The Guide #237: Fab 5 Freddy, the street artist at the heart of New York’s creative zenith
In this week’s newsletter: A new memoir by Fred Brathwaite offers an insight into the city’s emerging underground scene in the 70s and 80s – and shows us the power of subcultures in difficult times Don’t get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereHello everyone, I’m Coco Khan, covering for Gwilym Mumford, and this week, as the sun started to peep out from behind the clouds, I counted five Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirts on passersby during a park walk,Sure, I may live in a trendy London borough – but it’s still hardly surprising, given that the name and works of the New York artist whose roots were in graffiti have been licensed to fashion brands from Next, Primark and Uniqlo to Supreme and Saint Laurent,It’s hard to imagine that the artist – who died at 27 of a drug overdose, and whose signature slogan SAMO© (Same Old Crap – a criticism of consumerism, and the commodification of art, with a playful copyright mark) – would approve of the Basquiat name being on keyrings, tote bags and clothing,But hey, what do I know – I’m just another purist bore still upset that Ramones T-shirts are worn by millions who couldn’t name a song, when the Ramones themselves did not care,Still, the hope is that such merchandise connects new audiences to the artist’s work and graffiti as an art form.
See also: Keith Haring, another street artist whose work adorns T-shirts across the land.But if the shirts don’t do it, then a new, frankly dizzying, book will – the memoir of Fred Brathwaite, AKA Fab 5 Freddy, his graffiti name: Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture.For the Blondie fans experiencing a twinge of recognition, yes, this is the Fab 5 Freddy referenced in the seminal hit Rapture (“Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly,” raps Debbie Harry), and the book neatly follows his life, starting as a smart, plucky kid from Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn, who became the connective tissue between the emerging Black art forms of hip-hop and graffiti and the predominantly white downtown art-world scene.Basquiat makes an appearance, as does Haring, Blondie, Andy Warhol and even the Clash, and the book is being hailed as an “all-access pass” to the creative explosion of New York in the 1970s and 80s.It is a truly rollicking tale, told with the touching wide-eyed quality of Brathwaite as a young man discovering these new worlds for the first time.
On visiting legendary punk venue CBGB: “I felt like a Black secret agent on a mission, since the crowd was blindingly white.But I’ll never forget the first time I went into the bathroom: graffiti was everywhere … Yes there is a connection here between […] punk, and hood culture.” Or on seeing the godfather of dance music, Larry Levan, at the gay club Paradise Garage: “[It] wasn’t just a club.It was a transformational experience … Gay men, it must be said, tend to have hot female friends,” Brathwaite writes.“The first time I did mescaline was at the Garage.
Later my first time with MDMA was at the Garage,And since we’re talking about the 1970s and 80s, there was always some blow,”But reading Everybody’s Fly in 2026 is also bittersweet,The story of Brathwaite is also the story of New York, and of so many other cities before they became spaces to merely consume,Where subcultures existed physically rather than just online as aesthetics, and where the professionalisation of everything hadn’t yet happened (just ask Fab 5 Freddy, who got his break when he asked to be a cameraman on a TV show, despite having never done it before).
That New York was far from perfect, of course – it was in dire straits economically: “New York was broke,” as journalist Glenn O’Brien, who features in the book, put it,As many cities face economic struggles, perhaps there is a sense of comfort in Brathwaite’s story – that from the ashes something magnificent may grow,For Fab 5 Freddy, rap and punk were a symbol of “urban youth going against the grain, inventing their own culture, creating their own fun, responding to the world as it was” – “both so wrong, they were right”,In other words: everybody’s fly,Even if you can’t name a Ramones song.
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