“Baz has been on me for 14 months, asking me over and over and over: ‘Flash, could that have happened?’” He was an invaluable source of information for Luhrmann his team. We stand for something.”įlash is a burly, charismatic 58-year-old with a booming voice, an extraordinary memory and a gift for storytelling. Hip-hop’s message, says Flash, was very simple and very powerful: “We matter. They were asserting their identities at a time when it seemed the city didn’t care if they lived or died. Luhrmann’s typically flamboyant direction flows between its myriad characters like a DJ set and gives the young artists a mythological sheen. But for me,” he grins, “it was a great place to live.”ĭirector Baz Luhrmann’s ambitious, panoramic new Netflix show The Get Down doesn’t ignore the problems afflicting the South Bronx in the 70s but it focuses on celebrating the remarkable tenacity and creativity of the area’s black and Latino residents, especially the generation who revolutionised popular culture by inventing hip-hop. Where the gangs lived, that’s where the rubble was. One of our biggest pastimes was flying kites on the roof. One local health official called it “a necropolis – a city of death”.īut when I ask the groundbreaking DJ Grandmaster Flash what he remembers about his adolescence on Fox Street, not far from the embattled police precinct known as Fort Apache, he says, “It was wonderful. Touring the rubble in 1980, Ronald Reagan compared the neglected neighbourhood to London during the blitz. By the end of the decade, the South Bronx had lost almost 40% of its population.
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Whole blocks were reduced to ghost towns as cynical landlords torched their unsellable properties for insurance money. Unemployment and poverty were sky-high, as was crime, overwhelming police precincts and fire stations that were squeezed by austerity. H istory remembers the South Bronx in the 1970s as an urban catastrophe the ground zero of a city in crisis.