Donald Trump's campaign boss once dreamed of making a Hamilton-like rap musical about the L.A. riots

(Image credit: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

published 23 August 2016

Donald Trump's new campaign CEO and Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon once aspired to take Shakespeare's Coriolanus and "make a rap film out of it set in South Central during the [1992] L.A. riots," Julia Jones, Bannon's writing partner of 18 years, told The Daily Beast.

Rap musicals have recently risen to mainstream popularity, most notably with the Broadway hit Hamilton, although Spike Lee used Aristophanes' Lysistrata as the basis of the satirical 2015 musical Chi-Raq about gang violence in Chicago. Bannon, though, was perhaps ahead of his time with the never-produced 2006 script for The Thing I Am; Jones and the son of Bannon's assistant wrote most of the lyrics before "Steve [then] added stuff — all the 'dudes' are him," Jones explained.

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Soon after the musical begins, Agrippa and Brutus are already debating politics and class."They don't care for us," Brutus argues, enraged. "Their houses, crammed with good s---; their banks grow fat and daily they repeal fair acts against the rich while passing laws to chain the poor. If their wars don't eat us up, they will. And what's the love they bear us?!"Agrippa fires back, and in doing so commands the crowd's attention."South Central is the belly, you, n--gas, its mutinous members; look on and you'll see that the benefits which you receive proceed … from them to you. In no way from your sorry black asses," Agrippa retorts.According to the unproduced script, the Blood subsequently "crosses to Brutus and grabs his crotch." [The Daily Beast]

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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