Various Artists - The Hamilton Mixtape

Pitchfork 48

The Hamilton original cast recording recently passed half-a-billion streams on Spotify. That’s billion, with a “B”: Try to think of more influential, beloved, and ubiquitous cast recordings in history—you will probably end up counting on two hands, maybe one. The music of Hamilton now sits directly in the center of American pop culture, and it has smuggled rapping—the unadulterated, information-dense kind that you can hear tripping from the tongues of the best MCs—into the ears of Dick Cheney and Mike Pence with it, for God’s sake.

So why does Hamilton Mixtape exist? Hamilton doesn’t need any help crossing over, into hip-hop or anywhere else. In its best-case scenario, The Hamilton Mixtape is an afterthought, an asterisk or a curio for Hamilton obsessives. On it, a wide-ranging group of rappers and R&B singers reinterpret, or in many cases simply cover, the tracks from the soundtrack, which has been lightly reworked and retooled by a range of producers, with guidance from Questlove and assistance from J. Period, !llmind, and more. Ja Rule and Ashanti reunite to take on the Eliza Schuyler/Alexander romance tune “Helpless.” Regina Spektor and Ben Folds perform "Dear Theodosia.” Sia is here. Wiz Khalifa is here. Oh, and Jimmy Fallon, too: he performs “You’ll Be Back,” the jaunty break-up song from King George addressed to the unruly colonies. Fallon starts with a painful joke about how he was classically trained, “and by that I mean I was trained by vocal coach Ed Classically.” Then he takes a breath and starts singing. Trust me: You do not want to be in the room where this happens.

The guest list throughout is an assortment of marquee names and WTFs. Black Thought sounds tremendous and forceful on the rework of “My Shot,” but he’s followed by a plodding Joell Ortiz and a humorless Busta Rhymes, who stiffens back into barking-youth-basketball-coach mode once away from the relaxing influence of his fellow Native Tongues members. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing, a lot of faux-motivational bluster, not a lot of good writing. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who doesn’t show up on the song, is missed.

Miranda does show up on one of the mixtape’s only original songs, called “Wrote My Way Out.” He’s joined by Nas, who sounds disengaged, cartoonish, and distant. Miranda, meanwhile, burns through the song’s tissue-thin noble-struggle atmosphere with a verse hot with details. “I caught my first beating from the other kids when I was caught reading/Oh you think you smart? Start bleeding,” he yelps desperately. Yes, his verse also contains the seven-ton-anvil clang of “My mind is where the wild things are/Maurice Sendak.” But he’s a performer, and his ability to convey rising desperation in verse is maybe his purest and clearest link to hip-hop.

The Hamilton Mixtape shares one thing in common with its parent album: It is very, very long. But since it isn’t sequenced as a linear narrative, treating the show like a sort of greatest hits, you lose all sense of the knuckle-whitening tension that propels the original forward. Alicia Keys leeches the marital tenderness out of “That Would Be Enough,” turning an urgent and warm plea from a wife to a husband on a frightening precipice into something for torch-lighting ceremonies, as impersonal and pretty as a hotel lobby chandelier. By the time you get to Chance the Rapper, crooning the show’s devastating “Dear Theodosia (reprise),” you realize that The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.