Lin-Manuel Miranda in
Complex Magazine: Chance the Rapper and Lin-Manuel Miranda Cover Story (x) (x) / Complex News: Chance The Rapper & Lin-Manuel Talk… (video)
You’ve both managed to carve out these very unique lanes for yourselves. Are you too humble to admit that you’re trailblazers already?
You don’t feel it ‘cause you have your head down. I’ve just been writing—I had this thing ahead of me, I had this thing I needed to write, it took 6 years, 7 years. And then you look up and you see what you’ve done. But it’s a line at a time, it’s a couplet at a time. That’s how I approach it.
Legacy is a huge theme in Hamilton. Do you think about how people will remember you 50 years from now?
So many of my lyrical heroes died way too young, so legacy is really prevalent on my mind, particularly in terms of hip-hop. Big Pun only had two albums—one real album and one posthumous—but he recorded guest verses every day. There’s 60-some-odd guest verses because he was just like, “That’s the thing I’m gonna do.” We have those, and they’re incredible. Phife [Dawg], who passed away—you can only be grateful for the work. So in terms of my own writing, I really only think of just trying to get the work done, and not in a grandiose like “This is my legacy,” but more like if I don’t write it down, and I go, it’s stuck in my brain. No one else is gonna write it down for me. That’s how I think of legacy—I’ve got to get it out of my head or out of my heart, because no one else will do it for me.
What are you willing to sacrifice for your legacy?…
One of the things Chance and I first talked about when we met was about being new fathers and making the time for that to be the most important part of your life, because that goes on. Your family goes on, and I think there’s a real myth that you have to live a fucked-up life to write fucked-up music. I’ve had enough artists as mentors who write the craziest shit you’ll ever hear in your life, but then go home to their family. They leave it in the work, and then go home and spend time with their kids and make that a priority. You can go there in your work. I play Hamilton every night: I have an affair; I lose a son; I get into duels—I get to work out all that shit on stage, and then I go home, and I’ve got the early shift in the morning with baby boy. And that’s really nice.
You guys are two artists who make comment on things that are important. Do you think that that’s something artists have a responsibility to do?
I think an artist’s only responsibility is to chase their inspiration and to fall in love. If it happens to make the world a better place, so much the better, but if you’re trying to do that consciously, it feels like homework. We can smell when an artist is doing something out of obligation versus “Something in me demands that I write this.” [also]
Think of Marvin Gaye’s early work versus What’s Going On, when he really engaged in the civil rights struggle and started writing anthems we still sing today. It’s about falling in love and really writing what’s inside you. Sometimes that’s political and sometimes it’s, “I’m pissed off and I want to write about how I’m pissed off.” An artist’s only responsibility is to be true and authentically yourself.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot in the wake of Phife’s passing, someone who rapped about being five feet tall and about being diabetic, and made those superpowers, because he was so himself and he was so honest. I think that’s our job. I think that’s what people recognize, that’s what people relate to: authenticity.
The Hamilton characters joke that dying might be the best thing for your “legacy.” Are you supposed to boast about your work, or let people do it for you? …Do you think that people need reminding?
We were at the White House last week and I got to sit down with the president. I told him, “You’re graded on a much longer curve than us. We’ll come and we’ll go, but you’re going to be in history books 300 years from now.” And what he said to me was really surprising. I would think that would weigh on you heavily.
He said, “It’s actually really freeing, because you don’t think about ‘Oh, I’m really unpopular right now.’ You think, ‘What I did day to day that most people don’t see.’ I can make those unpopular opinions because I have my eye on the long haul. I’m not thinking about who hates me today. I’m not thinking about who likes me today. I’m thinking about my work and how it will be measured.” So it’s actually a liberating thing when you take the bird’s-eye view of your own life.
You’ve both hit some pretty huge milestones, but you’re just getting started. What are you looking forward to coming up this year? …Lin, you have the Hamilton mixtape coming out soon.
Yeah, the Hamilton mixtape in the fall. And I’m just trying to get as many people to see Hamilton as possible. I know how tough it is to get a ticket in New York, so that’s why our priority is getting Chicago up and running this fall. We’ll have the San Francisco tour up and running spring of next year. We’ll have West End running in London fall of next year. Everyone is like, “Just film it and put it on TV,” but that’s not the thing. The thing is seeing it live in the space. So it’s about being able to get as many people as we can to see that. We have 20,000 school kids through a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that are going to be seeing the show this year, and we’re duplicating that program in Chicago. [We are working on bringing EduHam to all the tour stops -tweet 5/11/16]
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