A forest of popular music rose from the scorched earth of New York in the 1970s, and the new Netflix series The Get Down tracks the early growth of the tallest tree: hip-hop.
That’s a trickier mission than it might seem. Not only does the show have to tell the story of the music, but it must also capture the often-fierce resistance it encountered, acknowledge its ragged edges, note its kinship to parallel genres like punk and disco and finally, perhaps most importantly, convey its sheer exuberance.
HBO recently tackled much of the same subject with Vinyl, which focused more on the punk scene of the same era in the same underground New York. Vinyl was scratched after one season, which will make it interesting to see if The Get Down, which drops on Friday, makes the charts.
Despite being set in the same general place, The Get Down feels different from Vinyl. Where Vinyl seemed to aim more at viewers who remembered the era, The Get Down feels like a tale for the youth of today.
Instead of focusing on executives and record companies, The Get Down is about the kids who actually make the music, at first without even knowing that’s what they’re doing. It’s also a story about being young and in love in New York, meaning that in another sense it harks back to the likes of West Side Story.
Ezekiel “Books” Figuero (Justice Smith) is a high school student from the South Bronx who’s in love with Mylene Cruz (Herizen Guardiola, left, with Smith). He wants a commitment. She wants to be free to pursue her dream of becoming a disco singer, a goal complicated by the fact that her evangelical preacher father Ramon (Giancarlo Esposito) violently opposes the idea that she would even consider this secular filth.
Books writes poetry, which he is too shy and at the same time too angry to share with his English class. But like Mylene, he’s acutely tuned to the music slowly rising on the streets around him – a combination of disco, pop, R&B, jazz, gospel and blues that’s being all mixed up by new artists called deejays.
It’s an exciting world, full of possibilities. It’s also a dangerous world because the South Bronx in the 1970s had become a vacuum filled in significant measure by gangs.
The Get Down does not, however, just shake its head dismissively. Its most intriguing adult character is “Papa Fuente” Cruz (Jimmy Smits), a political boss who cuts shady deals, but also cares deeply about the quality of life in the community. He foresees a time when socio-economic divisions could narrow, and this fallow stretch of the South Bronx could blossom into a better world for all.
As this suggests, The Get Down isn’t always subtle. But it’s smart enough to keep returning to Books, Mylene and their friends, whose pivotal moment comes when they meet shadowy graffiti artist and all-around hustler Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore, right).
He becomes their bridge to this emerging hip-hop world, whose culture at the time revolved around mixing deejays, graffiti writing (tagging) and break dancing.
Among other things, he leads them to pioneer deejay Grandmaster Flash (Mamoudou Athie), one of a number of real-life 1970s hip-hoppers who blend with the show’s fictional characters.
Flash explains that “the get down” is the tiny part of a record with the beat that really matters. It might be only 10 seconds, or five seconds, of a five-minute record. But that’s the segment the deejay picks out and isolates, replaying it over and over until “the get down” becomes the whole song.
It’s a fascinating glimpse into seminal moments that would eventually build the foundation for much of today’s popular music around the world.
The Get Down doesn’t feel like a slick show, and maybe it shouldn’t. This wasn’t a slick process, at least before the music business got hold of hip-hop, turned it into rap and made it an industry.
It also isn’t a perfect show. But it makes an underreported corner of music history feel human.