An electrifying memoir from a pioneering cultural icon whose fearless creativity reshaped the worlds of art, music, and style
Fab 5 Freddy doesn't just have a great story-he is the story. Name a seismic cultural shift of the last five decades, and chances are, he wasn't just there-he was making it happen. He's the graffiti artist who turned subway tags into fine art, the visionary behind the first hip-hop movie, the bridge between Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown punk scene, the first person to take rap global on MTV, and the opening rhyme of Blondie's number one smash hit "Rapture"-"Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly"-the song that propelled hip-hop from the Bronx to popular culture for the first time. With a spirit of joyful creativity, he shattered racial and artistic boundaries, bridging worlds and bringing underground movements to the mainstream.
Everybody's Fly is a fast-moving, all-access pass to Fab's extraordinary life-one that begins in a book- and jazz-filled Brooklyn home and takes us deep into New York's creative explosions from the 1970s to the 1990s. He didn't just shape culture, he synthesized it-from highbrow to street, Harlem to SoHo, punk to rap, Warhol to Wild Style. Whether he's skipping school to wander MoMA, painting subway cars that became moving masterpieces, or bringing hip-hop to downtown clubs for the first time, Freddy's genius has always been in seeing what others couldn't-until he made them see it too.
Vibrant, rhapsodic, and compulsively readable, Everybody's Fly is a love letter to the art of seeing, a fascinating account of an inimitable creative life, and a celebration of what it means to shape culture. Fred Brathwaite, also known as Fab 5 Freddy, is a pioneering graffiti artist who became one of the first to exhibit his paintings internationally. He co-produced, starred in, and composed the music for the cult classic film Wild Style, directed music videos for numerous hip-hop stars, including Snoop Dogg, Nas, and Queen Latifah, and was the original host of Yo! MTV Raps. Brathwaite lives in Harlem, where he continues to make visual art and produce and direct projects for film and television.
Mark Rozzo is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles.
