Baz’s Bronx: Get Down or Let Down? Lachlan MacDowall On August 12, Netflix will screen the latest project by Australian film director Baz Luhrmann. The Get Down is a twelve-part television series set in the Bronx in the 1970s that chronicles the birth of disco, punk and particularly hip-hop, through the lives of four teenagers. In one sense, the broad story of hip-hop is well-known: how the creativity of mostly black and Hispanic youth in New York’s boroughs gave birth to music, dance and art that eventually became a global enterprise and a multi-billion dollar industry. Yet, the origins of hip-hop also remain complex, contested, neglected and often shrouded in myth. If The Get Down takes its cue from the lavish party scenes of Luhrmann’s earlier films, his re- staging of the iconic moments in hip-hop – the first street parties, the beginnings of turntable music and subway graffiti – will no doubt be fabulous. But what is at stake in this kind of re- telling? In his films, Luhrmann has often been attracted to iconic cultural eras, such as bohemian Paris in the year 1900 or the Roaring 20s of The Great Gatsby . In these settings – as well as the imagined Verona Beach of Romeo + Juliet – the action turns on the social, racial and class mixing that happens at wild and extravagant parties, fuelled by drugs, music and dancing and staged with modern soundtracks and Catherine Martin’s exquisite costumes. As Jordan Baker remarks in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel: I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy. Luhrmann’s treatment of The Great Gatsby, set fifty years earlier in the New York of the Jazz Age, gives some clues to the themes of The Get Down. In Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, characters shuttle between the heat and grime of Manhattan and genteel Long Island and the cast is uniformly white, except for an anonymous “pale well-dressed negro”. However, in the filmic Gatsby, Luhrmann pays more attention to the wasteland boroughs at the edge of the city and the most energetic party isn’t one thrown by Jay Gatsby, but a raucous meeting in a downstairs speakeasy set to a hip-hop soundtrack – including music by executive producer Jay-Z – where a line of black dancers gyrate, displaying the same energy that was being released in the Harlem Renaissance and would resurface decades later in the Bronx. According to Rolling Stone, for The Get Down, Luhrmann worked with a crew of hip-hop founding fathers, including Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow, as well as rapper Nas. In a further historical twist, The Get Down also precedes the filming of Gatsby, reportedly its been a ten-year project of passion for Lurhmann. If the project had its genesis in the years after the 9/11 attacks, then Baz’s re-imagined scenes of 1970s multi-racial partying take on a extra significance, as do the decaying buildings in the desolate Bronx landscape, once compared to the ruins of European cities after the aerial bombings of World War II. Though hip-hop’s origin’s are complex and contested, it is often a story painted by numbers: singular events (the first street and basement parties), two boroughs (South Bronx and Harlem), a trio of pioneers (Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaata and Grandmaster Flash), the classic formulation of