Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis's 'Warriors' Concept Album Is Hella Dope
No. 32: Warrrrrioooooooors.... come out and plaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!
A ‘Warriors’ concept album with Lauryn Hill singing is all I need
When I told a friend about Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis's Warriors concept album based on the 1979 film of the same name, they immediately rolled their eyes.
Remember that episode of Saved by the Bell when the gang put on a rap version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Well, they likened this Warriors album without hearing it at all.
From Freestyle Love Supreme to In The Heights to Hamilton to Bring it On the Musical, I am a fan of Miranda and his remarkable oeuvre of hip-hop musical brilliance. One of the highlights of my career was reciting the lyrics of the Kriss Kross Sprite commercial alongside Miranda during an episode of the New Hollywood Podcast when he was promoting the In The Heights movie.
Hamilton was a storytelling masterpiece as much as it was entertaining but what was first considered groundbreaking turned into a narrative template that if put in the wrong hands, can make for a disastrous bastardization of the art of hip hop. I mean, do I have to mention that Canva thing?
No one is hurting anyone in any of these situations, but I get it — the Hamiltonization of it all has started to become a turn-off for some.That doesn’t mean Miranda and his Warriors partner in crime Davis, who is a celebrated playwright, can turn it out. She also was part of the Passing Strange ensemble that won an Obie Award in 2008 and has been seen on TV series such as Mare of Easttown, House of Cards, Betty, and Hart of Dixie. She also wrote on the Netflix adaptation of Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It starring DeWanda Wise. The multi-hyphenate also wrote Angela’s Mixtape, a story about her progressive Bay Area upbringing with her family that included her aunt, activist trailblazer Angela Davis.
Honestly, even I was a bit skeptical of this “concept album”. Those words scare me. It’s like when a really good friend wants you to come to their one-person show and you know it's not going to be good but you go anyway for moral support.
The Warriors directed by Walter Hill was released the year I was born so maybe that's why I have a strong connection to it — as do many Gen X’ers and younger Millennials. So we’re going to be protective of Swan and all the guys.
As soon as I heard that Miranda and Davis gender-flipped the whole thing, my ears perked up. Then I found out that Lauryn Hill was playing the role of Cyrus… I leaned in intently. I mean, to have Ms. Lauryn thee Hill, an artist who made one singular album that has withstood the test of time and rarely sings on albums, agree to be on a concept album — that is a huge deal. And it makes me wonder why it isn’t a bigger news.
With Shenseea as the omniscient DJ Lynne Pen (a DJ played by the late, great Lynne Thigpen in the movie), Miranda and Davis’s iteration with women playing The Warriors include Swan (Jasmine Cephas Jones), Ajax (Amber Gray), Cleon (Aneesa Folds), Cochise (Kenita Miller), and Rembrandt (Gizel Jiménez). Instead of Cowboy, it’s Cowgirl played by Sasha Hutchings while Phillipa Soo steps in the role of Fox, which might be an amalgam of the characters Snow and Vermin -- all of whom are introduced in an '80s J.J. Fad cypher-style roll call which serves as an idée fixe throughout this entire opus as the women make sure their voices are heard.
Nonetheless, the women have the same mission as the men in the album version, but the gender flipping adds a whole other layer of obstacles for the gang because they are women.
The album starts with a rallying cry of New York with marquee hip hop icons furiously spitting rhymes while “playing” boroughs that they represent on the explosive track “Survive the Night”: Busta Rhymes (Brooklyn), Cam’ron (Manhattan), Ghostface Killah and Rza (Staten Island), Chris Rivers (The Bronx), and album executive producer Nas (Queens).
From there, Warriors proves to be this formidable musical that you want to see but know it probably will never happen because it lives better in the imagination.