Music

Trump's campaign manager once wrote hip-hop Shakespeare adaptation

by Jeremy Mersereau

UPDATE, FEB 2016: Since this post was originally published, Bannon has been promoted to Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist and an attendee of the National Security Council, making it all the more hilarious (and terrifying). 

—

It takes a right-wing true believer to go from being a banker at Goldman Sachs, to directing anti-Occupy documentaries, to becoming chairman of your weird uncle’s favourite link outpost Breitbart News. It takes an even more fervent Reaganite prodigy to do all that, and then leapfrog straight to becoming Donald Trump’s chief campaign manager, but Steve K. Bannon is certainly that. Jesus, his resume reads like a real-life Lex Luthor’s.

Bannon is now the chief architect (or ‘CEO’, in his preferred parlance) of the rolling populist orange tide currently engulfing the U.S. But before he was plotting the downfall of the Clinton dynasty / Obamacare beneficiaries / anyone who makes under a deece six figgies a year, Bannon was just a poor struggling screenwriter in Hollywood just trying to make Riefenstahl-esque right-wing propaganda like any good American. And, like most peoples’, his ideas for movies are ridiculously dumb… with one in particular standing out.

In an interview with Bannon’s former writing partner, Julia Jones, The Daily Beast uncovered a hilarious former project of Bannon’s: at one time, he planned to adapt Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as a hip-hop movie musical set during the 1992 L.A. Riots. Damn, can’t imagine anyone more qualified to write that particular script than Donald Trump’s campaign CEO & Breitbart exec.

According to excerpts of this masterpiece, Coriolanus’s Menenius Agrippa, a senator of Rome, is recast as “Agrippa, ‘Mack Daddy’ of South Central, an ORIGINAL GANGSTA (O.G.) upper-echelon Blood”. Well, sorry for being sarcastic before, obviously this thing was going to be respectful and almost relentlessly true-to-life. Sadly for our cultural tapestry, the project never made it any further than a staged reading back in 2006.

Jones isn’t sure why Bannon was so taken with the concept, seeing that a Shakespeare hip-hop musical is exactly the kind of “SJW garbage” Breitbart stands emphatically against.

“The Stephen I know was incredibly generous,” Jones said. “He would give you the shirt off his back, literally… My fear of him being involved with Trump is knowing how effective he is. If anyone can pull this off, it’s Steve Bannon”. Well, if his rap musical is anything to go by, we should all be very, very afraid.