He's gotta get the O in EGOT. (I think Miranda's songwriting craft is legitimately terrific, but he does have a bag of tricks. Where he's genuinely next-level is in his skill with structuring a stage musical, a notoriously hard thing to do he makes look easy.)
I based my politics on Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and it's served me well so far.
(Basically all criticism that takes as its starting point “the wrong people like this” ends up here, regardless of political persuasion. Like this is Sasha Stone’s entire m.o. now.)
People have always been like this though, even when traditional media was dominant. The Satanic Panic, reefer madness, the Red Scare, the immigration panic of the 1990s, etc.
Perhaps the hardest rule of arts criticism to remember is: Don't review the audience. Yet we all fuck this up all the time.
There's an element of Trump's delivery that has always fascinated me, which you can see in this clip (alas on the X dot com platform): Doesn't he seem like he's a late-night host talking to his band leader? It's straight up Jay Leno talking to Kevin Eubanks. twitter.com/atrupar/stat...
Eh, a pretty common arc for something that got THAT big, especially as part of a medium that is necessarily gatekept by class strata. But I think you've seen a similar journey with, say, Game of Thrones. Stuff that gets so huge has a comparable downswing.
It's a big swing, and I cannot help but love a big swing.
A lot of leftist arts critique is useful and valid, and a lot of it is just reverse engineering a negative opinion from kneejerk disgust at cringe online fandom, and it's important to know the difference.
Used to be that I think Hamilton's good, but I feel like we've all kind of agreed to disagree on that one
