TV: ‘The Get Down’ (Netflix)

Picture yourself in New York City in the summer of 1977. You take a graffiti-strewn 6 train up to the South Bronx and exit in the sweltering stickiness of a record-breaking heatwave. You enter what can only be described as a war-zone. Burnt-down buildings torched for insurance money smolder around piles of rubble where large apartments once stood.

Street gangs of young teenagers menacingly roam — the names of their gangs sewn into the backs of their jean jackets. The lush and beautiful pulses of disco and soul crackle out of radios, giving a soundtrack to the neighborhood that the greater city had given up on. This is the vibrant world of Netflix’s new series The Get Down.

Produced by film director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby), old-school rap luminary Kurtis Blow, turntable innovator Grandmaster Flash, and hip-hop icon Nas, The Get Down is a lot of what you’d expect. It’s got a bangin’ soundtrack, great cast, and incredibly lush visuals bordering on the excessive.

It’s the performances that anchor The Get Down, and there isn’t a bad one in the bunch. The main cast of youthful actors positively crackles, standouts being Justice Smith as high school poet-turned-rapper Ezekiel “Books” Figuero; Herizen F. Guardiola as Mylene Cruz, aspiring disco singer and Figuero’s on again/off again love interest; and Jayden Smith as Marcus “Dizzee” Kipling, a cerebral and off-beat graffiti writer. If the rest of the young ensemble weren’t so great, the show might have been stolen by Shameik Moore as Shaolin Fantastic, an aspiring DJ who can’t escape the life of crime he’s entrenched in.

These up-and-coming stars are backed by standout acting vets Jimmy Smits, Kevin Corrigan, and Ron Cephas Jones. It’s truly refreshing to see such diverse performers as key players in a major Netflix series. White characters do figure in, but only marginally, as it should be; the beginnings of hip-hop are not their story.

The plot is pure Hollywood: it’s The Jazz Singer or Coal Miner’s Daughter transplanted on to 1970s New York City, a larger-than-life aesthetic that fashions the story of hip-hop as a universal tale about artistry, struggle, and hope against big odds. Traditional Hollywood tropes are used in inventive and engaging new ways, melded with cinematic techniques from Kung-Fu movies, Blaxploitation films, and superhero comics.

The result is an effective exercise in the mood and tone of the Bronx in the late ’70s. This may not have been exactly what had been going on at the time, but for the teenagers living there, it must have been the way it felt.

The Get Down goes beyond hip-hop, into the decadent world of Seventies disco. We peer into the Soho gay clubs, the offices of a Casablanca Records-esque company, and the DJ listening parties that could make or break a disco record during its heyday. These plot elements go a long way to show how the worlds of disco and early hip-hop intersected — which might surprise a modern audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXveVCl53uo

The Get Down also gives us the new disco song “Set Me Free,” co-written by Chic legend Nile Rodgers, who also lends his unmistakable rhythm guitar talents to the song. This nostalgia-drenched track is everything you want it to be.

The entire music selection for the series is bangin’. Episodes feature hits from the era by Donna Summer and Stevie Wonder. “The Love You Save” by the Jackson Five plays a pivotal role. And, of course, early hip-hop influences like “Apache” by Incredible Bongo Band, “The Mexican” by British prog rock outfit Babe Ruth, and “Vitamin C” by Kraut rockers Can all serve as themes throughout.

For a TV show that’s about the origins of hip-hop, there’s a surprisingly little amount of rap in these first six episodes. This is because The Get Down is doing it right. It’s set during a time when the DJ was king of the block party and MCs were only finding their place within the hip-hop firmament.

Ezekiel’s journey from high-school poet to the frontman of the Get Down Brothers is a slow-build that works. Along the way, Zeke and his crew encounter early hip-hop names like Grandmaster Flash, Cowboy, and DJ Kool Herc, but it doesn’t feel forced. These meetings instead show how such encounters helped shape these young men into the artists they became. When we finally get our first major scene featuring the boys at a DJ battle rapping in the final episode, the wait is worth it for this electrifying moment of TV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zejyzr5vW3A

However, The Get Down’s strengths and weaknesses are incontrovertibly tied together. The series is trying to accomplish a lot, so when it falls flat, it’s only because it’s trying to do too much. Each episode is bookended by an adult Zeke in a flash-forward to a concert he’s giving to an enthusiastic crowd 20 years after the main narrative takes place. Nas is performing the raps for this section.

During one of these recaps, I was able to pinpoint why I wasn’t getting quite as immersed in the world of The Get Down as I wanted. Zeke raps, “This ain’t no fairy tale,” a phrase that gets to the bottom of the series’s dichotomy. The heroes of The Get Down live in a world of extremes: surrounded by poverty, violence, drug use, and lawlessness, but also the dangerous potential of the unknown. A current of raw, youthful energy that sewed the seeds of the hip-hop movement.

But the inherent problem is that while The Get Down’s most artistic moments shine in the gorgeous, stylized Baz Luhrmann tradition, moments of violence or desperation don’t hit quite as emotionally hard as they should. Maybe these beats are not as realistic or ugly as they should be. There’s something about the elements of violence in the show that never grounds the plot in a reality I can fully get down with (see what I did there?).

It’s a shame that the first major mainstream project about the early origins of hip-hop is so impressionistic when a more realistic portrayal of the texture and nuance of the actual events might have led to an even better series.

It’s particularly difficult to get through the first episode, which was directed by Luhrmann himself. The series starts off attempting to cram a lot of narrative and character introductions into too short an amount of time. Characters behave in contradictory ways solely to further the plot, but their conflicting choices make relationships between characters hard to decipher at times. However, the back end of the six episodes are great TV and are more than worth powering through the first few.

Now that The Get Down has sorted itself out, I hope it sticks around for a while in the crowded landscape of binge-watchable series. I’d love for the series to take us through the stages of hip-hop’s dramatic evolution for a long time to come. I can’t wait for the second half of the first season, to premiere in early 2017.

PS: If you really enjoy the world of The Get Down and want to understand how the origins of hip-hop crisscross with the ugly history of NYC in the ’70s and the burgeoning punk movement, I would highly recommend watching the Emmy-nominated VH1 Documentary NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell.

The Get Down is streaming now on Netflix.

Louie Pearlman

Louie Pearlman is a comedic performer, songwriter, producer and pop culture writer living in NYC. He loves bubblegum music and punk in all its forms -- his favorite band is Talking Heads, but the Archies are a close second or third. You can check out his current projects at LouiePearlman.com, come see a show, and say “hi” after!