Warriors Come Out and Grate

By
Craig Jenkins,
a Vulture music critic who also covers TV, comedy, and video games

Can you cringe it?
Photo: Courtesy of Atlantic Records

“It takes about an hour, an hour and a half, depending upon the train service, to get from the top of the Bronx to Coney Island,” Sol Yurick wrote in his 1966 novel, The Warriors. But “not if every cop in the city might be alerted and blockading, not if every gang truce is off and every gang’s hand is raised against every other gang’s.” Yurick’s plausible scenario — sending an unlucky crew on a trek mirroring the flight of 10,000 Greeks in Xenophon’s The Anabasis — has captured imaginations for generations, most notably through Walter Hill’s 1979 cult film adaptation, whose unforgettable lines echo across hip-hop history. “I be like, ‘Warriors, come out and play,’” Ol’ Dirty Bastard rapped on Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers; the video for 2Pac and Dr. Dre’s “California Love” opens with a hearty “Can you dig it?” lifted from the rousing keynote The Warriors’ underworld figurehead Cyrus delivers before being shot to death.

This month, Broadway auteurs Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis tap into that colorful New York legacy with Warriors, a musical-theater concept album and cast recording. Like Yurick, Miranda and Davis see an opportunity to carve out a slice of the city’s class structure and observe the layers that make the cake. The Hamilton mastermind’s gifts — a love of hip-hop and a knack for folding intricate plotlines into percussive rhymes and dense stacks of melody — as well as his quirks — fearless but overbearing maximalism and good-intentioned liberalism with a tendency to wring an uplifting takeaway from an objectively bleak situation — are unmistakable here. More than any of the wide-ranging jobs Miranda has taken on in the past five years, The Warriors, a classic yarn about underprivileged New Yorkers weathering an arduous power struggle, is catnip for the 44-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning polymath. The album pines for the lost spirit of the burned-out, provincial, pre-gentrification city. It’s a quintessentially baby-Gen-X worldview, longing for cultural rituals that died on the altar of connectivity.

Miranda is, in some ways, an ideal vessel for the endeavor, a songwriter whose sensibilities were molded by the vibrant musical heritages of his hometown and whose most successful songs tackle the question of whether to fight or accept imminent change. His Warriors strikes the same knotty balance between reverence and corrective reassessment as a modern Disney remake. Fighting against adapting the story for years, Miranda had a eureka moment in the Gamergate era, the misogynistic mid-2010s rage against criticisms of demeaning portrayals of women in video games: The main characters would be women, doxxed and maligned by untrustworthy men and blamed for the sorry state of a scene they were never even awarded the power to ruin. Davis shaped it further, recalling in a recent Sway’s Universe interview, “The question that I had in Lin’s idea of changing the Warriors to be a women’s gang … How can this truly be a women’s story and not just women doing men’s things?”

The approach undercuts the grimy male gaze of the novel that trickled down into the film. But the kinder telling eschews some of the original’s inherent grit to delve deeper into the minds of its characters, struggling in key moments to convey a sense of motion. This is an unusual outcome for an album whose aim is to lean into the rich and unexpected hip-hop legacy of The Warriors. Rap is furtive and physical music, but the coarser edges this genre and narrative necessitate are sanded down by the stately restraint and occasional G-rated schmaltz plaguing the songwriter who saw fierce backlash for the disorientingly tacky Awkwafina rhymes in The Little Mermaid’s reviled “The Scuttlebutt.”

Perhaps anticipating a whiff of suspicion post-Scuttlegate, Warriors is top-heavy with cameos from rap royalty. Opener “Survive the Night” is a meeting of representatives from the five boroughs — Cam’ron for Manhattan, Big Pun’s son Chris Rivers for the Bronx, executive producer Nas for Queens, Busta Rhymes for Brooklyn, and RZA and Ghostface Killah for Staten Island — we never hear from again. Ms. Lauryn Hill is a no-brainer as underworld figurehead Cyrus, who, in the booming hip-hop soul jam “If You Can Count,” calls for an end to strife and a consolidation of power before summarily exiting the story.

The brilliance of bringing this beef to a Lin-Manuel Miranda engagement jumps out early in “Derailed,” which narrates a frantic scramble to escape the scene of Cyrus’s murder after Luther, her killer, blames the Warriors. “Derailed” is Lin-Manuel qua Lin-Manuel, disparate parts moving in a mechanical and complementary precision. A chorus screams for Cyrus overhead while the Warriors race to find one another, rebuffing accusations from the shooter, played by a histrionic Kim Dracula. Rap, rock, and drum-’n’-bass sounds braid underneath, delivering a spirited post-genre choral showcase advancing on the gains of Hamilton’s “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” and In the Heights’ “96,000.” (The purview of Davis is just as valuable here. Her 2009 play, Angela’s Mixtape, a tribute to her aunt, prison-abolitionist legend Angela Davis, suggests a kindred spirit at the crossroads of theater, politics, and music.) But the further Warriors strays from this home base, the weedier of a listen it becomes.

Of course, the drift is its beating heart, tracing the gang’s southbound exodus through shifting pockets of musical taste as much as an evolving expanse of neighborhoods and residents. The story feels almost reverse-engineered to bolster the musical travelogue. In “Leave the Bronx Alive,” the Hill film’s Turnbull ACs, a skinhead set patrolling the Bronx in a souped-up murder van, trade identities with the book’s Borinquen Blazers to give the Warriors a chance encounter turned merengue chase sequence. It’s a genius application of the genre’s deliciously manic pacing. Further downtown, the Warriors meet the Orphans, Hill’s quasi-Latinx solution to the wanton cruelty of the depiction of the Puerto Rican gang in the book. In Yorick’s telling, the protagonists gang-rape Mercy, the girlfriend of the Blazers’ leader, and leave her for dead; the film makes her a love interest who dumps her grubby-shirted squad for the Warriors. The album says the brave if sheltered Mercy has just been dying of boredom in a crew of pop-punk bros led by Utkarsh Ambudkar of Miranda’s Freestyle Love Supreme.

Photo: Courtesy of Atlantic Records

But “Orphan Town” is grating; canned guitars offer little else than a setup for the imminent rug pull of Mercy disrespecting her patrons and defecting. Warriors gets drunk on its own versatility in a midsection throttling through the Friends-themed punk-rock of “Orphan Town” and the shrieking, joyously macabre metalcore of “Going Down,” a centerpiece for Kim Dracula in full Serj Tankian-as-the-Joker regalia. “Still Breathin’” sees Colman Domingo nail tricky flows as Masai, Cyrus’s avenging second-in-command; “Quiet Girls” melts a few of the film’s Manhattan gangs into the queer Harlemite House of Hurricane, featuring Billy Porter and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez of Pose, realizing Hill’s interest in featuring a dignified gay gang in the film. But the Porter raps are atrocious, and in spite of a noble (and geographically apropos) glint of uptown ballroom culture in a tale once peppered with gay slurs, Warriors doesn’t dig into the hierarchical wrinkles they experience.

The lesbian romance of Mercy and wartime de facto head Warrior Swan feels good but never expresses the complications the pair face as outsiders in a field already stacked against them. The film handled this by giving Hill’s sweater-wearing, presumably queer Lizzies a fierce encounter in which the Warriors are nearly shot in a honeypot trap. The gender swap invents the Bizzies, a suave collective the script describes as a “dream boy band” featuring 1991 Wanya Morris (Boyz II Men), 1998 Lance Bass (*NSYNC), K-pop icon Joon, and a singing James Dean. “We Got You,” a two-parter co-written by KPOP’s Helen Park, is gorgeously uncanny, a washed-out airport-reggae jam drenched in audible, period-appropriate mp3 compression. It’s an exhilarating reversal, an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. Turning the crafty Lizzies into the gaslighting Bizzies streamlines the plot, asserting that there is no man the Warriors can trust. But it boxes the album out of another opportunity to contend on a deeper level with the structural imbalances of its world.

Sol Yurick stressed that there was nothing for his men to return to after their raids. They referred to their homes as prisons. He also didn’t write a corporeal villain. His figurehead gets clapped because the sight of the police in the Bronx makes itchy hotheads smell a setup. A lack of trust sets off a Rube Goldberg machine’s worth of misdirection. The trials of the Warriors linger in our thoughts because so little has changed. It’s no mystery where train stations are located anymore, but you can still have an unsavory adventure traversing multiple boroughs in the wee hours. You can still catch hell from the police for a crime you didn’t commit. Teasing out a genuinely motivational message from this miserable state of affairs is a Herculean — Cyrusian? — task Miranda seems uniquely bioengineered for. But in Warriors, he meets a story that makes his sunny-siding tendencies itch. While he excels at poking around his main leads’ motivations, Miranda’s charmingly self-aware raps don’t skew evil enough for the action.

This doesn’t make the unpredictable stylistic hodgepodge of this album go down any easier for hip-hop heads who grew up loving Hill’s The Warriors but not musical theater, and who will receive much of this as nuclear-grade cringe. Spreading out notable rapper cameos might’ve gone a long way. (It’s a missed opportunity that Warriors isn’t packed with prominent women in New York hip-hop’s past and present. Put Young MA in the Bizzies, give Ice Spice a Bronx crew, have fun!) Dancehall star Shenseea does a lot of heavy lifting in the role of DJ Queen Pen, this story’s analogue to the late Lynn Thigpen delivering messages to the boppers in the 1979 film. She’s a wonderful presence who drops a kind of closing address with “Same Train Home,” which fixates on the scene in which Disco Stu types amble into the subway after a night of reverie and slowly take in the fright of the dirty feet and fingernails of the war-ravaged Swan and Mercy. It’s the apotheosis of optimism, your archetypal big-picture Lin-Manuel Miranda resolution. Life is rough but we weather it together, says the drippy U2-style ballad surveying New Yorkers of different backgrounds sharing a common experience, interrupted periodically by the Mexican folk standard “Cielito Lindo.” But it’s too neat, a praise-band take on a scene meant to communicate the discomfort of contact with people who will never relate to you. The yuppies-to-be in the film are spooked by the sight of rock bottom. The new Warriors can’t resist squeezing a kumbaya out. Miranda remains a devastating writer whose sympathetic pen and willingness to mix ideas that shouldn’t work together are cornerstones of his kingdom but also sources of the deserved gripes against him. (You miss the Shot you don’t take.) You simply can’t order the sandwich without the cheese.

Warriors Come Out and Grate