Fab 5 Freddy doesn’t just have a great story–he is the story. Name a seismic cultural shift, and chances are, he wasn’t just there–he was helping to make it happen. He’s among the first graffiti artists to turn subway tags into fine art, the visionary behind the first hip-hop movie, the bridge between Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown new wave 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 New York streets to mainstream culture. With a spirit of joyful creativity and a deep capacity for connecting with kindred spirits (Basquiat, Haring, Lee, Flash, Warhol, and the Clash, to name a few), he shattered racial and artistic boundaries, bridging worlds and raising underground movements to pop culture dominance. Vibrant, rhapsodic, and compulsively readable, Everybody’s Fly is at once an intimate memoir and panoramic cultural history. It 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.
