As you may have read, I saw Rock of Ages recently on Broadway. There are plenty of OTI angles on it, especially with how the upcoming movie will differ from the stage version (change in villains from greedy German real estate developers to fundamentalist Christians), but I wanted to throw this one to the group…
Rock of Ages is pretty much the platonic ideal of an 80s period jukebox musical. It’s the story of a kid who wants to play hair metal on the Sunset Strip. There’s a band on stage, and they rock really hard. The costumes and music perfectly evoke the aesthetics and mood of the time period.
So my question is, what would the ideal 90s period jukebox musical be like? I’d argue that the 90s don’t have as clear of an identity as the 60s, 70s, or 80s. Would it be set in Seattle and feature grunge music? Or what about LA with early 90s hip hop? It could even use the LA riots as a current events backdrop (which Rock of Ages lacked) and would have the side benefit of allowing for Asian characters (I’ve always seen myself as playing a gun-toting Korean grocery store owner in my Broadway debut).
The latter also raises the question: could a hip-hop musical ever make it to the Great White (ahem) Way?
Perich
I would mortgage my future to finance a musical about the golden age of hip-hop, so long as it was set in Brooklyn.
Lee
Well, we can have the best of both worlds. Make it an East Coast vs. West Coast story with thinly fictionalized versions of Biggie and Tupac.
Forget mortgaging your future. I bet something like this could catch fire on Kickstarter.
Belinkie
It would obviously have to be bi-coastal. You might even have to split the stage in two visually, with Cali on the left and New York on the right. Atlanta could have a balcony, but honestly I don’t know how heavily the south or midwest would feature in a golden age hip hop musical.
Perich
Too late! Future mortgaged!
Also, which story are we telling—a rags-to-riches success story about a rapper rising to the top (which would have to be one coast) or a West Side Story tale of two studios, both alike in dignity (which could feature both coasts)?
Fenzel
You can represent the South with a James Brown figure who appears to one of the characters as he wrestles with his place in the historical legacy of music. You do a medley where a soul/funk song is first played straight, then sampled and incorporated into the corresponding hip-hop song.
Belinkie
Okay, so it’s about two friends that grow up in the Brooklyn projects together. They grow up performing “Rapper’s Delight” on a street corner, free-styling to impress the girls. When one of them is twelve, he gets moved out to Compton. Maybe an aunt adopts him after his mom gets shot. Then they meet again at a rap battle ten years later. They want to resume their friendship, but there is tremendous pressure from their entourages to start a rivalry, show some east/west coast pride. Maybe they each have a hotheaded sidekick/protege who is a little more aggressive and does the violent dis songs.
Oh, and there’s a girl who grew up with them who is now an exec at Atlantic Records. She’s the love interest, and also the “Hey, maybe hip hop could go mainstream!” person. And cast a famous white comedian as some shady promoter type.
Personally, I’d shy away from the “they both are shot” ending, and also the “let’s put aside our differences and record an album together” ending. Maybe we can stuff the girl in a fridge to get the boys to stop feuding.
Fenzel
You can have the East Coast and West Coast rappers at a standoff, guns drawn—and they fire at each other nine times. At the last second, a Midwestern rapper leaps between them, taking all nine bullets and falling in a crumpled heap on the ground, which convinces the two other rappers that violence isn’t the answer as they see its terrible toll.
The Midwestern rapper then gets up, dusts himself off, and sings “Candy Shop.”
Sheely
Matt’s description of the female character reminds me a bit of the song “I used to love H.E.R.” by Common.
In the song he personifies hip hop as a woman and uses her story to tell the story of the evolution of the genre. In the musical, this could be played out literally in this character, tracking the changes in hip-hop and changing with the times, kind of like the Jenny character in Forrest Gump.
Instead of a promoter, the shady white dude could be a record company A&R, the position charged with identifying and signing new talent. I’d very much like if he happened to be a mountain climber who played the electric guitar.
Perich
All right, Belinkie has convinced me the bi-coastal thing can work. (Blessed are those who hadn’t yet seen Belinkie’s response and still believed) Now what’s the tracklist?
Belinkie
Making good progress here. So of our two main characters, the one whose mom was shot and moved out west has a harder, gangsta style. (He’s the one who would do “Gangster’s Paradise.”) Let’s call this guy Otis. To balance him out, his sidekick is a more mellow, fun-loving, Snoop Dogg stand in. He’ll do “Gin and Juice,” obviously, and some of the other goofier rap classics. Maybe he does “The Humpty Dance” trying to mock the comic relief rap promoter.
Meanwhile, his east coast friend is more of a “socially-conscious” Talib Kwali/Eric B/Mos Def type rapper. He’s got better rhymes and better flow, but he’s not as commercial. Maybe he feels pressure to sell out a little once hip hop starts to take off. That’s his character’s dilemma—do you rap what the public wants to hear, or what’s in your heart?
And I realize that “Gangster’s Paradise” is by no means a “hard, gangsta” song. But it would definitely be in the musical, right?
Perich
Whereas the West Coast protagonist’s dilemma is: do I keep rapping what’s true to me (violence on the streets, anger at the cops) even as it inspires younger generations to imitate a gangster lifestyle that puts them in danger?
Sheely
I’d love to have the female character do Lauryn Hill’s “That Thing”, as I can see it working well as a ensemble number (the lead girl warning the others to “watch out”).
When the two characters are about to reunite, I’d love to have “Going Back to Cali” and/or “California Love”, possibly in medley?
When the character moves from Brooklyn to LA, could “Straight Outta Compton” be his introduction to his new environment? The only issue with that song is that many of the lyrics and references are very specific to the members of N.W.A.
Stokes
There are at least three related ways that musical lyrics and rap lyrics are not alike.
First, musical theater songs usually have a really tight focus: they are ABOUT something. It can be something stupid and irrelevant to the plot, but the songs don’t usually run off on tangents. Rap songs are usually all about tangents. The Rick Ross song “Hustlin'” is, uh, unusually specific in its focus, but it’s still all over the place by Rogers and Hammerstein standards. Put a line like “I know Pablo/ Noriega/ The real Noriega/ He owe me a hundred favors” into a musical, and what can you do with it? Either you let it hang there feeling out of place, or you introduce Noriega as a character, and establish the relationship he has with the Rick Ross character, and see some of those favors called in.
And it wouldn’t stop there. Where’s Jose Canseco? Where’s the guy serving a hundred lives? Where’s the lil’ Mama who claims to be twenty-two? That’s all in one song, remember. Take any two songs, and the problem will escalate. And when guest rappers start dropping by contributing unrelated guest verses… (Granted, you could probably do an interesting jukebox rap musical set up along the lines of Company if you make Ludacris the main character and limit yourself to songs where he does a guest verse.)
Second: Within one show, you typically only get one or two songs about any given topic. One song about working through grief, or clambakes, or whaling, or June busting out all over is fine. Two is pushing it. The only exception is love songs — these go back and forth all night — but even then you only get one or two for each of the couples, and the songs end up being about their relationship, or even about a specific moment in their relationship, rather than about relationships in general.
But rap songs, especially gangster rap songs, focus on the same limited territory: you show off not by finding new things to talk about but by finding a new and better way to say the same things. West Side Story has exactly one song in it that is about how awesome the protagonist’s crew is (“When You’re a Jet”), and exactly one song about how tough life on the streets is (“Gee Officer Krupke,” kind of). It would not work at all if every song were about those issues. But a rap album that didn’t have that kind of thematic unity would feel kind of sloppy. We wouldn’t call Illmatic one of the great artistic statements of the medium if it had a random song where Nas’ girlfriend talks about how much fun it is to put on pretty dresses.
Third, some songs in musicals are just distractions from the narrative, and rap would work fine for that. But there are also a lot of very important songs that do relate to the narrative, and these function by stretching out and intensifying a particular moment. (Sticking with West Side Story for a minute, the “Tonight” montage is probably the best example of this.) Rap doesn’t work for this purpose at all. When rap songs have a narrative element, they accelerate time rather than slowing it down. In “Gimme the Loot,” it only takes a couple of minutes for Biggie to 1) get out of jail, 2) meet up with his old accomplice, 3) decide to go out robbing, 4) reminisce with his buddy about what incredible hardasses they are, 5) find two victims, 6) rob them, 7) get noticed by the cops, and 8) shoot up said cops. A musical would need two songs at absolute minimum to get through that territory (1-4 and 5-8), and could squeeze eight or even nine songs out of it without breaking a sweat.
Belinkie
So at the very end, the two rival crews are poised for a climactic shootout, on the very corner where Otis and Wrather (I’ll go ahead and call him Wrather for fun) learned to rap as children. They stare each other down, knowing the insanity of what they’re doing, but unable to see a way out. There’s no common ground. Then, all of a sudden, a beautiful woman crosses the stage, oblivious to the standoff. For ten seconds, everyone just watches her pass.
Finally, one of them speaks. “Oh. My. God,” says Otis. “Look at her butt.”
“It is so big,” says Wrather, nodding. Then, he smiles a sly smile. “She looks like one of those rap guys’ girlfriends.”
Otis glares at him and tightens his grip on the pistol, wondering whether to take it as an insult or not.
Suddenly, he cracks up. The tension is broken, and everybody laughs.
“But, you know,” Otis chuckles, “who understand those rap guys anyway…”
Cue the bassline.
OK, guys, I think we’re ready. What do we call this? “Dropping English?” “Smoking Aluminum?”
Think we’re onto the next Broadway hit? Want to improve the plot or track list? Is Stokes right after all? Sound off on the great hip-hop musical in the comments.