This is old, familiar allegation against the genre, one that not only blows by questions of correlation and causation and confirmation bias but also refuses to separate out an art form’s content, purpose, and the social conditions within which it has been made to flourish. For decades, rap has been portrayed as especially dangerous because of the music itself—even more so than rock and punk and jazz, though they all, at one point or another, were accused of having a corrupting and deadly influence.
So it was even for disco, as Baz Luhrmann’s bighearted and halfway successful new Netflix series The Get Downreminds its viewers early in its run. Set mostly in ’70s Bronx, it centers on the high-school student Ezekiel(Justice Smith), who, we can assume, will one day be the rap superstar performing at the 1996 Madison Square Garden concert shown at the start of each episode (withHamilton’s Daveed Diggs lip-syncing to lyrics from executive producer Nas). But hip-hop doesn’t exist for Zeke in 1977, and it barely exists for anyone else either. Instead, there’s disco, which his neighborhood crush, Mylene (Herizen Guardiola), wants to conquer as the next Donna Summer. Unfortunately, Mylene’s dad (Giancarlo Esposito) is a strict minister who literally considers it the devil’s music. “Thy voice shall only be lifted to the glory of god,” are his first words on-screen.
From everything The Get Down then shows us—spoilers for the premiere ahead, though this isn’t a show you really watch for plot—he’s not necessarily wrong to worry about his daughter’s disco fever. The club she sneaks out to is called “Les Inferno,” for starters. Her efforts there to hand a demo tape to an influential DJ trigger a flamboyant crime enforcer named Cadillac to make sexual advances on her. And the Get Down’s first transcendently giddy musical sequence, a hustle-and-point duel to C.J. & Co.’s “Devil’s Gun,” meets its disturbing end when a group of masked men shoot up the club.
But once the violence erupts, the groove fades and distorts and Luhrmann’s soundtrack cuts to opera more befitting a Godfather showdown: one of many tells that in this show’s colorful take on cultural history, bloodshed and strife exist not in cahoots with the music of a marginalized and economically bereft minority but in tension with it. Standing near rubble-strewn vacant lots and burning buildings in the Bronx, Les Inferno and the gambling club above it are a playground for brown and black folks (one of whom, the delightfully imperious mob boss Fat Anne, runs the place). A bouncer outside tells Zeke to go around the corner when it appears he’s about to enter a fistfight. And the awful massacre is perpetrated by a gang called the Savage Warlords, white youths dressed like the cast of The Warriors. The disco club, it’s clear, is shaped by the presence of violence and desperation. But it’s also meant to be a refuge.
The same could be said for all of the creative exploits that the utterly charming kids of The Get Down get up to, including graffiti writing, DJing, breakdancing, and emceeing, the canonical four pillars of hip hop. By the end of the hour-and-a-half premiere, Zeke and his buddies have attended the titular Get Down, a party where Grandmaster Flash (Mamoudou Athie) shows off his radical new technique of using turntables to create a continual rhythm from parts of other peoples’ songs. Earlier, Zeke rebufffed his English teacher’s encouragements to use his talent for poetry in order to escape from the life that the Bronx would otherwise impose on a young, poor, parentless male like him. It’s only at the the Get Down, where the braininess that gets made fun of in the classroom can become a social weapon and route to status, that he takes his first step to rap stardom.
Which is not to say that discovering hip-hop magically whisks him away from the perilous dynamics of his environment—an environment clearly shaped by government neglect, as shown by an interwoven plotline about Mylene’s uncle, a tough but community-minded political boss played by Jimmy Smits. During the chaos-causing NYC blackout of ’77, Zeke considers joining the looting so as to help move his dream along, but a buddy counsels him to fall back. “Why, because we’re special?” Zeke asks. “Because we’re above all of this? How are we above all of this?”
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