{"id":761,"date":"2026-04-04T06:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/?p=761"},"modified":"2026-04-04T06:01:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T06:01:00","slug":"the-guide-237-fab-5-freddy-the-street-artist-at-the-heart-of-new-yorks-creative-apogee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/?p=761","title":{"rendered":"The Guide #237: Fab 5 Freddy, the street artist at the heart of New York’s creative apogee"},"content":{"rendered":"

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H<\/span>Hello everyone, I’m Coco Khan, covering Gwilym Mumford. As the sun began to peek out from behind the clouds this week, I counted five Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirts I saw passersby wearing on walks in the park.<\/p>\n

Sure, I may live in a trendy London borough, but that’s still no surprise considering the name and work of a New York artist with roots in graffiti has 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 of a drug overdose at the age of 27 and whose slogan was SAMO\u00a9 (Same Old Crap – a playful copyright symbol, a critique of consumerism and the commodification of art) would allow his name to appear on keychains, tote bags and clothing. But hey, what do I know? I’m just one of those purists who is still pissed that Ramones T-shirts are worn by millions of people who can’t even name the song, even though the Ramones themselves didn’t care.<\/p>\n

Still, it is hoped that such products will connect new audiences to the artist’s work and to graffiti as an art form. See also: Keith Haring, another street artist whose work graces T-shirts around the world.<\/p>\n

But if the shirts don’t make it, a new and frankly dizzying book will be published – the memoir of Fred Brathwaite, also known as Fab 5 Freddy, whose graffiti name is Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture.<\/p>\n

For Blondie fans experiencing the tingles of recognition, yes, this is the Fab 5 Freddy mentioned in the seminal hit “Rapture” (“Fab 5 Freddy said they were all flies,” Debbie Harry raps). And the book neatly traces his life, starting as a smart, brave kid from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and becoming the connective tissue between the emerging black art forms of hip-hop and graffiti and the predominantly white world. Downtown art world scene. Featuring Basquiat as well as Haring, Blondie, Andy Warhol and even the Clash, the book has been hailed as an “all-access pass” to New York’s creative explosion of the 1970s and ’80s.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>1986, Fab 5 Freddie with Jean-Michel Basquiat.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is a truly hilarious story, told with touching, eye-opening quality by Brathwaite as a young man discovering these new worlds for the first time. Thoughts on visiting the legendary punk venue CBGB: “The crowd was so blindingly white that I felt like a black secret agent on a mission. But I’ll never forget the first time I walked into the bathroom. There was graffiti everywhere… Yes, there’s a connection between the two here.” [\u2026] Punk and food culture. \u201d Or the time he met the godfather of dance music, Larry Levan, at the gay club Paradise Garage.[It] It wasn’t just a club. It was a transformative experience…I have to say that gay men tend to have sexy female friends. “The first time I used mescaline was in a garage. Then the first time I used MDMA was in a garage. And we’re talking about the 1970s and ’80s, so there was always some kind of hit.”<\/p>\n

However, reading “Everyone Will Fly in 2026” leaves me with a bittersweet feeling. Brathwaite’s story is also the story of many people in New York and beyond. <\/strong>A city before it became a space for mere consumption. A place where subcultures exist physically rather than just aesthetically online, and where the professionalization of everything hasn’t yet happened (just ask Fab 5 Freddy, who got his big break when he was asked to be a cameraman for a TV show, even though he’d never been a cameraman before). Of course, New York was far from perfect and was in dire economic straits. As journalist Glenn O’Brien, who appears in the book, says, “New York was bankrupt.”<\/p>\n

As many cities face economic hardship, perhaps there is reassurance in Brathwaite’s story that something great may grow from the ashes. For Fab 5 Freddie, rap and punk symbolized “urban youth going against the grain and inventing their own culture, creating their own fun, and responding to the world as it is” and that “they were both wrong and right.”<\/p>\n

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In other words, everyone flies. Even if you can’t name the Ramones song.<\/p>\n

To read the full version of this newsletter, subscribe to receive the guide in your inbox every Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

#Guide #Fab #Freddy #street #artist #heart #Yorks #creative #apogee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HHello everyone, I’m Coco Khan, covering Gwilym Mumford. As the sun began to peek out from behind the clouds this week, I counted five Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirts I saw passersby wearing on walks in the park. Sure, I may live in a trendy London borough, but that’s still no surprise considering the name and work … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[502,1],"tags":[1681,1678,1680,1676,1677,171,1461,1076,1679],"class_list":["post-761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-design","category-general","tag-apogee","tag-artist","tag-creative","tag-fab","tag-freddy","tag-guide","tag-heart","tag-street","tag-yorks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picsura.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}