‘The Get Down’ and the Secret Myth of Hip Hop

I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a Hip Hop docudrama that was actually about Hip Hop. Straight Outta Compton , for all its good intentions (that weak handful I recall), was more about taking NWA and hermetically sealing these iconic characters onto the silver screen like the hyper-masculine action figures of the Saturday morning cartoons associated with their era. The real attraction (aside from Angela Bassett) of the Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace biopic, Notorious, was an amalgam of the shock value of how certain characters around Big were portrayed and this silent but understood expectation among the audience that there would be some previously overlooked insight into the events surrounding Wallace’s murder. With some exceptions, Black music biopics have a tendency to spotlight the awe of (usually the hardship of) Blackness while the music is left in the background to make special guest appearances to remind you why you care about these caricatures of iconic artists. And though these films usually excel at recalling the artist’s unique relationship to the music, they rarely explore the music’s relationship with us as recipients. Music is something far bigger than the sum of its parts, an artistic connective tissue that most humans have in common when we have nothing else. It’s one of those universal things that, for better or worse, we drop damn near everything to defend when it touches us. If there is such a thing as a soul, music is more capable of r…