“It’s sad how people paint the Bronx like it was some kind of O.K. Corral,” he said. “I think it was a city of experimentation. We left no stone unturned musically. Life was a lot simpler then. I didn’t see a whole lot of problems in that period. Maybe it was because I knew how to handle the corral. But I do know that when I came out in the park, all the gangsters, all the gang members and everybody would come to the park in total, total peace. The biggest gangs would buy soda, chips and popcorn for like 500 people. You’d see guys with a reputation for being super-ruthless, but they were the kindest guys to my audience. The police officer would be right across the street drinking a soda, because anybody that could be starting trouble was right in the park with me. So they allowed us to play until 11 or 12 o’clock.”

With “The Get Down,” he said, he hopes to convey that dimension of hip-hop’s formative period. “I think it’s a great time,” he said. “I’m excited for people to take a look. I ain’t trying to change anybody. I just say, Here’s what it was.” Four decades after its inception, he said, hip-hop is now “a billion-dollar business.”

“Somebody has to say, where did this thing come from?” he said. “Who baked this cake? Why not ask the baker?”

His silence on aspects of the past aside, he said he was not bitter about the money he never earned from his hit records or concerts, or the wealth earned by the stars who followed him.

“I’m so glad I didn’t come in at this time,” he said. “I didn’t mind spending the 10, 12 years building a solid foundation of what I do, and have people follow me, so that when I got into the lions’ den, which is the industry, I didn’t get eaten up. So it’s a good thing now.”

He gestured out the window to the new buildings rising on 145th Street. Most of his peers now perform sporadically, if at all. Some, like Cowboy, are gone. If Flash no longer rules the Bronx, he enjoys a different, broader kind of success.

“I accept change,” he said. “Forty years ago that might have been a grocery store. Today it’s a Caribbean market. If you don’t accept change, change will leave you behind. So I’m good with change. Oh, yeah.”