Walter Hill’s 1979 film The Warriors, based on the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick, presents a blood-stained map of a New York City ruled by highly territorial gangs.
Warriors, a new concept album based on the same story, begins with a dancehall-tinged intro by the Jamaican singer Shenseea, before Bronx-born rapper Chris Rivers hops on the track to rep and introduce his borough. This sets the stage for the next four voices: Nas (of Queens), Cam’ron (Manhattan), Ghostface Killah and RZA (Staten Island), and Busta Rhymes (Brooklyn).
Soon after comes a jolting reminder that this is, in fact, a musical theater piece by Lin-Manuel Miranda, as a handful of Broadway favorites (Phillipa Soo, Amber Gray, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Aneesa Folds, Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Gizel Jiménez, and Julia Harriman) drop in, playing the gender-swapped titular gang.
But then, the ultimate blow to expectations: Lauryn Hill emerging as Cyrus, a soon-to-be-slain gang leader who proposes the clans drop their rivalries and take the city from the police, which they outnumber 3-1. While Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, released after the success of that 2015 musical, featured several hip-hop notables, never has his music sounded so, well, hard.
The cameos don’t stop there. Co-created with writer-performer Eisa Davis, Warriors (out today from Atlantic Records) moves through a lot of genres, from salsa (Marc Anthony, Luis Figueroa, and Flaco Navaja), house (Billy Porter, Michaela Jaé, and Mykal Kilgore) to punk (Utkarsh Ambudkar and Casey Likes), and KPOP-inflected crooning (Stephen Sanchez, Daniel Jikal, Joshua Henry, and Timothy Hughes) to, most shockingly, heavy metal (Kim Dracula and Alex Bonniello). Colman Domingo also appears, as do James Remar and David Patrick Kelly from the original movie.
Davis and Miranda insist that an actual staging of the work is not on their horizon right now, and that the album should be consumed purely as a sonic experience. That’s a simple task, given how musically rich it is, not to mention how difficult it would be to find performers to sing each taxing genre eight times a week. It also mirrors an element of the film Miranda loves: that it captures “a New York that never was—both a snapshot of the city in ’79 and gorgeously shot.” In its current form, the album similarly lives in an impossible imagination.
Miranda and Davis first met back in 2008, when both were making their Broadway debuts: Davis in Passing Strange Miranda in his own In the Heights. Despite a narrative that the only two Black-and-brown shows on the Main Stem would be in competition (one that Davis calls “ridiculous”), they became friends.
Miranda, who grew up on the northern tip of Manhattan but briefly attended the since-shuttered Greenwich Village Montessori School school downtown, recalls perceiving the city as a massive universe he’d never conquer, an idea reflected in The Warriors, which follows the titular crew as they travel home to Coney Island from a meeting in the Bronx gone fatally awry. He remembers taking the uptown A train home with his sister, from West 4th to 200th Street, “and tracing that line all the way up.”
“We used to play a game where we would try to predict how many people would still be on the train by the time we got to the second-to-last stop, where we would get off, and also when all the white people would get off,” says Miranda. “It’d usually be 59th street, but there’d be a couple hanging on till 125th Street. That notion of class, of where you live in the world and who is on the train when you get home, that’s a lived experience from that commute.”
Davis, the niece of activist Angela Davis and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her 2006 play Bulrusher, grew up in the Bay Area and had never seen the film before Miranda suggested a collaboration. But she likens it to “hip-hop scripture” given how many rappers—from the Wu-Tang Clan to Common, Tupac Shakur to LL Cool J—have referenced it in their work.
She was as drawn to the romance of belonging to a group that would stand up (and even die) for one another, as to the film’s depiction of the gangs’ midnight summit, where Cyrus advocates for turning on the NYPD. The scene is startling in its lucidity (and, especially for that time period, its racial acuity)..
“Cyrus is there and is then instantly killed, but, wait a minute, I’m actually really interested in what Cyrus is saying,” Davis says. “Why is that not there in the rest of the film? In adapting it, I wanted to see if we could keep that dream alive throughout the record.”
Davis and Miranda are careful to not put too fine a point on any anti-cop message outside the context of the work itself. But its antepenultimate song, a showdown between a Warrior and “New York’s Finest” (as they’re listed on the tracklist) ends with a righteous provocation: “I’m sick of being afraid of you / and what you have the power to do / You’re the baddest gang in the city, it’s true / [...] Quiet girls don’t make it home / Why can’t we just go back home?”
Nevermind that the policeman she’s addressing is here saliently voiced by David Patrick Kelly, whose taunt to the Warriors to “come out to play” in the original film remains one of cinema’s most bone-chilling lines.
“I think what’s there in the film, and the message of Cyrus, is a little bit different than the one we are rolling with in the album,” says Davis. “It’s definitely [about] self-determination, but more about unity and this sense of a truce amongst the gangs.” She connects the idea to “the way many of these gangs became community organizations and became hip-hop crews,” pointing to Benjy Melendez, the real-life president of the Ghetto Brothers who, in 1971, brokered peace between gangs from Harlem and the Bronx.
“[The Ghetto Brothers] became a music group more than a gang,” Davis continues. “That was something we were really looking to: how this gang culture leads to the birth of hip-hop.”
Miranda notes the album’s opening line: “‘This is the sound of something being born’—even though there s a lot of action and loss, something is being born out of this night. And there s a lyric towards the end, ‘We ll be dancing on the corners we were battling for,’ nodding to how loss and change also leads to rebirth.”
The bulk of the duo’s work taking place in 2023—a year recognized as the 50th anniversary of hip-hop—also informed their take on the genre’s origins and social consciousness. The two spent that year sending each other genre-based playlists to hone each sound before Miranda enlisted star producer Mike Elizondo (a Dr. Dre protegé with whom he’d worked on Encanto’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”).
“It’s typical Lin,” says Elizondo, who is based in Nashville, “where things just start happening and you have to go with it, and eventually it becomes official.” If he hadn’t texted Miranda during a visit to New York, “maybe he wouldn’t have asked. With him, you just say yes and then figure out the details, because you know it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Eventually, Miranda and Davis invited Elizondo to join them upstate, where they made some demos before laying down tracks in Nashville this past summer. The idea to engage Nas as a collaborate came up early on in the process, and convincing the Queens-raised musician, who Miranda calls a superfan of the movie, was simple enough.
“The challenge, then, was: how do you write a verse good enough for Nas?” Miranda says. When the chess phrase “Queen’s Gambit” came into his head, gears started turning. Miranda trained the data analytics software LexisNexis on the online lyrics encyclopedia Genius to see if Nas had ever used that term in his songs. “If he had, I’d have to go back to the drawing board. But we had lunch together and I played it for him in the car afterwards and, as soon as he hears ‘Queen’s gambit / pawns out / control the center,’ I saw him [stop in his tracks]. I’d found the one Queens metaphor he had not yet used.”
Getting other rap legends to appear on the album became easy once Nas had agreed to executive produce. As Elizondo says, “Lin’s clout goes a long way. Pretty much all the asks that went out, people came back intrigued, even those who had never even seen the movie. The fact that it was a full-length concept album felt like something exciting to be a part of.” Still, a few rappers were hesitant to let other writers draft their lines. “Emcees write their own rhymes,” Miranda says, “and the way we had to pitch it was that they’d be playing a character. These are not Cam ron lyrics, this is Cam ron playing Manhattan and embodying the spirit of the Manhattan crews. During recording, Busta [Rhymes] turned to me and said, ‘I have never let anyone else write lyrics for me.’ It really required a mental shift for a lot of these emcees to play these roles.”
“You get someone like Nas involved,” says Elizondo, “and people who might be a little wary about doing something out of their comfort zone think, Well, if Nas is doing it, what do I have to be afraid of?” Most vocals were recorded in Manhattan’s Power Station studios, with some sessions taking place in Los Angeles or, in the case of Marc Anthony, Miami. But one performer—the one Davis, Miranda, and Elizondo all said had long been their dream partner—recorded her part from still-unknown whereabouts, and her involvement came shrouded with mystery.
Unbeknownst to Miranda at the time, Lauryn Hill had seen and admired Hamilton during its original off Broadway run at the Public Theater. Had he known this, he says, the composer-lyricist would have tried to clear a sample of one of her lyrics (“You might win some, but you just lost one”) that featured in his song “We Know” from the musical’s early presentation, so it could make it to Broadway. (Miranda mentioned this to Hill’s team later, when he met them socially, and learned this would have been an easy fix.)
Miranda and Davis wrote the elusive recording artist a letter explaining why the moral and musical authority she would bring to the role made her their only choice. “A year later, we got a Dropbox file with all these vocals in it,” he says.
“I think the thing that worked in our favor, because she doesn’t do a lot of guest spots, is that she’s familiar with hip-hop theater,” Miranda ventures. “She was in a show called Club XII [an off Broadway hip-hop adaptation of Twelfth Night] with Wyclef [Jean] back in the ’90s.”
Hill, who began her career as an actor, remains an astounding get for the album, instantly tying it to a legacy of New York hip-hop. “Yeah, that was a mystery,” Elizondo says of why she ultimately joined the project. “I have no idea where she was in the world when she recorded her parts. We were just sent off the tracks and hoped that at some point we would hear back. The fact that not only was there a response, but then for her to deliver in the way that she does, is very emotional.”