The Hamilton Trend That Has Taken Over My FYP

Ok Real Quick Episode 15
My Obsession With The Hamilton Trend
Ok, real quick, this Hamilton trend has me obsessed.
On July 22nd and 23rd, Irish TikToker Zoe Coyle posted a series of ten TikToks in which she is dressed in a ruffled shirt, a long, brown coat, and tan pants. Her hair is slicked back and in a couple of the videos she has a bobby pin coming out of the front of her hair and onto her forehead, the way a stage mic would be affixed on an actor’s head. She has drawn a goatee on her face in eyeliner. In these TikToks she uses clips from several different songs from the musical 2015 Lin-Manuel Miranda musical Hamilton. She lip-synchs along with the song in these videos and in most of them she’s just gesturing and walking around, or waving some paper around. Nothing other Hamilton fans haven’t done before. But one video, which currently stands at 11.7M views and 1.9M likes, is a departure (literally) from that content. In it, with “The Best of Wives And Best of Women” playing, she lip-synchs Miranda’s part as she climbs out of a window. Now, do YOU remember Miranda as Hamilton climbing out of the window during the musical? No? That’s because that didn’t happen. What actually happens onstage during that song is that Alexander Hamilton is sitting up writing a letter when his wife, Eliza, played by Philippa Soo, comes up to him asking why he’s up and won’t he come back to bed. The section of the song used in the video goes back and forth between husband and wife:
“Alexander come back to sleep”
“I have an early meeting out of town”
“It’s still dark outside”
“I know, I just need to write something down”
“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”
“Shhhh”
“Come back to bed, that would be enough”
“I’ll be back before you know I’m gone”
“Come back to sleep”
“This meeting’s at dawn”
Those of you familiar with US history and Alexander Hamilton know that the meeting he’s alluding to is the duel in which he was famously killed by Aaron Burr. For a certain few of you that knowledge may not come from a history book but from a commercial from milk. I’ll link it in the show notes because it is a classic and if you haven’t seen it, you need to.
So, Coyle’s video blows up, and spawns a trend that is still going strong, with other TikTokers using the same clip, dressed to resemble Miranda-as-Hamilton, and also climbing out of windows, but sometimes into washers, kayaks, out of doggie doors, under garage doors, falling off horses, and on and on. There are also videos with people using the audio, but as if they’re awkwardly witnessing the interaction between Alexander and Eliza, or subbing in their pets for the Hamilton parts. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda has gotten in on it, doing his own versions both with his own wax statue and then during a screening of the recently released in movie theaters Hamilton, for the stage musical’s 10th anniversary. Miranda has shown a great deal of appreciation for the trend and for fans who are still enjoying the music and keeping it in the public eye with such love and devotion. In fact, for the film’s premiere on September 3rd, the musical’s official TikTok account posted several videos in which Coyle was featured on the red carpet, along with other TikTokers who have also become famous thanks to millions of views of their own videos. They even had a curtained window on the red carpet for anyone who wanted to recreate the trend.
Now, I didn’t become aware of the trend until well after it had taken off. When Coyle’s first TikTok was posted I was out of the country and didn’t open the app, so when I got back I had dozens of videos to scroll through in my DMs courtesy of my friends. Meg and I keep each other well fed on TikToks, sending each other dozens each week. Among the ones she sent me while I was on vacation were a few based off of Coyle’s trend. At first I didn’t get it and didn’t think much of them, but as they kept showing up on my FYP, the feed created by the app’s algorithm of videos you might like based on your activity on the app, I started to understand why people were so enamored with this trend.
This is the part where I confess that I’ve never seen Hamilton myself. Not the stage show nor the film release. Despite almost every theater-loving friend of mine having watched it on stage at least once, it’s just never really appealed to me. At some point I may watch it at home, but I’m just personally not in a huge rush to do it. When the stage musical first became a sensation, I was just so happy seeing my friends enjoying it. Some of them took their kids to see it and it became a bonding moment for them. Others have made girl trips out of it, like my friends Tiffany and Shannon, who made a week out of it and visited New York to see the show, sight-see and eat at all the restaurants they had always wanted to try in the area. And thanks to the way that the original cast members advertised the show starting way back in the early 2010s, I had heard bits of the songs well before the show even debuted on Broadway. But, not everything is for everybody, and Hamilton I guess just isn’t for me.
Going back to Coyle and how she came up with the concept for the video, she’s been quoted as saying, “Whenever I hear that scene I always think of it as him trying to sneak out, so I was like, hmm, I could portray that”. This is certainly much funnier than just a straight copy of the action on the stage which, again, is just Hamilton and Eliza talking while he’s sitting and trying to write. What I like so much about it, and why now Meg is being spammed with a deluge of TikToks from this trend, is the direction in which people have taken this, and the fun they’re having engaging with a piece of art. They’ve taken a serious moment in a tragic story and added levity to it, simultaneously showing a passion for the original work and gleeful engagement with it and with each other by piggy-backing on and building off of each other’s ideas. It’s beautiful, collaborative, and fun, and coming across these videos almost always makes me happy, and it’s nice to be reminded that such lovely things still exist in the world.
And Now Ok Real Quick Presents "On My To Be Read Pile".
Thank you voice from the other end of the couch!
I did it. I read Sunrise On The Reaping. If you listened to my last episode, you may remember that I recently reread Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series and The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes, which followed the book’s biggest villain in his youth. I considered whether I wanted to give myself some time before I dove back into that world. The series is a tough read, getting more and more difficult to get through with each successive book. And, again, it’s not because it’s a bad series or it’s poorly written. If anything, the writing in each book is better than the last. But, ugh, the subject matter is hard on the soul. In case you somehow don’t know the premise of the series, it’s about a dystopian future set in North America, in a country named Panem. The story revolves around what are known as The Hunger Games, a punishment on the people of Panem enacted by their rulers, the wealthy people of the Capitol. There was a war in which the Capitol, the victors faced off against the people of the 13 districts it controlled. Not satisfied with winning, they basically enslaved the entire population of the districts, keeping their activities under tight control through coercion and strategic starvation. Lest the populace forget who’s in charge, every year the Capitol chooses two children from each district, aged between 12 and 18, and force them to fight each other to the death. Yeah, not exactly fluffy reading material.
So, let’s talk a bit about Sunrise On The Reaping, the newest book set in this world. As you might imagine, it’s hard to get through graphic descriptions of children killing each other for the enjoyment of their oppressors and this being used as a punishment and reminder to the nation at large of who’s in charge. What do you mean you see parallels to our real world? I can’t imagine how you could say that!
Anyway, the story in Sunrise centers on Haymitch Abernathy, a character who features prominently in the original trilogy. In those books we know Haymitch as a man who wants nothing to do with anybody, who keeps people away with his less-than-sparkling personality and who is never not drunk. In Sunrise, he starts off as a 16 year old kid who loves and is loved by his mother and brother, and who is in love with a girl and has plans for their future. The book takes us from how he went from this to the Haymitch in the trilogy, and, needless to say, it’s harrowing.
It’s hard to say “Oh I enjoyed this book so much,” because, yeah, I did, because it’s a good book written well with compelling characters and solid story-telling, but I don’t know that “enjoyed” is the right word. I’m not not glad that I read it, and, like the Songbird and Snakes book I would recommend it, but know that it’s not a light read.
The book refers frequently to Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. The only complaint I have about the book is that, in my opinion, the frequent use of the poem takes me out of the story the more it is used, and there is a section of the book in which it used a lot. I don’t particularly care for that, not just in this book but when I see that in books and fanfiction in general. So, if I have any complaints about the book, it’s that. But that aside, it’s a solid read. Just be aware that it’s hard, and maybe look up triggers and content warnings before diving in.
And that’s it for this week. As always, whether you subscribe or not, I hope you enjoyed the show.
Ok, bye!