 15 years, I think it causes a lot of hurt feelings and mixed emotions and embarrassment. And is Hamilton like the apotheosis of Obamacore? Yeah, I mean, I think Hamilton in many ways has become the single cultural object that most stands in for the... Obama era as a whole. A few weeks ago, people started sending around an old 2016 onion headline that said, DNC aiming to reconnect with working class Americans with new Hamilton-inspired Lena Dunham web series, which, you know, kind of, it became a standard for this, you know, proudly cosmopolitan, optimistic, triumphant era in American life. What else do we think of when we think of Obamacor? What else fits into the genre? Last summer when we wrote the list, we had a hundred things on the list and that, you know, the original was 200 or 300. Give us the top 10 in your heart. Okay, the top 10. Millennial Pink, girl bosses, stomping holler bands, Glee, Louis C.K., female ghostbusters, Taylor Swift's 1989 era. the word mansplaining, the TV show Transparent. And then the 10th one is an Instagram filter of a woman with bangs, drawing a mustache on her finger and putting it in front of her face. Is that like definitely like a Nate Jay Jones, like number one right there? That was a late cut. That was the 101st one. How many of these things are you comfortable calling cringe now? Not of those 10, but like all the whole hundred. I mean, a lot of it is. I mean, it's hard, right? Because a lot of this stuff, you don't want to write the whole thing off, right? Like, Moonlight.

is Obamacor in a way, right? And Moonlight's an amazing film. Moonlight holds up. Yeah, you know, and a lot of the music really holds up. You know, some of those Miley Cyrus songs in the Bangers era, they hold up. I came in like a rugby ball. Taylor Swift songs, you know, 1989, good album. This sick beats. This is something that we've seen recently, I don't know if you remember, but a few weeks ago, there was a whole week of discourse about the Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zero song, Home. And people are saying like, this is actually really bad. Worst song ever made. I would respect him more if he just went ahead and started the yoga sex cult he clearly wants to. Primarily, it is guilty of sounding like something that was composed to be played while someone is being euthanized. But that's true of most pop music. Yes, yes. And I think, you know, and in this discourse, a lot of people made the point that, like, right, we have what's called the nostalgia cycle, and it kind of is generally like, you know, when something's a year ahead of its time, it looks really cool. When something's a year behind its time, it's kind of, you're kind of tired of it. When something is 20 years behind the times, it gets cool again. But when something is 10 to 15 years, that is kind of the nadir of the sign curve of coolness. And I think with a lot of this Obama era culture, we are kind of just at the nadir of the coolness in the nostalgia cycle, right? Like, we are already seeing people starting to bring back the early to mid-2000s, right? Like, you look at Salper, and that's very much nostalgia for the mid-2000s. So we probably are like five to ten years before someone tries to bring the Obamacore stuff back, but... Until then, yeah, it's kind of just, it's people in their late 30s thinking back on the culture of their early 20s. And reassessing it. And reassessing it. And then I think the thing that specifically works with Obamacore is that there was this major thing that happened at the end of it. And it broke a lot of people's brains because one of the fundamental elements of Obamacor was a confidence. It was a confidence that the culture was on our side and that things would keep getting better. And then that didn't happen. That was proven decisively wrong, you know, in 2016. And then elements of Obama Corps, I would say, still sort of survived the election of Trump in 2016, the first election. You know, I think a lot of the social elements really sort of found their full flower, right? The social movements that came along with... Obama's election, if anything, they were heightened, right? Trump is when we saw Me Too. You know, that is when we saw a wider acceptance of the Black Lives Matter movement and everything. But then I think now in the second Trump era, even those social movements have kind of, I don't want to say died, like they've been killed, right? Like there has been a decisive conservative backlash that has attempted quite successfully to snuff that out. And so everything is kind of being reincessed.

In preparation for this interview, I was thinking about how Chance the rapper is kind of Obamacore. A hundred percent. Or like really Obamacore? He is one of the defining artists, yeah. Because here's a rapper who's like father literally worked with Barack Obama, but also just exuded positivity and kindness. He came from Chicago. And it just reminded me of this video of him performing at the White House for like their holiday, you know, maybe tree lighting ceremony. Sasha Obama's there like singing the lyrics to Sunday Candy, which is a song, I should add, about going to church with your grandmother. Like, not exactly left-right stuff here. Yeah. But everyone's smiling. It feels like pure and decent. And it doesn't feel like something we should be embarrassed of. If anything, it feels like a president celebrating the arts and the holidays and family and religion and, like, love. And you just wonder if we could get back there one day. I agree exactly what you were saying about Chance the Rapper. Like, you mentioned purity. And I think that was definitely part of it. Like, there was a longing to go back to this kind of purity of childhood in a lot of it. Like, you look at Chance, you know, rapping over the theme song to Arthur, the children's TV show. Every day when you're walking down the street, wonderful. Everybody that you meet has an original point of view. There was a sense that, like, oh, if we could all kind of just embrace our inner child. That is what we all need. And obviously that has definitely kind of gone away. But yeah, no, I mean, it's, yes, I would love to be hopeful that we can have an era like that again and that it won't just all be nihilism and cynicism.

Nate Jay Jones, you can check out the big Obamacore package he worked on at vulture.com. Avi Shai Artsy made our show today. Jolie Myers edited, Laura Bullard, Check the Facts, and David Tattachore Mixed. The rest of our team includes Patrick Boyd, Denise Guerra, Hadi Mahdi, Miles Brian, Peter Balanon Rosen, Devin Schwartz, Rebecca Ibarra, Danielle Hewitt, and Kelly Wessinger, who joined us this week. Welcome, Kelly. We use music by Breakmaster Cylacier, Aman al-Aisdis, our supervising editor. Miranda Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s our executive producer. Noel King is in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean, and today Explained is distributed by WNIC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can check out more of our shows at Podcasts.com, and you can listen to this show without ads by signing up. To support us at Vox.com slash members. When you guys were compiling your list, did you determine whether or not Vox was Obamacor? Fox is 100% Obamacore, and the only reason we did not put it in was to be good corporate siblings. Box is the ultimate of Obama Corps. It is the element of Obama Corps that is a culture by and for rule followers, right? It's kids who sat in the front of the class. It's people who thought that we could get a better future by having the right charts. And I'm not saying that insultingly. Like, I believed it too. I thought the right chart would make a difference. And, you know, it turns out it didn't. I'm sending this to Ezra.

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