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.
The album follows the movie based on a 1965 book by Sol Yurick. More or less, it’s the hero’s journey of the titular gang. On the night of a big meeting of all the greatest gangs in New York, someone shoots and kills Cyrus (played by the late Roger Hill in the movie), the leader of the strongest gang, the Gramercy Riffs. The Warriors are wrongfully accused of the death and the news spreads like wildfire.
The movie version of The Warriors includes titular gang members Swan (Michael Beck), Ajax (James Remar), Cleon (Dorsey Wright), Snow (Brian Tyler), Cochise (David Harris), Cowboy (Tom McKitterick), Rembrandt (Marcelino Sanchez), and Vermin (Terry Michos), and Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh). As they try to get home to Coney Island, they have to fight their way through the gangs of New York as they have a bounty on their heads.
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.
This gender-flipped version makes this an entirely different kind of survival story but hits similar beats to the film. For instance, instead of The Lizzies, it’s the cardigan-clad gang The Bizzies played by Stephen Sanchez, Joshua Henry, Timothy Hughes, and Daniel Jikal. With K-pop panache, they seduce the women into an all-out brawl as they sing a boy band reprise of “We Got You”.
The other gangs are pulled from the 20+ gangs featured in the movie with some minor tweaks. Miranda and Davis opted out of including more visual gangs (The Baseball Furies) and included versions of The Rogues (Kim Dracula, Alex Boniello), The Orphans (Utkarsh Ambudkar, Casey Likes), and the Turnball ACs (Flacco Navaja, Marc Anthony, Luis Figueroa). The great Colman Domingo pops in as Masai, Cyrus’s right-hand man while Mykal Kilgore, Michaela Jaé, and Billy Porter represent The House of Hurricanes (in the movie, they are simply “The Hurricanes”, a ballroom gang who force The Warriors off the train while wacking their way through the shade-throwing and ball tune “Quiet Girls” (my fave).
With Davis and her rich narrative voice on board, Miranda’s vision continues to carry his sonic signature. The duo serves an audio landscape that feels like a modern-day New York but is set in the past as it honors all genres of music. From rap to boy band to Latin to West Coast angst rock of the late ’90s and early ’00s, Warriors is an enjoyable buffet of TRL glee mixed with the prestige of theater and the rawness of New York born and bred hip-hop.
And just to hear Ms. Lauryn Hill sing on the track “If You Can Count” — that was enough for me.
In particular, “A Light Or Somethin’” echoes Miranda’s past lovelorn romantic duets such as “When the Sun Goes Down” in In The Heights and “Helpless” from Hamilton — but this one is queer. Like the movie, there is a romance between Swan and Mercy — and they are both women in the album version. It’s a detail about this iteration of Warriors that expands its scope and aims to broaden the horizons of its listeners. It also makes this version of the story different and a lot more interesting.
With the Swan and Mercy romance and the House of Hurricanes, there are certainly more queer characters scattered throughout this new iteration — and maybe even within the Warriors. I mean, have you seen the art? It’s giving queer.
There are moments and glimpses of corniness throughout this concept album — I mean, at the end of the day, it is a musical iteration of The Warriors. The hokey nature of some of the lyrics comes with the territory and helps the story move forward. But the pop cultural heft and iconic sign-offs from Nas and Lauryn Hill make up for any of my reservations.
Miranda and Davis created something here that honors a pop culture totem in a way that is thoughtful and speaks to the times. Alongside Davis, Miranda does what he does best as he tends to a lush landscape of musical genres like Edward Scissorhands — and to have James Remar, who played the original Ajax, and David Patrick Kelly, who played Luther, appear on the album as cops? Well, that’s just a goddam treat for fans of The Warriors.
Warriors reminds us that Miranda is still good at what he does and he wants to introduce us to other artists like Davis who are doing equally incredible things.
Can you dig it?
