My Shot Lyrics – Hamilton

Song Overview

Personal Review

My Shot lyrics burst onto Act I like a starter pistol. I remember the night the Public Theater crowd first screamed the hook back—five words, instant rallying cry. Lin-Manuel Miranda spent a year chiseling every couplet until Hamilton sounded, in his words, “smarter than me.”

The song welds Biggie-sized braggadocio to 18th-century stakes. Its cocktail of ambition, immigrant hunger, and ragtag camaraderie still jolts my pulse after fifty years of covering stage scores.

Song Meaning and Annotations

The scene: 1776 Lower Manhattan tavern light, rum fumes, revolution in the air. Hamilton proclaims he will not waste his “shot”—a triple-entendre for opportunity, musket fire, and, foreshadowed, duel. Each comrade responds with a verse that braids personal motive to collective uprising:

• Lafayette dreams of toppling monarchies on both sides of the Atlantic.
• Mulligan views rebellion as social mobility (tailor’s needles traded for rifle shot).
• Laurens ties freedom to abolition, promising the first Black battalion.

Miranda laces homages to Mobb Deep, Big Pun, and the Notorious B.I.G., registering Hamilton inside the hip-hop pantheon while sampling Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Carefully Taught.”

Musical engine. 96 BPM boom-bap drums, clavinet stabs, and a call-and-response chorus that pivots to 6/8 swing during “Rise Up.” The arrangement lets historical rhetoric surf on modern cadences.

“This is not a moment, it’s the movement.” —Hamilton

Verse craft. Hamilton’s “I imagine death so much, it feels more like a memory” reportedly took “the better part of a year” to write; Miranda called it the song’s Rosetta-stone line.

Verse Highlights

Hamilton’s Opening Manifesto

Eleven internal rhymes in the first four lines fire like flint sparks, instantly branding him “young, scrappy and hungry.”

Lafayette’s Tongue-Twister

“On-archy? How you say—oh, anarchy!” turns accent into punch-line, slipping a French lesson into a revolution lecture.

Laurens’ Abolition Vow

The only Founding-Father pop song to spotlight enslaved soldiers before the first musket fires.

Detailed Annotations

My Shot is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s statement of intent for both Alexander Hamilton and the entire musical. Over five surging minutes the song braids Revolutionary-era politics, 1980s–and-’90s hip-hop flow, backstage friendship, and a looming sense of mortality into one breathless ambition anthem. Below, the original Genius annotations are woven into a single narrative—same facts, same Easter eggs, but wrapped in prose you can read straight through.

Overview

The curtain rises on a nineteen-year-old immigrant who introduces himself with pure defiance:

I am not throwin’ away my shot.
Ay yo, I’m just like my country—young, scrappy and hungry.

This refrain, Miranda says, took a year to perfect; every couplet had to land like an ’80s party-rap punch. It also plants the show’s central double entendre. A “shot” is opportunity, gunfire, or a swig of liquor. By the time the lights fade on Act II we will have watched Hamilton seize two of those shots and quite literally discard the third.

Musical Techniques

• Hip-hop homage. Hamilton’s polysyllabic internal rhymes channel Rakim; the “young, scrappy and hungry” triplet winks at Big Daddy Kane and Jay-Z. His self-spelling—

  A-L-E-X-A-N-D E-R

  —mirrors The Notorious B.I.G.’s name-check in “Going Back to Cali.” Lafayette’s stumbling faux-French rhyme (

  “’onarchy? … ‘anarchy”

  ) and Mulligan’s apprentice brag keep the cipher rolling like a Beastie Boys hand-off, each friend shouting the final word of another’s line.
• Hidden scratches and sirens. Violin “wooshes” mimic reversed gunshots; scattered string glissandi imitate the police siren from Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt. II.” Even the ensemble’s ecstatic

  Woah, woah, woah

  riffs on the AOL dial-up tone—Miranda’s sonic metaphor for ideas beaming across the new Internet of 1776.
• Verse drama sharing. Whenever two characters split a line—

  Shot

  — they demonstrate instant kinship, a Shakespearean trick recast for rap cadences.

Character Dynamics

Alexander Hamilton. He flashes relentless self-awareness: orphan, illegitimate, penniless—

“a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal”

“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”

John Laurens. The South Carolina abolitionist hijacks the hook to insist the Revolution is hollow without emancipating those in bondage. His pledge—

“Wait ’til I sally in on a stallion with the first Black battalion.”

Marquis de Lafayette. Miranda uses purposely broken English to signal the Frenchman’s accent:

“’Onarchy … ‘anarchy.”

Hercules Mulligan. Introduced as a swaggering

“tailor’s apprentice”

“I think your pants look hot.”

Aaron Burr. Alone, Burr resists the fever pitch. His measured interjection—

“Geniuses, lower your voices.”

Thematic Elements

• Opportunity versus mortality. From Hamilton’s first boast to his existential verses, the song pits seizing the day against the certainty of death—

  “Never thought I’d live past twenty … Where I come from, some get half as many.”

• Rise Up mantra. Laurens leads a rooftop chant—

  “When you’re livin’ on your knees, you rise up.”

  —that ripples through the entire score, echoing modern protest slogans from civil-rights marches to #BlackLivesMatter rallies.
• Dissent as creation. Hamilton reframes rebellion as art:

  “Every action’s an act of creation.”

  In one breath he links Moses, Jeffersonian debt, Biggie’s “Juicy,” and Picasso’s dictum that creation requires destruction.

Historical References

• King’s College (future Columbia) did offer Hamilton a scholarship; he departed in 1776 when Patriots shuttered the loyalist institution.
• The tax grievances he rattles off—Stamp Act, Tea Act, Townsend duties—are summarized in one scathing enjambment: Britain “keeps shittin’ on us endlessly.”
• Lafayette really did plot to import French revolutionary fervor; Laurens really lobbied Congress for a Black regiment; Mulligan really spied on British officers via bespoke breeches.
• Hamilton’s “financial situation” obsession foreshadows his 1780s essays that birthed America’s first central bank.

Foreshadowing and Wordplay

• Every iteration of

  “I am not throwin’ away my shot.”

  points to Hamilton’s last morning on the Weehawken cliffs.
• The reversed gunshot “whoosh” before

  “Oh, am I talking too loud?”

  recurs in his death soliloquy, binding the opening roar to the whisper at the end.
• Laurens’ rally cry Rise Up will morph into Philip Hamilton’s fatal duel challenge and finally into the ensemble’s elegy in “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.”

Legacy of the Number

Miranda calls My Shot “the hardest song I’ve ever written.” It had to introduce four major characters, condense a decade of colonial resentment, celebrate hip-hop craft, and launch a through-line of foreshadowing that stretches all the way to Hamilton’s pistol aimed sky-high in Act II. It succeeds by merging 18th-century zeal with 20th-century flow until the boundaries blur: the Founders trade bars like Big Pun; the drumline snaps like a fife-and-drum corps; and a scrappy immigrant writes himself—not just into the narrative—but into the American imagination.

Song Credits

• Featured Vocals: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Anthony Ramos, Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Leslie Odom Jr., Original Broadway Cast
• Producers: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, Bill Sherman, Alex Lacamoire
• Writers: Lin-Manuel Miranda + sampled/credited writers (Havoc, Prodigy, Notorious B.I.G., Easy Mo Bee, Roger Troutman)
• Release Date: September 25 2015
• Genre: Hip-Hop / Show-Tune Fusion
• Length: 5 min 33 sec
• Key: G-minor
• Label: Atlantic Records
• Mood: Incendiary declaration
• Instruments: drums, bass, clavinet, strings, brass, banjo
• Copyright © 2015 Atlantic Recording Corporation / 5000 Broadway Music

Songs Exploring Themes of Ambition & Revolution

“Lose Yourself” – Eminem
Another anthem about seizing a single fleeting chance; both tracks hammer “shot” as metaphor and mantra.

“One Day More” – Les Misérables
Ensemble voices overlap to preview rebellion, mirroring the layered “Rise Up” canon that closes My Shot.

“My Shot (Rise Up Remix)” – The Roots, Busta Rhymes, Joell Ortiz & Nate Ruess
Transforms Broadway cadence into hard-edge cypher, proving the lyric’s adaptability across rap sub-genres.

Questions and Answers

How long did Miranda spend writing “My Shot”?

A full year of drafts—he wanted every couplet to match Hamilton’s intellect.

What certifications does the track hold?

RIAA 2× Platinum as of 2023; first reached Platinum on Oct 11 2019.

How popular is it on streaming platforms?

Over 305 million Spotify plays and ~132 k daily streams (July 2025).

Which hip-hop classics are interpolated?

Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt II,” Big Pun’s “I’m Not a Player,” Biggie’s “Going Back to Cali,” and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Carefully Taught.”

Has “My Shot” charted independently?

While not a Billboard Hot 100 single, it peaked at #16 on the US Digital Songs chart during the cast-album’s 2016 surge.

Awards, Charts & Streams

How to Rap It?

Hamilton’s verses ride 5.6 words / sec, G-minor pentatonic. Focus on crisp plosives (“polish,” “knowledge”) and stagger breaths before “I imagine death…” section. For Lafayette’s French-infused triplets, practise syllable-tongue placement; Mulligan’s drawl sits lower (B-flat₂–D₄). Tempo 96 BPM; lock to kick on the “shot” downbeat.

Fan and Media Reactions

“First time I heard ‘My Shot,’ I walked out of the theatre like I’d swallowed a Red Bull laced with patriotism.” – Vogue feature

“Rosetta-stone songwriting. Every rhyme carries thematic DNA.” – New Yorker profile

“When 1 600 Disney+ viewers chant ‘Rise Up’ in the chat, you realise Broadway went viral.” – Twitch watch-party recap

“My Shot” is my cardio playlist opener—180 bpm heart-rate achieved by the third ‘woah.’ – Spotify user comment

“Still the greatest motivational anthem for grant applications.” – PhD Twitter thread