Baz Luhrmann on New Show ‘The Get Down’: ‘It’s a Living History’ of Hip-Hop
For Oscar-nominated writer/director/producer Baz Lurhmann, the road to his new Netflix series The Get Down began a decade ago with a single contemplation. “I started this concept with a question 10 years ago, which was, ‘How did a totally new idea get born from a borough in a time where there was little care for that borough or the people in a borough? How did they come up with a brand-new, pure creative idea?’ And that led me on a sort of epic journey myself,” he tells Yahoo Music.
That epic journey had now finally led to the eagerly anticipated The Get Down, which finds Luhrmann and a massive team that includes rappers Nas and Grandmaster Flash bringing to life the beginnings of hip-hop in 1977.
Telling tales onscreen with music is nothing new to Luhrmann, whose Moulin Rogue is one of the definitive movie musicals. But doing it on TV and setting it in an era in his lifetime was a very different endeavor, and it presented several new challenges for the Australian director — who admits he didn’t approach this series, which premieres this week, as if he is an authority on the subject.
“I didn’t go, ‘Wow, I’m the right person to do this.’ I just found myself, just by trying to answer the question, engaging with writers like [music/pop culture critic and author] Nelson George, who is also one of the [show’s] writers,” he says. “It’s a living history… the people are actually alive. And so I worked with them to help tell the story. And that’s really enriching, but also really demanding.”
Nas and Flash were two of the first to come on and recognize the importance of bringing the series to TV. “And then when it came to the music, when I approached Flash, very quickly he said, ‘You’re right, no one’s ever told this story. Everyone wants to know about the cake, but no one wants to know about the recipe.’ And they very quickly realized this story hasn’t been told. So Nas was like, ‘Yeah, why hasn’t this period been told?’ So what has been my great privilege, and I really, really mean that. I found myself not just collaborating with, but really curating, like helping get told, the stories of all that artists that actually lived.”
As a diehard music fan, Luhrmann’s joy is evident as he talks about Chic legend Nile Rodgers being a great resource or recounts the meetings of punks and hip-hop artists back in New York in the ‘70s, like Blondie’s Debbie Harry meeting Grandmaster Flash uptown while he was playing basketball. A great moment to him was being taken to the historical Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx, one of the recognized birthplaces of hip-hop. “I can remember being taken upstairs and being shown the birth of the Andrew Freedman house and it was an amazing secret. It was a surprise — his father had a sound machine in Jamaica, he said, ‘Get the sound machine out and let’s make it dance to get the kids off the street.’ The parents helped him. And I thought, ‘That makes total sense,’” Luhrmann says.
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For Luhrmann, telling the tale of The Get Down with music, including helping produce the music for the two soundtrack albums that feature Janelle Monae, Zayn, Christina Aguilera, Miguel, Nas, and young artist Grace, has been one of the great pleasures and sanity-saving aspects of this massive undertaking. “Working with Grace and building that chart, they are small pockets of creative oxygen. And that keeps me going,” he says. “I’ve got very young artists, like brand-new, undiscovered hip-hop artists who are doing contemporary work, and then I’ve got Flash remixing a Teddy Pendergrass and Zayn doing a topline. I’ve been intimately involved in making the music and working with producing and producing myself with collaborators.”
One of his most collaborators was executive producer Nas. “Nas was remarkable. It really wasn’t a long conversation. After I met with him and we talked about it, he was like, ‘This has got to be done.’ And he recognized that he, as someone who had lived the fruits of what those kids invented, should do something to celebrate the fact that those kids invented it. And he’s been incredible on that level.”
Luhrmann has learned a lot working on the show, including answering his original question of how the music was born in the borough. “What I recognized is that in an environment where everything had been taken away and where the outside world looking in saw only devastation and negativity, that the young, if they’re surrounded by negativity, will eventually engage their imagination in their dispirit and they will produce positives,” he says. “So taking the kids’ point of view, they mythologized themselves. Flash was Grandmaster of the culture; they mashed up references and they made themselves into heroes, and they had heroes and they had gurus, and they were within that culture.”
All of this is being told within the framework of a TV show, which allows the more expansive story to be told. The first season is being told in two parts, and Luhrmann knows where he’d like the first season to wrap up — though the show is still being made, so that may change.
“What I was hoping was that the first season would end in ’79, so hopefully we’ll get there,” he says. “The reason ’79 is such an amazing year is that in the summer of ’79 there’s the burning of disco records in Chicago at the White Sox game. Suddenly you see disco incinerate overnight. And in the same summer, you hear the first ever hip-hop record [“Rapper’s Delight”] being played, and [record producer/Sugar Hill Records founder] Sylvia Robinson produced it with a bunch of kids from Jersey. No less than three months later, in December, the last month of the decade, there were I think five hip-hop records in the charts. So in the birth of the ‘80s, we now have this form on the charts full on.
“And the ‘80s would be our second season.”