How Nas & Grandmaster Flash Helped Shape Netflix’s ‘The Get Down’

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Aug 12, 2016

Photographer: ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images

Two NYC legends break down their involvement in the new series about hip-hop’s birth.

Grandmaster Flash has just one regret about the mid-’70s.

“Nobody was really documenting—nobody in our crews had a camera,” the 58-year-old DJ pioneer tells Genius. “It’s sad. If I would’ve had just one jam on a Super 8 reel of any party in the ’70s, you know what that’d be worth right now? It’d probably go to a museum. We weren’t thinking about that at the time, we were just kids having fun.”

Someone has a camera now. Flash is seated on a black leather couch in a dorm-sized dressing room on the sprawling Queens, NY set of The Get Down, Netflix’s latest coup (out Aug. 12) that recreates those early hip-hop years. He serves as the series' associate producer, lending counsel on wardrobe, props and aesthetic, which director Baz Luhrmann had been imagining for more than a decade. The first six-episode season opens in 1977 in the South Bronx, where Flash grew up, and tells the story of a group of fictional teenagers finding themselves during the genesis of graffiti, DJ, breakdancing and MC cultures.

Flash is just one member of Luhrmann’s carefully selected cabinet of cultural trustees, which includes hip-hop historian Nelson George (supervising producer), Kurtis Blow (associate producer), and consultants DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Rahiem of the The Furious Five. Perhaps most involved was walking hip-hop embodiment Nas, who joined The Get Down as executive producer in the beginning stages of production, writing original songs and most of the rhymes that appear in the show, like this one from “Rule The World (I Came From The City)”:

The Bronx
We had to rumble with rivals on the rubble
While buildings around us would crumble

When Nas came onboard, he took on the challenge of penning raps to fit different characters’ POV and personality based on the early scenes that were already shot. The script was malleable enough to also be molded by the Queensbridge MC’s words.

“I’d go over what I write with Baz and we’d shape the story into what I wrote, and vice versa,” the 42-year-old rap legend explains. “We sit and we talk about it. If I write something that Baz likes and didn’t see coming, it gives him an idea of how to shake things up in the story. He’d go, ‘We need to see that.’ Every piece is as important as the other.”

Nas begins each episode in 1996 as The Get Down’s MC and protagonist, Ezekiel “Books” Figuero (lip synced by Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs), narrating with raps about his adolescence—the period in which the storyline takes place. While those rhymes sound modern, he also writes ‘70s-style raps for the younger version of Books (played by Justice Smith), and his friends. Nas channeled idols from his own childhood to capture the sound of the time. In one pivotal scene from the pilot episode, Books finds his competitive rap voice during his first underground street party:

This ain’t a battle, this is all a scrimmage
Please refrain from applause ’til I’m finished
Dressed in my disco clothes and still kill it
The best in the Bronx, eventually you’ll get it

“T La Rock, Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde, Melle Mel—I used to recite their lyrics coming home from school,” Nas recalls. He surrounded himself with ’70s imagery to tap into that retro rhyme aesthetic. “I remember growing up and hearing tapes—Grandmaster Caz, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five—going to the park jams in my neighborhood. When I learned how to rap, I was emulating them. That was in me since a kid.”

Despite TGD being set in a time before Nas was even enrolled in kindergarten, he reached back to other childhood memories to inspire his pen. The social climate of the times recalls decaying slums, abandoned buildings and poverty, juxtaposed with the fresh culture and underground parties that were so full of life. “Some people might look at this shithole and think fantasy or Netflix series—but that stuff was real,” says Nas of his city’s depiction in The Get Down. “People in the community would do whatever they could to survive.” The series’ third episode takes place during the infamous New York City blackout of 1977 and triggered poignant recollections for Nas, who was three years old at the time.

“I remember that day like yesterday—it was just me, my brother, and my mom at home,” he tells Genius. “We didn’t know many people. I remember people knocking on our door with candles in their hand, checking to make sure we were cool. As a kid I could sense that I was in a wild neighborhood in Queensbridge. The energy outside of the apartment was crazy. And I remember the love of human family. When Baz played me that, that was the most emotional point while working on it—that hit the hardest.”

Flash, on the other hand, mostly recalls the good times: “We were having trouble with our mayor, there were some political things that were kind of a nightmare, but whatever was affecting the rest of the planet didn’t affect us. These were really fun years. We did our block parties and I could play all of these different drum solos and as long as they were on time, seamless to the beat, people would keep dancing. That was so amazing for me.”

Before there was MCing, there was the DJ, and Flash was an innovator on the turntables. In episode two, actor Mamoudou Athie (who plays a young Flash) depicts a technique that revolutionized DJing. Flash would use a crayon to mark the points on vinyl records—disco, funk, soul—where a breakbeat begins and ends. By switching between the same segment of music on two identical records, he could theoretically keep the portion on infinite loop.

“It was a way of definitively finding the break without having to pick the [turntable’s] tone arm up,” Flash says of his crayon method. “I needed a marker, I needed to see where it was so if ever I was in a dark place, I know where to put the needle.”

It’s these intricate touchstones that shape the sound and authenticity of The Get Down as it tracks the toddler stage of today’s most influential musical genre. “It’s giving you a forgotten time about forgotten people in a forgotten version of New York City,” Nas says. “Even if you weren’t born at that time, you can look at the days of the founding fathers through this series.”