Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” they sing in “Hamilton.” Well, if you have control over the combination of your biography and all your hit songs, the answer is perfectly simple: you do.
There’s a big difference between pop stars and politicians: the ones whose hits stay in demand can control their material and their legacy, even from beyond the grave.
Consider. You cannot make a Broadway jukebox show about Donna Summer without including her veritable cornucopia of disco-dance ditties: “I Feel Love,” “MacArthur Park,” “On the Radio” and the deceptively upbeat song that, for at least some of us, signaled the jarring end of a hundred nights of teenage frustration, “Last Dance.”