I like to think that I’ve trained my Spotify recommendations well; the playlists it makes for me are on the most part decent, and I’m one of the only people I know who uses the DJ feature. Recently though, there’s been an interloper. It’s unsurprising that the “Hazbin Hotel” cast album has been consistently showing up in my suggestions, considering that many in their cast of Broadway’s biggest stars regularly number in my top Spotify artists. Nevertheless, every time I hear the start of a song, it’s like having a surprise snowball shoved down the back of my shirt.
There have already been many posts and articles airing out gripes with the show like its cringeworthy writing, ineffective character design and dubious arguments about morality. I, however, have another beef to quash with “Hazbin Hotel.” After being badgered by my Spotify homepage over and over, I decided to listen to the album. After all, my middle school days were spent drawing “Heathers” fanart and “Be More Chill” was the first musical I ever went to in person — theoretically, I should be the target audience. My conclusion: It sucks. Despite having the combined vocal prowess of those such as Stephanie Beatriz (“Encanto”), Jessica Vosk (“Wicked”) and Alex Brightman (“Beetlejuice: The Musical”), the show made a soundtrack so unimpressive and ineffective that it made me viscerally upset at the waste of talent.
The placement of songs
Musical theater legend Bob Fosse once said “the time to sing is when your emotional level is too high to just speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.” Generally, this is how musicals combine speech and song. That way, the songs are reserved for the key plot points, and the depth of emotion in those moments also make the songs interesting to listen to on their own. Think of your favorite Disney musical: Songs like “Let it Go” in “Frozen” or basically any song in “Encanto” occur when a character is absolutely overwhelmed with emotion.
“Hazbin Hotel,” on the other hand, likes to use songs to set up premises. This is the case for “Welcome to Heaven” or even the opener “Happy Day in Hell,” which the show uses to tell us the main character Charlie’s (Erika Henningsen, “Mean Girls: the Musical”) plan to solve overpopulation in Hell. Instead of music being used as a way of conveying emotions and plot, it’s used to keep the audience’s attention while all the plot facts are conveyed. This makes for boring music because the subjects of the songs have no significance to the audience yet and therefore fail to emotionally resonate. I don’t care about Charlie’s plan because I have no idea who she is or why I should care. It also reads as a lack of confidence in the plot standing on its own.
The subject of songs
Songs are a poor way of conveying facts. Singing makes it hard to decipher words, and in their effort to be intelligible, the show has a lot of talk-singing that makes for really clunky lyrics and an unenjoyable listening experience. Usually in theater, songs are either used to cover a wide summary of events (see: “Prologue” from “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812”) or harp on one specific point (“Hard to Be a Bard” from “Something Rotten”). In fact, “Hard to be a Bard” is a great example of talk-singing done right. The style is used to convey a frantic feeling and, unlike songs from “Hazbin Hotel” like “You Didn’t Know,” “Something Rotten” keeps a consistent rhythm to the number of syllables per line, giving it a meter-like effect. “Hazbin Hotel” seems to write lyrics to then shove forcefully into preexisting melodies. “You Didn’t Know” specifically has a weird quirk of splitting sentences down the middle with melodies that resolve in the middle of sentences. This confuses the audience upon the first few listens when you’re seemingly given half of a sentence as a full phrase, and then unexpectedly the other half comes after the phrase is thought of as done.
The style of songs
One point that I’ll concede to “Hazbin Hotel” is the strong sense of style in the individual songs. Each song harkens to a specific genre of music, and when you hear a song, you immediately get a sense of the character singing it. The issue is that, as a unified piece of artwork, this makes the album completely incoherent. Don’t get me wrong — genre is often employed in musical theater to convey character. “School of Rock: The Musical,” for instance, has characters move from choral singing to rock as the story progresses, and the finale song is a mixture of the two, representing the unique power of combining a preppy go-getter attitude and the spirit of rock ’n’ roll. This works for “School of Rock” for two reasons. First of all, instead of trying to combine five or six distinct styles of music, they went with two. More importantly though, the style of music in “School of Rock” was a throughline in the overarching story, which then touched on every character and every song. Charlie’s (Henningsen) Disney princess songs and Lucifer’s (Jeremy Jordan, “Tangled: The Animated Series”) unbearable techno-cabaret have no actual relation to the story, and thus feel unconnected and more like forced character quirks than a thought-out part of the media. They don’t even sound like they’re from the same musical.
Speaking of Lucifer’s weird electro swing, “baby’s first Apple Logic Pro project” nightmare, who is this music supposed to appeal to? Rhetorical question, by the way. The actual answer is chronically online 14-year-olds who think swearing a lot makes you punk rock. However, for a show that desperately wants to be taken seriously as having a valid moral quandary, its music has an amateur quality that while charming in fan works, is hard to sit through as a full-length album. It’s electronic and robotic in a way that feels more like it was the easiest choice rather than the best deliberate choice, and the vocal performances sound incredibly repetitive verse to verse, which I can only assume is due to a lack of vocal direction. I think “Hell’s Greatest Dad” is the only time I’ve ever wanted Jeremy Jordan to finish singing sooner.
The lyricism also leaves much to be desired, with lines like “You’re a loser, baby / A loser, goddamn baby / You’re a fucked up little whiny bitch” in response to a character in a deeply abusive and exploitative relationship. They read as incredibly tone-deaf and cringey, rather than with an edgy callousness that the show so badly wants to exude. Other lyrics are completely nonsensical, such as “Best hotel that you’ve ever seen / Twice the bedrooms, we can fill it”. Twice the bedrooms compared to what? The whole point of the show is that they’re building a new concept of a hotel for the Hazbins, so the comparative statement makes no sense whatsoever.
The structure of songs
“Hazbin Hotel” commits what I consider to be the biggest sin a musical theater song can commit: being boring. The genre is about glam, camp and making weird experimental art, and yet you write all your songs in 4/4? On purpose? Not only is it all in the same time signature, but nearly every song has the same phrasing as well. What’s more frustrating is that there are some songs that would actively benefit from a different time signature. “Respectless” takes (light) inspiration from flamenco music as seen in its opening guitar riff, but then immediately drops it in favor of a generic pop vibe. The song is an argument between two characters and honestly, upon first listen, I couldn’t keep track of who was singing because their parts sounded exactly the same. Differentiating them through changing time signatures, as is seen in flamenco music, could’ve been a distinctive and more memorable way to approach the song. That might’ve also required more cultural tact and worldliness than the “Hazbin Hotel” team is capable of, though, so maybe it’s for the best.
The songs of “Hazbin Hotel” also tend to go between a total of five to seven notes through an entire song, all within an octave and a half or so. Technically, they’re just not that impressive. Yes, not every song needs to be a high-belting, octave-skipping, Sondheim-esque masterpiece. But when you’ve cast one of the best Elphebas (Vosk) in “Wicked” history, why the hell would you give her a song that my choir teacher would describe as a “poor showcase of ability” at auditions? “Hell is Forever” was probably the only semi-acceptable song in this regard, allowing Brightman to show off his signature rasp in a rock style. Even then, I would’ve loved to see that pushed further and his unique propensity to sing in vocal chord-grinding ways used to its full potential.
This limited range is only exacerbated by the lack of harmonization in the songs. The majority of the songs are solo and there are a few duets, but there isn’t a single song with an ensemble or background vocals. Even looking outside of the theater, most songs nowadays have a chorus of background singers. This is because it’s very difficult to garner the stage presence required to fill a space through solo audio alone. For musicals, ensembles are even more important, as they often represent the characters’ connection to the world at large. To use a gaming allegory, the main characters are the players and the ensemble contains all the non-playable characters that give a human connection to the wider world. The ensemble in the musical reacts to the characters’ emotions — recall that singing is an expression of emotion — and how it has actual effects on the world they live in. Of course, not every song in a musical needs an ensemble, but without the help of soaring melodies or interesting pacing to fill the track, the complete lack of ensemble in the “Hazbin Hotel” cast album just feels very half-hearted and empty.
Conclusion
Unabashedly: If “Hazbin Hotel” has a million haters, I’m one of them. If “Hazbin Hotel” has one hater, then I’m that one. If “Hazbin Hotel” has no haters, that means I’m dead.
I get that not everyone is a theater kid who’ll read sheet music to be a more informed hater and hey, if you think the show is just a fun time, more power to you. That being said, the music is only one of the many things I have beef with in regards to this series, and I really hope that with season two of the show coming soon, the creative team either improves their work or Prime takes those resources and gives it to one of the countless good shows they keep canceling. There are just so many shows out there with more artistic value to spend your time on. If you want a dark campy musical comedy, try “Schmigadoon,” “Smash,” or hell, even “Glee.” If you want a Queer show with actual worthwhile moral quandaries about the biblical Heaven and Hell, I cannot overstate how much better a story “Good Omens” is. If you want animation, I could probably give you a full A to Z list. Or, listen to some more stage musicals — most of the actors are famous for their Broadway careers and have done far better work, available for your ears with a quick peek on their Wikipedia pages. I had to search up the album on YouTube to write this article as I blocked it on Spotify weeks ago, and now the algorithm keeps pushing me “Hazbin Hotel” edits. The least you can do for me is listen to actually good musicals.
Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at yanglinj@umich.edu.
The post How to fix ‘Hazbin Hotel’ appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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