Fred Brathwaite—better known as Fab 5 Freddy—contains multitudes. Born and raised in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, he grew up in a house steeped in books, music, and radical Black consciousness. Skipping school to tag subway cars led eventually to pioneering the notion of graffiti as fine art—and along the way, he befriended everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Andy Warhol to Madonna. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie were in that mix, too; their 1981 song “Rapture,” the first number-one single to feature rap vocals, name-dropped Freddy.
Wild Style—the ambitious 1982 film conceived by (and starring) Freddy, which synthesized rap, breakdancing, and graffiti—remains a towering cultural landmark, but it wasn’t until his 1988 debut as the host of Yo! MTV Raps (the then-new network’s first hip-hop show) that Freddy became known to a much wider audience.
His new book, Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture (with Mark Rozzo)—out today—is a fascinating and page-turning chronicle of a righteous life lived at a grand scale. We sat down with Freddy near his home in Harlem for a chat about it all.
Vogue: Your book seems so incredibly alive to me, but in terms of timing, you and I just missed each other. I moved to New York—right across the street from your studio on 9th Street in the East Village—
Fab 5 Freddy: El Bohio.
Yes—but just as you moved uptown, as it turns out. Yo! MTV Raps is how I learned what rap music was—that, and some friends who were preachers’ kids who moved to my tiny town from New York City and brought cassettes of Grandmaster Flash and the Sugarhill Gang.
Yeah. Wow—you got a taste early on.
Not nearly as much as you did; you intersected with so many aspects of culture. Your godfather is jazz drummer Max Roach, and when you were a tiny kid and you wanted to learn about jazz, you looked in your dad’s address book and you called Thelonious Monk. Your dad had some pretty creative, innovative thinkers over to your house; he was present when Malcolm X was assassinated. The assassination of Martin Luther King is something that you felt in a visceral way when you were about eight years old, also because of your dad.
He had heard there were fires in our neighborhood that night, and he said, “Let’s go up on the roof.” And we could see the glow from five or six fires in different areas around us in Bed-Stuy. So my dad and a couple other guys and I drove to Brownsville, because they were working with people in the community there and they wanted to make sure that people weren’t trying to burn it all down.
We were at a light, and I happened to glance up at this older white man running furiously at our car. I was like, “What the fuck.” Before I knew it, he opened the door and jumped in on top of me, and right then there was this loud bang on the top of the car. These other guys were chasing him, and they likely would have killed this poor man. He was terrified. He didn’t understand what had happened—that King had been assassinated [in Memphis] and that people were going crazy in the streets and it wasn’t a good place to be out there. My dad took him not far away and dropped him off at a police precinct, but it was something you never forget.
You have a great line in your book: “The grownups in my world were paying attention.” They were clued into the world they lived in—the civil rights movement, radical thinking, Black consciousness.
Yeah—they were very aware, very tuned into a variety of things going on. And then also, hearing Max Roach talk about how he was treated better in Europe than he was in the United States—I picked up on all that.
I was on a Nina Simone kick many years ago and remember reading about her saying more or less the same thing as Max Roach: basically, “I don’t need this shit—I’m moving to Paris.”
So that’s deep what you just mentioned, because I allude in my book to how my dad would have these periods where he became rather difficult—my mom called it going off—where he could get just irate. There was a documentary on Nina Simone about 10 years ago, and I went to the premiere at the Apollo Theater. At a point in Nina’s life, she goes through some serious mental stress and, yes, goes to live in Europe. Then she got diagnosed and treated and given the proper medication for these pressures she was under. And in this documentary, one of Malcolm’s daughters had become good friends with her, and she says, in referencing what Nina had been going through, “It’s hard to imagine somebody being Black at that time and aware of these things and not going through these issues.”
And at that point I was like, That’s what happened to my dad—he was constantly looking for a better way, but would get frustrated when the system just would not allow certain things to happen.
Fast-forward a little bit in your life and you’re in high school and you are getting into… did you call it graffiti? Tagging?
We referred to it as writing—the New York term for graffiti was, I’m writing. Every kid had a name, and you’d create this other persona.
At the same time, you are educating yourself in the canon of art, and learning about how what you were doing might have a place within that world.
Pieces fell into place. School was a little boring to me, and so we’d get on the buses or the trains and travel to these parts of the city that were completely unfamiliar to me. That led me to discover the Metropolitan Museum—they always had a suggested price of a couple of dollars, but if you gave them a nickel, you might get a look, but you could still get in. And so as a kid with very little money, to go to the Met was like a Disneyland experience for me—looking at Renaissance, Egyptian, modern, and abstract art—and I got familiar with certain paintings: that’s Lichtenstein, that’s Warhol.
Then I would pick up a book and read about them, and somehow it clicked. The real moment was realizing that these pop artists were inspired by the same things that a lot of people in graffiti at that time were looking at—like the cartoon, the comic—and so this stuff began to develop and swing around in my head.
And around the same time, you were an altar boy, but only very briefly. What happened?
So at church, I believed all that stuff at that young age—all the Catholic stuff—how your guardian angel is always there with you. I’d be like, “Oh, my guardian angel’s here! I wonder what he’s like.” I’d be thinking about this deeply. And when I was in altar boy training—man, they would talk about how the host that you eat during communion is the bread of Christ turned into the body of Christ—I thought, maybe that’s why the little wafers are so thin, because it’s got all this power, so they only give you a little bit. So one day I ate about 30 of them damn things, man. Fucking horrible—this shit had no flavor—but I’m waiting for some shit to happen. And it never happened.
Back to the graffiti world. There have now been gallery shows for decades about street art, but it’s amazing to read in your book about a time when it wasn’t like that. You were the enemy—you were hoodlums who were defacing the property of the city and you needed to be stopped. The landscape has changed.
Well, we changed it. Part of what motivated me was seeing something within it that was special and unique—a creative movement forming out of this madness. And I was like, man, nobody’s seeing this—how could they not see this?! How can they not make these connections? I didn’t know enough about art, but I knew that if I could find the right people to have this conversation with—people from this punk rock moment and New Wave, who were challenging the established norms—they might connect with it.
You also write, "It mattered deeply to me that no one defined what we were doing as primitive, self-taught, outsider, or folk art, the usual terms to describe artists of color who hadn’t come through the art school system. We weren’t hobbyists or anomalies. We were artists.”
Exactly. The artists I was into were not looked at in this patronizing kind of light. I knew that people were going to try to say, This is what you are, but I wasn’t going to let that go down.
There was this artist, Olivier Mosset, who did these monochromatic paintings, and when I was just getting my feet into the art scene I was dating this French woman and she had a small Mosset. And I said, “This reminds me of a nice, clean wall.” I pulled out a marker and went to it, but she was like, “No, no, no, no, don’t.” I was just teasing, but she was like, “Oh God, no,” and pretty soon she tells the artist, Olivier, “Oh—I’m dating this guy and he’s one of these graffiti people, and he was going to tag on your painting.” And Olivier says to her, “Huh—that’s a very interesting idea.” So me and Olivier meet, and I’m talking about Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, and he was like, “You know about those guys?” I’m 19 or 20 at the time, but I was like, “Look, I’m into this shit.”
And we collaborated—I tagged on three or four of his paintings, and they were exhibited. One of the pieces I tagged Kneecap Art Pimps, and I write in the book about how I thought that the Red Brigade [Brigate Rosse, a violent far-left Italian paramilitary organization] might show up. I didn’t realize how highfalutin the gallery was, but I thought it might happen, because they were doing political graffiti attacking different politicians; they were shooting people in the knees.
I used to have one of their T-shirts; I heard about them through the Clash. I wore it out once to meet my father-in-law, who’s Italian, for dinner, and when he saw me wearing this shirt he freaked out and told me I couldn’t wear it in public—
Oh, shit.
Anyway, you’re in the flow of things now. Your graffiti work is being taken seriously; pretty soon you meet [writer and editor and Warhol figure] Glen O’Brien and become part of the crew around his legendary cable-access show TV Party.
They became family—those guys really guided me along for about three or four years, from late ’78 to ’81-ish. That was so pivotal—I met Chris [Stein] and Debbie [Harry] from Blondie, John Lurie, all the cream of the crop of the New Wave and No Wave music scenes. And the Mudd Club opened at that time, so we were all going there together after TV Party, and that just further embedded me in the scene with all different kinds of creators.
Is that where you also met a graffiti artist who was then known as SAMO?
No, Jean [Jean-Michel Basquiat] and I met at a party, but we became better friends through being associated with TV Party, and soon we began to get some attention from an art dealer in Rome. Some people were curious. The rest just saw us as wild savages defacing public property—which, a lot of it was that—but there were some creatives among us trying to emerge. I felt what we were doing was akin, contextually, to what New Wave and punk were doing.
I want to talk a little bit about a certain magnum opus of your creative life—putting together the film Wild Style, which is maybe the first time that these three disparate things—
All of it. Absolutely. It’s the beginning.
…Rap, breakdancing, and graffiti culture—are made as one. It was your concept to tell the story, to say that these are not three different groups of weirdos—or they are, but they’re all part of a movement.
Correct. One of the reasons I wanted to do this book was to lay it all out, because prior to me doing that, it didn’t exist. I mean, people in the Bronx making rap music—they all weren’t into graffiti, and vice versa. But Wild Style was a way to show that young Black and Latin kids were not all thugs and hoodlums the way the press often painted us to be.
[The literary and music critic] Albert Murray had written this article that said, “For a culture to be complete, it should have music, a visual art, and a form of dance,” and that stayed in my head. Breakdancing had kind of waned, but when we started to work on Wild Style, that put some excitement back into it—the people making [the 1983 film] Flashdance picked up on what we were doing and featured the Rock Steady Crew in Flashdance, which was a huge movie. People were like, “What is this?” But that was the idea: to say that this is a culture.
You don’t claim to have invented hip-hop, though you were around when hip-hop was being invented.
Yeah. And I helped to put the name in place. I was talking with Charlie [Ahearn, the producer and director of Wild Style] when we realized that we don’t have a name for this. And I’m like, “Charlie, what are we going to call it?” Rap was something that was obvious, but we needed something that encompassed the rest of the music. Every other rapper, in between raps, would be like, “To the hip, the hop, the hip, the hip, hip, hip hop, don’t stop”—that was a way to keep rocking and think of the next rhyme you’re going to say. So I was like, “Charlie, let’s just call it this—everybody’s already using it.” I don’t like to go around and say, “I named hip-hop,” but I like to look at the fact that I nudged it into place.
So many people came to know you as the host of Yo! MTV Raps, the first hip-hop show on MTV. It’s not a job that you were lusting after—you didn’t seem to love what MTV was doing at the time.
I did enjoy the fact that MTV was this new thing, but when you saw that Rick James was threatening MTV with a lawsuit because they weren’t programming Black music, it was like, “What the fuck?” MTV was basing what they were doing on the way radio had always been pretty much segregated around race lines. It was pretty much the established norm, but it’s basically racism—it’s structural racism. But MTV was just stumbling along with this brand-new platform—cable—and tried this new show. And, boom—immediately, the ratings were through the roof.
Did that change your life in a way that was fun—or, I guess, not fun?
It was weird, because most people in New York had no cable—cable TV was really just Manhattan at the time. Most of my friends had no idea, but among those that knew, it was incredible. When I began to travel with the show, we were somewhere out in Cali and these young white kids saw me and were like, “Oh my God.” I was like, “Oh—me?” It was really shocking.
And it opened a lot of doors for you—pretty soon you’re directing music videos for Gang Starr and Queen Latifah and a ton of other artists.
Yeah. I directed about 60, 70 videos.
More recently, you did a documentary, Grass Is Greener.
Yes—the main impetus of the film was to show the connection between American music and cannabis. Jazz artists in the ’20s and ’30s made songs about cannabis; Louis Armstrong loved cannabis. But then, after they decriminalized alcohol, they [the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] decided to go after this plant, and they used racist tropes—they even promoted the name of marijuana to make it sound Mexican, like Tijuana. That was not a term that had been widely used. And hemp—I mean, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights was written on hemp paper. It doesn’t biodegrade—it’s really good shit. But they demonized the fuck out of it—they made propaganda like the film Reefer Madness—but all the coolest musicians and counterculture people were always into weed. So I was like, oh, what a dope way to tell this story—with Snoop, Method Man, Redman the guys that really became this generation’s proponents of cannabis. But then I had to look at the criminal justice nightmare, and that led me to focus on a guy who’d been given a 13-year prison sentence for two joints worth of weed out of Louisiana. And a week or two after we had interviewed his family in New Orleans, we get word that he’s getting up for parole, finally, after seven years. So we flew back to capture that moment of him walking out of prison.
I was so moved by what I learned in the film that I created a cannabis brand in his name—his name is Bernard Noble, hence we call the brand B Noble. And we donate a percentage of our revenue to organizations that help people who are getting fucked over by similar cannabis laws. That became the foundation and the idea of the brand. It’s been six years now we’ve been in business. Yeah, B Noble: that grew out of a film. I didn’t plan it, but man; it was perfect.
