{"id":381309,"date":"2026-04-04T07:58:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T07:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/381309\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T07:58:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T07:58:07","slug":"the-guide-237-fab-5-freddy-the-street-artist-at-the-heart-of-new-yorks-creative-zenith-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/381309\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guide #237: Fab 5 Freddy, the street artist at the heart of New York\u2019s creative zenith | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello everyone, I\u2019m 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<\/a> T-shirts on passersby during a park walk.<\/p>\n

Sure, I may live in a trendy London borough \u2013 but it\u2019s still hardly surprising, given that the name and works of the New York<\/a> artist whose roots were in graffiti have been licensed to fashion brands from Next, Primark and Uniqlo to Supreme and Saint Laurent. It\u2019s hard to imagine that the artist \u2013 who died at 27 of a drug overdose, and whose signature slogan SAMO\u00a9 (Same Old Crap \u2013 a criticism of consumerism, and the commodification of art, with a playful copyright mark) \u2013 would approve of the Basquiat name being on keyrings, tote bags and clothing. But hey, what do I know \u2013 I\u2019m just another purist bore still upset that Ramones T-shirts are worn by millions who couldn\u2019t name a song, when the Ramones themselves did not care.<\/p>\n

Still, the hope is that such merchandise connects new audiences to the artist\u2019s work and graffiti as an art form. See also: Keith Haring, another street artist whose work adorns T-shirts across the land.<\/p>\n

But if the shirts don\u2019t do it, then a new, frankly dizzying, book will \u2013 the memoir of Fred Brathwaite, AKA Fab 5 Freddy, his graffiti name: Everybody\u2019s Fly: A Life of Art<\/a>, Music, and Changing the Culture.<\/p>\n

For the Blondie fans experiencing a twinge of recognition, yes, this is the Fab 5 Freddy referenced in the seminal hit Rapture (\u201cFab 5 Freddy told me everybody\u2019s fly,\u201d raps Debbie Harry), and the book neatly follows his life, starting as a smart, plucky kid from Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn<\/a>, 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 \u201call-access pass\u201d to the creative explosion of New York in the 1970s and 80s.<\/p>\n

Fab 5 Freddy with Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1986.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cI felt like a Black secret agent on a mission, since the crowd was blindingly white. But I\u2019ll never forget the first time I went into the bathroom: graffiti was everywhere \u2026 Yes there is a connection here between [\u2026] punk, and hood culture.\u201d Or on seeing the godfather of dance music, Larry Levan, at the gay club Paradise Garage: \u201c[It] wasn\u2019t just a club. It was a transformational experience \u2026 Gay men, it must be said, tend to have hot female friends,\u201d Brathwaite writes. \u201cThe first time I did mescaline was at the Garage. Later my first time with MDMA was at the Garage. And since we\u2019re talking about the 1970s and 80s, there was always some blow.\u201d<\/p>\n

But reading Everybody\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u2013 it was in dire straits economically: \u201cNew York was broke,\u201d as journalist Glenn O\u2019Brien, who features in the book, put it.<\/p>\n

As many cities face economic struggles, perhaps there is a sense of comfort in Brathwaite\u2019s story \u2013 that from the ashes something magnificent may grow. For Fab 5 Freddy, rap and punk were a symbol of \u201curban youth going against the grain, inventing their own culture, creating their own fun, responding to the world as it was\u201d \u2013 \u201cboth so wrong, they were right\u201d.<\/p>\n

In other words: everybody\u2019s fly. Even if you can\u2019t name a Ramones song.<\/p>\n

To read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe<\/a> to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello everyone, I\u2019m Coco Khan, covering for Gwilym Mumford, and this week, as the sun started to peep…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-381309","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}