"Michelle Obama said that it was 'the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen,' an observation that put Michelangelo, Mozart and Miles Davis in their place."

"There have been a few detractors but most have been confined to isolated pockets of social media, like guerrilla fighters facing overwhelming odds. What is it that generates so much excitement?... [W]hatever [Hamilton]’s true merits, it has at least bridged the ever-growing gap between Broadway and popular song. Think of it, if you like, as Les Mis for the beatbox generation. Just as the Boublil and Schönberg celebration of life on the Parisian barricades goes overboard with the bombast, so Miranda’s narrative bludgeons you with facts. The one obvious problem is that the rap lyrics are at the same time mundane and relentlessly dense.... The effect is sometimes numbing: imagine if Cole Porter, who had a more nimble grasp of language, wrote nothing but list songs. We’d be bored."

From "Hamilton review — Facts aren’t music to everyone’s ears" by Clive Davis (London Times).

"Hamilton" is reopening in London after the lockdown, so this is a reassessment from Davis. If you want to get into the subject of how people in England respond to an American telling of the Revolution, you'll have to go back to reviews written in 2017. So don't wonder about why Davis isn't doing that. 

He's mostly bellyaching about rap, and I thought the complaint "rap lyrics are at the same time mundane and relentlessly dense" was worth thinking about. I don't listen to enough rap to have a valid opinion, but I do find it offputting because it demands a lot work out of the listener. You have to pay attention... though I always resort to looking up the lyrics and reading them if there are ever lyrics I want to be familiar with, as occasionally happens.

But what is this category of songs called "list songs" — "imagine if Cole Porter... wrote nothing but list songs"? I'd never heard of this, but there's a Wikipedia article:

A list song, also called a laundry list song or a catalog song, is a song based wholly or in part on a list. Unlike topical songs with a narrative and a cast of characters, list songs typically develop by working through a series of information, often humorous or comically, articulating their images additively, and sometimes use items of escalating absurdity. 

The form as a defining feature of an oral tradition dates back to early classical antiquity, where it played an important part of early hexameter poetry for oral bards like Homer and Hesiod. In classical opera the list song has its own genre, the catalogue aria.... The list song is a frequent element of 20th-century popular music and became a Broadway staple. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, and Stephen Sondheim are composers and lyricists who have used the form....

A Cole Porter list song that's easy to call to mind is "You're the Top." The "you" in that song is, the singer asserts, the Colosseum, the Louvre Museum, a symphony by Strauss, a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, Mickey Mouse, etc. — that is, the best example in the category.

There's a long list of list songs at the Wikipedia link, including Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Bob tells us he's seen "a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it... a highway of diamonds with nobody on it... a black branch with blood that kept dripping... a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding... a white ladder all covered with water... ten-thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken... [and] guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children."

There's a few more Bob Dylan songs on that list. "All I Really Want to Do" and "Forever Young" have far pleasanter items on the list than "Hard Rain."

The Beach Boys song on the list is easy to think of. There's one Beatles song listed, "Come Together," but it was easy enough to think of another — "Savoy Truffle."

But let's go back to Cole Porter. Here's how "You're the Top" unfolds in its musical theater setting, "Anything Goes" (which no one, especially not Michelle Obama, thinks is the top of musical theater):

 

BONUS: Here are Ethel Merman and Frank Sinatra doing the "You're the Top" scene on the TV show "The Colgate Comedy Hour" in 1954: