Fred Brathwaite — known everywhere as Fab Five Freddy — grew up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, in a household steeped in books and jazz. He came of age in a New York City hollowed out by poverty and arson, where teenagers in the Bronx were responding to their surroundings by making music and marking the walls around them. Brathwaite became one of the first graffiti artists to move from the subway system into downtown galleries, showing alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Futura at a moment when those worlds had never overlapped.
His new memoir, “Everybody’s Fly,” published March 10, traces that journey and the decades that followed, from scoring the feature film “Wild Style” and hosting Yo! MTV Raps to making documentary films and building a cannabis brand rooted in criminal justice advocacy.
In a conversation with WABE, Brathwaite reflected on what it meant to go back.
“I never expected hip hop and all this stuff that I had a hand in to become as big as it did. It’s blown my mind,” Brathwaite said. “So I very humbly … said, let me just lay back and put [the story down], so I can share my origins, my beginnings.”
From the Bronx to MTV — and the culture in between
Brathwaite was a connector before that word meant anything in media. He moved between the downtown punk and new wave scene and the emerging hip-hop world at a time when those communities had little contact. His friendship with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein contributed to “Rapture,” the 1981 song that gave rap its first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and introduced the genre to mainstream radio. “Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly” is the opening line.
That bridge-building instinct carried into his tenure at Yo! MTV Raps, which launched in 1988 and became the channel’s highest-rated show. Brathwaite told WABE the reach of that audience surprised even him.
“When people hear the real deal, and they feel the realness, they wanna be a part of it… this is when radio wasn’t really playing rap practically anywhere in the country,” he said. “But when those kids saw it and felt it, it was surprising to me too, that they jumped all over it and ran to the record store to buy this music.”
He also came to Atlanta during that period, to cover Freaknik and to put cameras on OutKast and the Dungeon Family for Yo! MTV Raps. People still tell him, Brathwaite said, how much those moments mattered to the local scene.
“It really signified Atlanta is here, baby,” he explained. “’It’s time to take a listen.’”
One thing leads to the next
The memoir also covers Brathwaite’s 2019 Netflix documentary “Grass Is Greener,” which examines the history of cannabis laws and their uneven enforcement across racial lines. The film led him to Bernard Noble, a Louisiana man who had served 13 years in prison for possessing cannabis. Brathwaite filmed Noble walking out of prison, then built a cannabis brand, Be Noble, in his name, donating proceeds to criminal justice organizations. Noble is a co-owner of the business.
A literary model from the same downtown world
When asked which memoirs shaped his approach, Brathwaite pointed to Patti Smith’s “Just Kids,” her account of her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their years in the same downtown New York scene Brathwaite was moving through. “That book was somewhat of an inspiration,” he said, “but I knew I was going to do my thing … in my way.”
“Everybody’s Fly” includes 16 pages of photographs sourced from the archives of photographers such as David LaChapelle and Nan Goldin, many never previously published, featuring Brathwaite alongside Basquiat, Haring, and others from that era.
The audiobook, also released March 10, features Brathwaite’s own narration along with interviews recorded between chapters with figures including Grandmaster Flash, artist Lee Quiñones, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie. It also includes a licensed recording of “Rapture.”
If you go
Fab Five Freddy appears in conversation with Christopher Daniel at the Tara Theatre, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road NE, Atlanta, on Thursday, March 12 at 7 p.m. The event is presented by A Cappella Books and includes a screening of “Wild Style.” Tickets are available at taraatlanta.com.
