The Get Down is a really great tool for visualizing the way hip hop as a subculture manifested itself in the Bronx, giving a narrative to the combination of its elements, politics, and theory.

First and foremost, I really appreciate that the show isn’t “just about hip hop,” in which I mean the show isn’t trying to glorify hip hop in a way that we’ve culturally accepted it to be. It weaves in the circumstances that really lead to the creation of the subculture, like those discussed in the All Aboard the Midnight Train reading. Tricia Rose follows the circumstances of the South Bronx that fostered the construction of said subculture: the industrialization, exodus of white bodies that brought tax dollars with them, legislation, lack of affordable housing or resources, urban renewal, the Cross Bronx Expressway, among others that come as a result of the racist and classist structures in our country. The show doesn’t shy away from any of this and encapsulates how different characters’ music or flows stem from their reality; the show even goes to use the expansive power outage of 1977 as not only a “fun fact” historical event that happened in that time period, but as a real crisis that affected people. And not just affected them, but simultaneously also created windows of opportunity. For the Fantastic Four Plus One, the blackout gave them a diversion to obtain the sound equipment they needed to DJ, albeit through looting but only after their own equipment was lost in the arson of their building for profit. Mylene, while being used for potential profit by a white producer indebted to her uncle, was able to connect with Jackie and demonstrate her potential ability as a genuine music artist (putting Jackie’s eventual near death overdose on the back burner for a second). I just feel like the Get Down gives these characters the dignity of being multidimensional and complex given their circumstances, instead of either categorizing them as “ghetto” or making them nothing more than tools of hip hop.
The show also does a really good job of honoring sentiments shared in both Chang’s Furious Styles and Rivera’s New York Ricans. In a current conception of hip hop, most people immediately referencing rap as an overarching label as a whole. However, both of the aforementioned pieces go into the complexities and layers that create hip hop as an entire form of identity and expression; it is composed of four main elements- MCing (or rap as we know it), DJing, b-boying/girling, and graffiti- that both work individually and in tandem with each other. B-boys can’t dance without beats from the DJ but DJs have to spin beats the b-boys can move to and the like. It is also a very collaborative effort, as we see in the show. Each of the boys relies on the others to create unity, and they all look to Shao as their leader, DJ. In turn, Shao looks to Grandmaster Flash as a mentor, which was (and still is, though perhaps in different contexts) a big part of hip hop in its beginnings. When you are creating your own community and culture, as is also the tradition in African oral storytelling, everything is must be passed down. For Shao, DJing becomes like a trade, a finely tuned set of skills that he must learn and study from Grandmaster. From there, authenticity is key.

Obviously, I’m obsessed already. In an effort to wrap up, I will make one final sentiment; I have been really intune to the lack of women participating in hip hop (as more than just a party goer) in the show and I am intrigued by rather that is intentional on the part of the creators or not, and what the specificity of those intentions is.