Six-hour-long Version of Beat Street
There's not much more to say about it.
shareOther than the fact that both are set in New York and deal with early hip-hop, both BEAT STREET and THE GET DOWN are totally different creatures. Obviously you haven't watched it----it's an excellent drama so far, with lots of great music and intense drama in it.
shareThanks for your assumption, but I unfortunately did watch all episodes (I have a tendency to see things through once I make an investment in them). If there is a second season I definitely will not be checking.
Beat Street is about an aspiring DJ who is entangled with a girl potentially out of his league owing to his involvement with hip-hop (which she, to some extent, considers a form of low-culture). The girl in Beat Street was a studying music at a prestigious college; the girl in The Get Down is a preacher's daughter with obvious vocal talent (that is implicitly assumed to transcend 'low-culture' hip-hop talent by those outside of the scene). The whole story arc in both is about (a) getting the girl and (b) making it in hip-hop (and by extension, providing its legitimacy as an art form). The only differences between the two is that (a) The Get Down is going to drag this tired, cheeseball story on for as long as possible rather than 90 minutes, and (b) the lead character is an MC rather than a DJ.
Yeah, but the real big difference is that THE GET DOWN is telling the history of hip-hop and the people who created it from a vantage point of nearly 40 years, not just some tired guy-gets-through-hip-hop Hollywood plot like BEAT STREET had. It tells more than one story about a whole neighborhood in a city and how a bunch of young folks managed to create an art form in the worst of times for New York City that would gradually take over and spread to the far corners of the world. It's way more complicated than you're giving it credit for, and comparing it to one of earliest hip-hop films is basically selling it real short. I actually liked BEAT STREET, because it's definitely one of the better early hip-hop films made---just before hip-hop itself really got assimilated into the mainstream (I'm just old enough to recall when it came out---yep, I'm an old and ancient hip-hop head myself,lol.)
Anyway, here's another cool review of THE GET DOWN here:
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/09/06/black-superhero-music-the-get-down-is-amazing
And another one, even more hyped than the first:
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/08/30/film-crit-hulk-smash-please-get-down-with-the-get-down
Yeah, but the real big difference is that THE GET DOWN is telling the history of hip-hop and the people who created it
There's virtually zero historical accuracy in it. I do not even feel like traveling down that avenue though, because it's not a documentary.
There's enough drama in the real stories involving hip-hop in the early days that you do not even need to fictionalize it. That would require deflating the egos of people like Flash though and breaking many tired and incorrect narratives. share
There's virtually zero historical accuracy in it.
Absolutely. I lived through the era and even though the show amused me at times I couldn't help but think how greatly it was whitewashing the era for the sake of entertainment.
Anyone who has said that they've lived through the era and remember it exactly as how it is portrayed on the show either has a huge memory lapse or is somehow connected to the show and trying to draw attention to it. share
@Mikethemechanic
That's interesting, because there are a handful of posters on this board who have said that the show is pretty accurate from what they recall of having lived in New York in that era. You remember it one way, they remember another. It dosen't make their recollections any less accurate because they aren't exactly like yours. People recall specific times in history differently, depending on where they were and what they were doing at that time. Not everyone is going to have the exact same recollection of the same events from the same time period. anyway. So to claim that only your memories are the only accurate ones is pretty arrogant on your part,because you weren't the only person there.
@hqahtani
The thing is, Grandmaster Flash himself and a number of other hip-hop pioneers (DJ Kool Herc and Kurtis Blow) are credited as supervising producers on the show, meaning they had a lot of say and imput (that Luhrmann specifically felt that the show needed, of course) in making sure that certain aspects of the show were true to the actual time period. They even put the main actors through a six-month period training course of actual DJing, breakdancing, and rapping (I don't know about the tagging--graffiti painting--part---but that was possibly included too,lol.) just to make the show even more authentic. And virtually NO show or film is 100% accurate with anything it depicts. But to claim it's not accurate in anything it depicts is kind of stretching it a bit.
My understanding is that it's accurate in terms of what things were like but there are a lot of fictional characters and plots in the show.
share