'The Get Down' Review: A Grand, Flashy History of Rap
It’s one thing to make a TV series about music because you love the songs and the lifestyle (see Showtime’s Roadies). It’s another thing to make a TV series about music because you want to relive the nostalgia of your youth. (HBO’s Vinyl was, now in its canceled retrospect, Martin Scorsese, Terence Winter, and Mick Jagger’s memory production.) But it’s a whole different thing when you make a TV series about music because it’s a rich, big story you want to tell, to capture both the facts and the feeling, to educate and entertain your audience about a period of history that is increasingly lost in the minds of the current generation. That’s what The Get Down tries for, and it’s an ambitious goal it frequently achieves.
The simplest way to summarize The Get Down is that it tells the early history of rap music — the pre-hip-hop, post-disco style that emerged from New York City in the 1970s. But there’s nothing simple about The Get Down. It’s co-created by Baz Luhrmann, who never met a musical scene he couldn’t blow up into a gaudy, candy-colored explosion (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet). But Luhrmann said that when it comes to this subject matter, he knows “it’s not my story,” and he’s collaborating with producers and writers of color such as Nas, Nelson George, and Grandmaster Flash to root the spectacle in gritty details and facts. The result is a show that, at its best, sweeps you up in an engaging mixture of passion, heat, and cool, clever wit.
Related: ‘The Get Down’: Tour the Boogie-Down Bronx With Producer Nelson George
The show seems, initially at least, to focus on Justice Smith as Ezekiel “Books” Figuero, a skinny kid with a big Afro and a gift for lyrical images and rhymes. He’s just a kid who, when not going to school, roams the streets of the Bronx with his buddies who call themselves the Fantastic Four Plus One (a comic-book reference combined with a nod to the excellent early rap act the Funky 4+1. He’s in love with a girl — Herizen Guardiola’s Mylene — who wants to be a disco singer, the new Donna Summer. One of the things I love about The Get Down is that it doesn’t sneer at disco in favor of nascent hip-hop music. Unlike much of the rock-music establishment of this era, which despised dance music (thus the rallying cry “Disco sucks!”), rap-music pioneers recognized that the pulsating rhythms could be thrilling, and the series itself understands just how glorious the greatest disco was. The soundtrack glows with snippets of Summer’s “Bad Girl,” the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno,” and the Spinners’ “Rubberband Man.”
And so the would-be rap poet Books falls for the would-be disco queen Mylene, but The Get Down doesn’t become just another variation on Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. The title of the series refers to a “get-down” — an actual phenomenon — a semi-spontaneous party often held in the street or in an abandoned building, whose audience gathered through word of mouth to come hear DJs spin records. That’s where the documentary-like precision of this show comes into play: Thanks to the DJ genius Grandmaster Flash as a consultant (and as a character, played by Mamoudou Athie), we are shown exactly how a DJ turned “two turntables and a microphone” into an art form.
The Get Down unfurls a huge canvas. It’s a great example of the way different pop-culture phenomena influence each other, like how graffiti art and black viewers’ interest in kung fu movies (embodied here by a character called Shaolin Fantastic) feed even more imagination into Books’s rhymes. In addition to Books and his crew, Jimmy Smits (probably the production’s biggest name) does a marvelous turn as a South Bronx political fixer and would-be real estate magnate. The character is complex — you can’t separate the idealist from the hustler in him. Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito is also joltingly effective as Mylene’s fiercely pious pastor-father.
It’s clear to me The Get Down wouldn’t be as rich in manifold influences and details were it not for the presence of a co-producer such as Nelson George, whose writing on every variation of black music I have been reading since the 1970s. George, Luhrmann, and the show’s many collaborators have given us a grand, sometimes overwrought, precise show that captures a specific time in pop history better than it’s ever been shown on television.
The Get Down starts streaming Friday, Aug. 12, on Netflix.
