Hamilton Vocabulary

Words by order of first appearance.

The video shown below features the soundtrack from Hamilton—editing out every word that appeared earlier in the soundtrack. At first the loss is barely noticeable…

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman…

…but pretty soon, the loss of common words like “of” and “the” starts piling up, and then more important words disappear, like, say “Alexander Hamilton.” What’s surprising is how much of the text survives this treatment—you can spot matched rhymes almost to the end.

It’s part of a YouTube tradition of guerilla remixes using weird constraints to alter an original work. I’ve already covered literal videos, a subset of this idea. Other examples—more visual than verbal—include “Bee Movie but every time they say ‘bee’ it gets faster,” and “Gaston but every time they say ‘Gaston’ the frames trail even more.”

Side note: my personal favorite of these is the least wordplay-related. It’s “Every episode of Friends played at the same time,” which reduces 236 half-hour broadcasts into a single writhing mass of blue-and-Caucasian-white. Ghostly faces and buildings cubistically interpenetrate. The chatter of recognizable voices is like a neverending party outside your window, set against a hurricane-like laugh track.

Watching the Hamilton video is almost as bizarre an experience, but unlike with the other examples here, you can do some amateur textual analysis while you drink in the strangeness. As the YouTube commenters mention, even this abridged version of the play goes on for half an hour, only a quarter or so of the play’s original run time, and that there are some recognizable words even in the play’s concluding song.

That shows just how much varied vocabulary there is in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s career-making masterpiece. Given the same constraint, I don’t think Bee Movie’s script would have filled thirty minutes—or even twenty!