Fab 5 Freddy’s memoir ‘Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture,’ written with Mark Rozzo, is out March 10 via Penguin Random House. It is the story of one of the most genuinely consequential creative figures of the last half century, told by the man himself. The New Yorker called him “the coolest person in New York.” The resume backs it up completely.
Fred Brathwaite was among the first graffiti artists to move subway tags into fine art galleries. He was the visionary behind Wild Style, the first hip-hop film. He was the bridge between Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown new wave scene. He was the first person to take rap global on MTV as the original host of Yo! MTV Raps. And he is literally in the opening lines of Blondie’s Number 1 hit “Rapture,” the song that carried hip-hop from New York streets into mainstream culture worldwide.
‘Everybody’s Fly’ moves from a book-and-jazz-filled Brooklyn childhood through the creative explosions of New York in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. His circle included Basquiat, Keith Haring, Grandmaster Flash, Andy Warhol, and The Clash. He directed music videos for Snoop Dogg, Nas, and Queen Latifah. He painted subway cars that became moving masterpieces and brought hip-hop into downtown clubs for the first time. At every inflection point in the culture, Brathwaite was not just present, he was pushing.
This is a memoir that doubles as a panoramic cultural history of one of the most creatively fertile periods in American urban life. Fast-moving, deeply personal, and compulsively readable, ‘Everybody’s Fly’ is essential reading for anyone serious about understanding where hip-hop, street art, and downtown New York culture came from and how they took over the world.