The King of Fly
On hip-hop O.G. Fab 5 Freddy’s new memoir, "Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture."
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Fred Brathwaite, aka Fab 5 Freddy, started transforming from a regular city kid into a cultural chameleon who became instrumental in advancing various urban art forms—graffiti and rap—to the next level. In addition, beginning in the early 1980s, he was also involved in film, co-writing and starring in Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style; the Lower East Side/SoHo art world; and directing pioneering rap videos. A native New Yorker born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in 1959, years before gentrification lined the landscape with coffee shops, art galleries and chic restaurants, Fred’s hometown streets were full of mom-and-pop stores, old school businesses, and West Indian upstart families, much like his own, who came to America looking for a better way.
Certainly, as Fab tells it in his recently released autobiography Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture, co-written with Vanity Fair scribe Mark Rozzo, though the bond of family was tight in his hood, as a youngster he also had to dodge street gangs and deadly drugs, sinister vices that led to the downfall of many. Hell, folks didn’t refer to the community as “Bed-Stuy, do or die” for nothing. Nevertheless, coming from a solid background where his jazz enthusiast dad was an accountant with a revolutionary streak, and his loving mom heavily endorsed education, the one criminal minded activity Fred was swayed into was graffiti, on the rise in New York City as he headed into his wild teenage years in the mid-1970s.
It was during that time that Fred began playing hooky from the smart kid school, John Dewey High, where most days he sat in class, “staring out the window, daydreaming and checking out the Coney Island train yards next door.” Instead of going to class, Fred began roaming streets, going to museums, chilling in Times Square movie houses, and tagging trains with other “writers,” as the graff kids called themselves. Yet, unlike other magic marker and/or aerosol artists who never went further than spraying their names on subway cars and city walls, Fab used his talents to transport himself and others into the worlds of art galleries, television studios, film locations, recording booths and cool clubs.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Fred Brathwaite, aka Fab 5 Freddy, started transforming from a regular city kid into a cultural chameleon who became instrumental in advancing various urban art forms—graffiti and hip-hop—to the next level.
Fab was also instrumental in bringing “the uptown sound” of rap music, which he first discovered through friends and bootleg recordings, downtown to Manhattan nightclubs Mudd Club and The Roxy. It wasn’t long before the punks and new wavers were head-nodding to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. Along the way Fred also developed real friendships with more than a few of the late-20th Century’s artistic contributors, including writers like Glenn O’Brien, who was also the host of TV Party and Rene Ricard, artists Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, club promoters Michael Holman and Lady Blue, and punk-pop stars Blondie, fronted by singer Debbie Harry and bandleader Chris Stein, who became his other family.
“Fab 5 Freddy tells me everybody’s fly,” Harry raps on her group’s 1981 hit “Rapture,” the single credited with introducing rap to the mainstream. Those lyrics raised Fred’s status as well as supplied the title for a rousing account of a few decades in his life. He also helped elevate into respected spaces in NYC and Europe the “low” graffiti art of his friends Lee Quiñones—who gets much props in the book as Fab’s mentor and partner in art crimes—and Futura 2000.
Digging deep, in Everybody’s Fly Brathwaite writes about everything from the night of Martin Luther King’s murder, to drawing illustrations for his high school’s newspaper, to his brief stint as a weed dealer in the Catskills, to his obsession with watching films and studying the medium on his own. “I had the filmmaking jones,” he writes. In the fall of 1978, while working as a security guard, he encountered the production team of Bob Fosse’s masterwork All That Jazz at his job and was even more smitten.
Fab was also instrumental in bringing “the uptown sound” of rap music, which he first discovered through friends and bootleg recordings, downtown to Manhattan nightclubs Mudd Club and The Roxy. It wasn’t long before the punks and new wavers were head-nodding to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa.
A few years later he served as a muse, co-producer, music supervisor and man behind director Charlie Ahearn on the 1983 film Wild Style. It starred his friend Lee as a young graffiti writer named Zorro who bombs (spray paints) throughout the city and the transit system until he is discovered by a white gallery owner, played by the lovely Patti Astor. In real life Astor was behind the Fun Gallery, the Lower East Side space that gave many young East Village artists, including Fred and Jean, their first shows. Wild Style also took the viewer into the raw world of rap, from the streets to the stage.
Wild Style showed the ingenuity of the young men and women involved in that still new movement that within a few years would rise to the top of the pop culture ladder. That film, with its cinema verite style that reminded me of The 400 Blows, has been the influence and inspiration for countless rappers and producers and their overseas bros from Brixton, England, who a few years later would be well known as producer Nellie Hooper, as well as recording angels Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead.
Along the way Fred also developed real friendships with more than a few of the late-20th Century’s artistic contributors, including writers like Glenn O’Brien, who was also the host of TV Party and Rene Ricard, artists Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, club promoters Michael Holman and Lady Blue, and punk-pop stars Blondie, fronted by singer Debbie Harry and bandleader Chris Stein, who became his other family.
Less than a decade after the DIY aesthetic of punk had captured the musical imaginations of youth throughout Britain and America, hip-hop was casting a similar spell. “Movies had always portrayed Blacks and Latins as pimps, petty crooks, criminals,” Freddy writes. “We showed them there was more going on.” There were a few other hip-hop related films made in the 1980s including Breakin’ (1984), Beat Street (1984), Rappin’ (1985) and Kush Groove (1985), but none compared to the rawness of Wild Style.
“There is never going to be anything more authentic than Wild Style,” hip-hop journalist Mark Skillz told me via email. “From Grandmaster Flash rocking three turntables in his girlfriend’s apartment in the South Bronx to the Treacherous Three and the Fearless Four with Grandmaster DST on the mic with Grandmaster DST on the wheels (turntables) during the closing scene, Fab and Charlie Ahearn just had access to so much realness.”
Digging deep, in Everybody’s Fly Brathwaite writes about everything from the night of Martin Luther King’s murder, to drawing illustrations for his high school’s newspaper, to his brief stint as a weed dealer in the Catskills, to his obsession with watching films and studying the medium on his own.
Freddy and I travelled in similar circles in the mid-1980s, hanging on the Lower East Side amongst the musicians, artists, filmmakers and other talented outcasts, but we never met until the fall of 1990 when writer Havelock Nelson and I were working on the early hip-hop text Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture Our editor, Michael Pietsch, who a few years later made his mark as the man behind David Foster Wallace’s supposedly brilliant Infinite Jest and became a big deal in the world of publishing, suggested we interview someone for the foreword.
We debated recruiting various record executives, including Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, or Uptown Records homie Andre Harrell, who was also a former rapper. In the end it was decided we needed someone who’d been ingrained in various hip-hop-related scenes. Indeed, that man was Freddy, who in 1988 secured a gig as the first host of YO! MTV Raps, the music network’s first connection with the hip-hop community across the country. For someone who’d been down with several subcultures, being on MTV was seriously mainstream. However, as we soon learned, the man himself was still grounded. He maintained the ambitious edge that had already taken him so far.
Freddy and I travelled in similar circles in the mid-1980s, hanging on the Lower East Side amongst the musicians, artists, filmmakers and other talented outcasts, but we never met until the fall of 1990 when writer Havelock Nelson and I were working on the early hip-hop text Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture Our editor, Michael Pietsch, who a few years later made his mark as the man behind David Foster Wallace’s supposedly brilliant Infinite Jest and became a big deal in the world of publishing, suggested we interview someone for the foreword.
While some men would’ve been content simply being a VJ interviewing rappers and producers for the premier music station, Fab was also developing into a behind-the-camera cat, directing videos for KRS-One (“My Philosophy”) and Queen Latifah (“Ladies First”); his then-latest was the gritty “Just to Get a Rep” for Gang Starr, which 37 years later remains a favorite of mine. Fab invited us to his beautiful Manhattan Plaza apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, which was about a 15-minute walk from his office at MTV.
Reminding me of the line from The Jefferson’s theme song, the former Brooklyn b-boy had snagged himself “a deluxe apartment in the sky,” where he lived there for most of the decade before moving uptown to an exquisite Harlem brownstone. After hooking us up with juice and a fruit platter, the questions began—and didn’t end until two hours later. “And through all of that I bet you didn’t even realize that you were making history,” I said. Havelock chuckled, but Fred didn’t even smile. “That’s not true,” Fab said finally, “I was always aware that we were making history.”
While some men would’ve been content simply being a VJ interviewing rappers and producers for the premier music station, Fab was also developing into a behind-the-camera cat, directing videos for KRS-One (“My Philosophy”) and Queen Latifah (“Ladies First”); his then-latest was the gritty “Just to Get a Rep” for Gang Starr, which 37 years later remains a favorite of mine. Fab invited us to his beautiful Manhattan Plaza apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, which was about a 15-minute walk from his office at MTV.
In its own way, Everybody’s Fly also serves as a history book. And not just about hip-hop, but also NYC during its bankrupt and most dangerous days in the 1970s, and the 1980s post-Pop art world that he, Basquiat and Rammellzee inhabited, which helped open the door for the next generation of Black visual artists who began emerging from various art schools a few years later.
Still, as Fred reminds the reader, Basquiat might’ve made good money from the collectors, but respected art critics slaughtered him in print. Angrily he writes, “The hating ass motherfucking critics couldn’t wrap their heads around somebody this sharp, this original, this sophisticated had come from the hood and was essentially a self-taught prodigy.” The hate was piled on more when, in 1985, Basquiat teamed-up with his friend and mentor Andy Warhol on paintings for a show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. The reviews were savage and put a wedge between the two artists. Two years later Warhol died during a simple gallbladder operation, a death that led to Basquiat spiraling into a deep depression and an eventual fatal heroin overdose on August 12, 1988.
In its own way, Everybody’s Fly also serves as a history book. And not just about hip-hop, but also NYC during its bankrupt and most dangerous days in the 1970s, and the 1980s post-Pop art world that he, Basquiat and Rammellzee inhabited, which helped open the door for the next generation of Black visual artists who began emerging from various art schools a few years later.
Having followed Freddy’s career since seeing him in the pages of the East Village Eye and the Village Voice back in the 1980s, I already knew well the professional side. But it was the sections of the book about his young blood years in Brooklyn that were my favorites. In passages that reminded me of two Bed-Stuy cinematic classics, The Education of Sonny Carson and Crooklyn, he reflects lovingly on his dad debating music, politics and Black liberation with his buddies (including Fred’s godfather, jazz drummer Max Roach) in the basement while he listened at the door. He also sat with his mom in the kitchen (“her domain”) where she and her best friend Doris had their own conversations.
With an artist’s eye and a filmmaker’s perspective, Fab 5 Freddy’s Everybody’s Fly is as vivid as it is insightful. Turning back the hands of time, he takes the reader on a delightful journey through the old school memories that still sound fly today.
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Fantastic piece. I can't wait to read the book!
Nice to see the Paper cover with the story I wrote featured here.