The Get Down
I spend a lot of time yelling when I watch The Get Down. I spend a lot of time yelling when I watch TV in general, but The Get Down wiggles loose a very specific part of me, a yell I have that’s pure exasperation. It’s loud and obnoxious and it sounds like this: “Zeke and/or Shao, I love you but please, dear lord, shut up.”
To be clear, this is not how I spend most of my time watching The Get Down. Most of my time is spent doing gentle shouts about who I would die for (everyone) and how good the intercut scenes are (very). Sometimes, I even watch quietly. But at least once an episode, I get cranky with Zeke and/or Shao for being self-centered in a way that ricochets off everyone around them. To some degree, this is not fair. Zeke and Shao are both under tremendous pressure, being pulled in multiple directions by older people who are certain that they know what’s best, and rapid cycling between being adored and harangued by partners, collaborators, and mentors (and, more often than not, one another). Zeke is in high school, and Shao isn’t much older. It’s pretty unreasonable to hold them to any sort of adult emotional standard.
That said, not everyone is the Knight of Cups. Feelings flow into Zeke and Shao and right back out again. It’s like pouring water into a giant sieve. It’s too much for any one bucket to catch. Some of it goes into their music. The Get Down is about the birth of hip-hop in the South Bronx in the late 70s. It does that thing I fucking love of combining real people (Grandmaster Flash) with inventions (Zeke, Shao, most characters) to tell a true story (“true” here meaning a mix of emotionally and factually accurate). All of the music on the show is fucking exceptional. The last episode I watched (s02e01) had a soundtrack that would have been incredible if it was spread over an entire season; that it was in a single episode was almost too much to comprehend. (Sidebar: I obviously love disco, and every episode my crush on Cadillac and the attendant shame increases.) Shao and Zeke are at the forefront. They’re not just crafting their emotions into music; they’re crafting their emotions into inventing music.
It’s outstanding to watch. The music is great (“fucking fantastic,” one might say), but the ways that Zeke and Shao live in it is beyond. They’re pouring themselves into it, and I really mean that. Shaping themselves to fit into something that they’re also shaping. Not enough time has passed for there to even be the potential of a macro view, let alone for these two to go looking for it. Even if it had, I’m not convinced they’d take it. The Knight of Cups is not tremendously interested in the world outside of themself besides people that may listen to them, and those people are more concepts than actual people anyway. They want to express themself, and while they believe that could benefit other people, that’s not their core goal, even though they may tell themself and others that it is. (There’s nothing wrong with this; I think this is true of most musicians, and most artists in general.)
As sometimes happens with these, I could write a bazillion words more. Usually that’s because I could go further in depth into some specific form of analysis, tarot or TV or otherwise. Here, it’s because Zeke and Shao embody the Knight of Cups so fully that I have a list for each of them of individual scenes and general themes that I could write entire posts on. Instead of spiraling into any more text, I’ll just note that Knights notably have a teenage vibe, which is age appropriate for Zeke and Shao. My understanding of brain development is that teenagers are physiologically designed to be self-centered and hyperemotional. That Zeke and Shao are able to funnel these emotions into art is what cements them as Knights of Cups. Emotion is not enough to claim such an elevated identity. Because we often— importantly, necessarily— try to remove capitalist language and frameworks from our lives, we can sometimes lose the concept that creating something is quite literally producing something, making something where before there was nothing, and that that’s not inherently bad. (This is big The Empress vibes.) Zeke and Shao are Knights of Cups because they take their emotions, huge and incomprehensible and all-encompassing, and use them to fill empty bits of the world with themselves.
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