The coolest person in New York at the moment is a man named Fred Brathwaite, who is known most of the time to most of his friends as Fab Five Freddy, Fab, Five, or just Freddy. Freddy has a lot of jobs. He has been, at one time or another, a graffiti artist, a rapper, an internationally exhibited painter, a video and TV-commercial director, a screenwriter, a film scorer, an actor, a lecturer, and a television personality. Currently, he is also known to millions of viewers as the host of MTV’s popular Saturday-night rap-music show, “Yo! MTV Raps.” Freddy also knows a lot of people. He counts among his friends the late Andy Warhol, a music promoter who goes by the name Great Adventure, the painter Julian Schnabel, and the afternoon manager of a McDonald’s on 125th Street in Harlem. Freddy’s tastes range all over the place. In the course of any given day, he might express enthusiasm for Italian postmodern painters, a new rap song by Public Enemy, the oxtail soup served at a dumpy little Haitian restaurant on Tenth Avenue, the actor who played Grandpa Munster on “The Munsters,” Malcolm X, high-end stereo components, medieval armor, dogs, women, and nicely designed long-haul trucks. Hanging around with Freddy is a multimedia experience.
Freddy has perfect grammar, but, in keeping with his non-standard tastes, he prefers to use a finely discriminated array of non-standard English expressions to characterize his regular outbreaks of good feeling. These include:
Fly—implies exceptional stylishness or unusually high achievement. How Freddy described the food at a dinner he attended with representatives of the Ebel watch company at Le Cirque.
Excellent—often refers to a successful business transaction. How Freddy said he felt when he found out he was being hired to play himself in an upcoming movie.
Dope—expresses all-purpose positiveness, especially about something intense or challenging. How Freddy rated a new album by the Jamaican singer Shabba Ranks.
Extra happy—refers to a big, expansive swell of feeling. How Freddy described his emotions upon hearing that his television show would be broadcast in the Soviet Union.
Yo!—the ultimate, all-purpose exclamation, which, depending on inflection, can imply marvellousness or wonderment. How Freddy begins a discussion of what it’s like for him to consider that at this fairly early point in his life he is already the host of a hip internationally televised music show, has a deal with Warner Brothers to direct two movies, travels freely among a dozen different worlds, knows famous people, and is famous himself.
People recognize Freddy on the street all the time these days, but you get the feeling that even if he weren’t televised weekly he would still not be the sort of person to go unnoticed. On camera he can look wiry, but in person he is over six feet tall and more than solidly built. He is thirty-one years old, looks about thirty, and will occasionally assign himself a few years less than that in the telling. He has prominent, round cheekbones, a bow-shaped, wily smile, and a small, nearly forgettable mustache. His hands are large and long-fingered and mobile. He is very adept at the classic B-boy gestures of rap—stiff thumbs, forefingers, and pinkies moved in deliberate, threatening sweeps, ending with arms crossed high, shoulders hunched, and head tilted sassily—but his real body language is more subtle. He walks canted forward, as if he were about to lean over and whisper. His voice is slightly nasal and usually amusing. I can describe neither his eyes nor his hair, because he always wears a hat and sunglasses—indoors and out, night and day. He favors felt fedoras and Jean-Paul Gaultier shades. The rest of his outfits have an equally arresting quality—he always looks camera-ready. One time I was with him, he was wearing a scarlet camp shirt with flap pockets, baggy black gabardine pants, red suède oxfords, and a taupe felt fedora. Another time, he was wearing a pumpkin-colored rayon shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, a string of large amber beads, baggy rust-colored pants, green suède oxfords with thick black soles, and a black silk trenchcoat. All in all, his style is pretty sui generis.
Summing up what he does for a living, Freddy said recently, “I’m the king of synthesis.” There is no such job listed with the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Freddy nonetheless synthesizes full time. An ideal Fab Five Freddy project involves several media and several individuals who represent the high and low ends of artistic endeavor or social standing and whose association would be discordant if they were not harmonized by Freddy. His favorite version of such projects at the moment is the cross-pollination of black street culture with highbrow art. Some months ago, describing a trip he took to Italy, he told me, “I wanted to walk by Fellini’s house, because I really admire his filmmaking. So I took a huge ghetto blaster, put in a Run-D.M.C. tape, and walked up and down Fellini’s street, right in front of his house, blasting rap music. I liked the idea of combining the two experiences.”
Freddy describing the rest of his stay in Italy: “Then I went to dinner at the home of the man who runs the Galleria la Medusa in Rome. We were getting together to talk about the graffiti scene, and all that. His house was filled with all these gorgeous Caravaggios and de Chiricos and Italian Futurist paintings. It was, like, yo.”
One morning this spring, I caught a cab and headed over to pick Freddy up at his apartment. Freddy lives in a modern high rise on the western edge of midtown Manhattan. Before that, he lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side. When he first achieved notoriety as a graffiti artist, he was living at home with his parents, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. His present apartment has sensational views in three directions, quite a few mirrors, a vacuum-sealed ambience, and, to my eye, a sort of Wall Street yuppie gleam, which makes it exactly not the place I would have expected Freddy to live in. As it happens, though, Freddy appreciates good views and slick buildings. He also has a lot of friends circulating in the neighborhood; one evening when he and I were coming back from a “Yo!” taping, we ran into a rapper named Queen Latifah and her manager, both friends of his, in the entranceway.
The things Freddy does and the pace at which he does them make him seem to be all over the place all the time. This is true of many people in New York—and, in particular, of the kinds of people who populate Freddy’s various businesses—but Freddy takes being on the move, like everything else he does, to its highest form of expression. A typical day for him might include shooting an episode of “Yo!” on location in the Bronx, then editing one of his music videos at a production facility in midtown, then shopping in SoHo, then meeting people for dinner at the Odeon, then visiting friends at midnight in Bed-Stuy. One afternoon this winter, Freddy called me from Los Angeles. I was actually expecting him to be calling from Japan, where he and rap have lately become hot commodities, both separately and as they are teamed up on “Yo!” Freddy is usually more than happy to travel wherever he has become a hot commodity, and a few weeks earlier he had decided he ought to visit Japan while he was still in vogue, but apparently the trip had fallen through, and instead he had gone to California. In Los Angeles, he was staying at the Mondrian Hotel, a glossy place on Sunset Boulevard whose owners also happen to consider him a hot commodity: several years ago, they let him live in the hotel for three months in exchange for some of his paintings. Toward the end of the conversation, I asked Freddy what he’d be doing for the next few days. He rattled off a list that included movie, television, advertising, and music projects that would entail travelling to three nations on three continents. When I said that he’d be hard to find, he said, “Oh, not really. I don’t know how to drive, so the whole time I’m in L.A. I’ll kind of be stuck in my hotel room.”
This particular morning in New York, Freddy was first going to a meeting about an upcoming music-video project, then shooting the episode of “Yo! MTV Raps” that would run the following Saturday night, then working on his Warner screenplay, and then having a meeting about another music video he might be directing. I was late, but Freddy didn’t seem to notice: when my cab pulled up, he was sitting in the lobby, absorbed in a magazine about expensive stereo equipment. The lobby was busy with people in smart business suits. Freddy was wearing a silky shirt with a pattern of brightly colored fruits and vegetables, zoot-suit-style brown twill pants, tan socks, his green suède oxfords, a satin baseball jacket with the slogan “45 King” on the back, a small leather map of Africa hanging from a rawhide thong around his neck, a newsboy cap of Irish tweed, and steel-rimmed Gaultier shades with little round lenses. He looked stylish. He appeared to be in a good mood. Upon seeing me, he hollered “Yo!” and then laughed—a loud, articulated laugh that sounds like the air brakes on an eighteen-wheeler seizing. On our way out, he accosted his doorman, his concierge, and various people entering the building by cocking his head and calling out “Yo! My man!”
“How’s it going, Freddy?” his doorman asked.
“Living large, man,” Freddy answered, sauntering through the doorway. “Living very large.”
As we crossed the courtyard, Freddy stopped to greet a neighbor who was walking twin black pugs. “Great dogs,” he said, leaning over to pet them. “I love that—matched dogs.”
“Brother and sister,” the neighbor said. “They’re not exactly matched.”
“I love the way they look,” Freddy went on, disregarding the correction. “That’s so dope! I should get a dog. It would look fly to walk down the street with twin dogs.”
The morning’s first meeting was being held at the SoHo offices of the film director Jonathan Demme. Ted Demme, the executive producer of “Yo! MTV Raps,” is Jonathan’s nephew, and Jonathan himself is a music enthusiast, who occasionally directs videos for rap groups. This particular meeting had been called by the rapper KRS-One, who recently founded an education project called Human Education Against Lies and was proposing to make a collaborative rap record and video to raise money for it. A group of rappers—L.L. Cool J, Kid Capri, Freddie Foxx, Big Daddy Kane, M.C. Lyte, Queen Latifah, Run-D.M.C., and Ms. Melodie—had already been drafted to rap on the record. The two Demmes, Freddy, and a young director named Pam Jenkins had been invited to direct sections of the video.
Freddy, stretching out in the cab, was smiling to himself. “I’m thinking, Yo, this is pretty cool,” he said. “Here it is, right after Oscars night, and here I am going to a meeting to direct something with Jonathan Demme. That’s some cool fucking shit! Jonathan Demme, you know—director of ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ and everything.” He drummed his fingers on the seat. The cabdriver turned his radio up. A toxic smell from New Jersey wafted in one window, mixed with the air freshener on the dashboard, and blew out the other side. It was a bright morning with a wind that came in startling chilly puffs. No rain was imminent. Somewhere across town, a “Yo! MTV Raps” production assistant was noting with relief that the day’s taping could take place outside, as planned. “It’s funny, me and Jonathan were No. 1 and No. 2 for a while,” Freddy went on. “What I mean is that Jonathan’s film ‘Lambs’ is out now, and so is the movie I’d been working on as associate producer, ‘New Jack City,’ and we were No. 1 and No. 2 box-office in Variety for weeks. We’d still be No. 1 and No. 2, except that the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is out and it bumped us. I’m not dissing it, but it does hurt to be bumped by turtles.”
Demme’s office is a narrow, cluttered loft on the eighth floor of a building on lower Broadway. It is filled with mismatched chairs and desks, and has the economical look of a student-newspaper office, except that hanging on the walls are a huge “Silence of the Lambs” poster and a photograph of a theatre marquee announcing a double feature of that film and another Demme production, “Miami Blues.” When we arrived, the meeting was already in progress. The Demmes, KRS-One and his associates, and various technical advisers had pulled their chairs into a circle in the middle of the loft and were discussing the logistical challenges of shooting a video in Harlem with four directors, countless interested onlookers, and a three-thousand-dollar-a-day Steadicam. The conversation stopped when we walked in.
“Fab,” Ted Demme said, in greeting.
“Yo,” Freddy said.
“Fred,” KRS-One said.
“Yo, man,” Freddy said. Freddy and KRS have some history. The first video Freddy ever directed was “My Philosophy,” a hit for KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions in 1988. When Freddy introduces the video on “Yo! MTV Raps,” he invariably says, with no trace of bashfulness, “Yo, now here’s a great video, one of my favorites.” When Freddy refers to KRS in conversation, he quite often identifies him as “the heart and soul and conscience and brains and philosophy of rap” and sometimes adds that he is “my main man.”
“We’ll catch you up,” Ted said. “KRS was just talking about his project to advance human consciousness.”
“Excellent,” Freddy said. He nodded to KRS and sat down, reached for a pen, and nodded genially at the others in the room.
Everyone turned back to the business at hand. I had never previously seen Freddy in any situation where he wasn’t the principal object of attention. In this circle, he seemed uncharacteristically unanimated. KRS, a bulky, soft-faced man with a rolling bass voice and a soothing, professorial manner, did most of the talking, describing a plan to distribute four million copies of a book he had written challenging the basic assumptions of Western education. “I’m going to drop the book onto the school system,” KRS said. “Our goal is to get people thinking. For instance, we put out the statement ‘Aristotle was a thief.’ The first reaction will be ‘What are you talking about?’ The next is that it will start people thinking.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking,” Ted Demme responded. “I’m thinking that when kids hear that there are ten major rappers in the neighborhood they’re going to go crazy.”
A discussion of laminated security passes followed. It was close to noon. Jonathan Demme stood up, excused himself to go to another meeting, and headed for the door. Then Ted Demme stood up, thanked everyone, and said that he and Freddy had to leave for the “Yo!” taping, and that he was available to meet again as the plans proceeded. He then shot Freddy an urgent look.
Freddy stood up and strolled over to the “Silence of the Lambs” poster and paused in front of it. The large face of Jodie Foster framed the back of Freddy’s head. “Yo,” he said to me after a moment. “Doing something with Jonathan is excellent. I’m extra happy I got asked to do this video.”
Many things make Freddy extra happy. Working with someone well established and successful, like Jonathan Demme, is one of his extra-happiest experiences. He is unabashed about it. In fact, he aspires to it. He started his movie career, in 1980, by telephoning Charlie Ahearn, whose movie “The Deadly Art of Survival” was then being celebrated on the underground-film circuit, and asking Ahearn to include him in whatever he was doing next. When he got interested in painting, he cultivated friendships with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. When he did graffiti, he did it alongside the graffiti star Lee Quinones. He scored a movie, when movie scoring caught his attention, with Chris Stein, of the band Blondie. People like Freddy; almost everyone he has sought to attach himself to has said yes. The trade-off is that Freddy has a gift for getting himself and his undertakings, and therefore his collaborators, noticed. He manages, seemingly without effort, to create an aura of noteworthiness. His philosophy of career advancement is not a matter of being a successful hanger-on. It’s a philosophy that appreciates mastery and technical proficiency but prizes the knack for courting accomplished, proficient people, the knack for noticing which direction popular culture is heading, the knack for grafting one art form or pop form onto another, the knack for attracting a lot of attention to whatever you do, and the knack for understanding that attracting attention is, ultimately, the real art form of this era. Freddy has all these knacks. There are times when I am of the opinion that Fab Five Freddy is the hip-hop Andy Warhol. And, in fact, Freddy’s extra-happiest professional association was with Warhol, whom he refers to as his hero.
This is the path from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Andy Warhol: “My mother is a nurse, and my dad is an accountant. There was always a very heavy music thing in our house. Max Roach is my godfather, and Max and my dad are like brothers. They were beboppers together—black intellectuals. My dad lived in Brooklyn, and he had a posse of musicians like Bud Powell, Cecil Payne, Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown. They’d hang at his house—everybody called it the Chess Club. My dad’s not a musician, but he’d always hang with all these dudes. Bed-Stuy is cool—it’s anchored by all these churches in the community. My parents just got cable about a month ago. Before that, I’d send them tapes of ‘Yo!’ so they could see it. I grew up about three blocks from where Spike made ‘Do the Right Thing.’ I kind of slipped out of high school and finished up in this program called City as School, which is for people who are smart but don’t want to listen to other people. I was going to Medgar Evers College and I got the idea to be a painter. I’d been tagging my name up, doing graffiti, when I was an adolescent, so that I could start getting known, to popularize myself in the city. That was when all these dudes would tag up their names. My tags were Bull 99 and Showdown 177 and Fred Fab Five. I’d play hooky a lot and go to the Met to look at armor, look at paintings, look at jewelry, and I would think, Yo, I want to do this. I didn’t want to be a folk artist, I wanted to be a fine artist. I wanted to be a famous artist. Somewhere in there, I started reading about Pop art. I was reading a lot of books about art—and some of them were really hard to read and boring and didn’t say anything to me, and others sounded cool, and they were about Pop art. I started reading Interview and making my plans. I knew you had to have some kind of plan to move into the media.”
Freddy’s plans to be a famous artist coincided with the Pop-art movement’s championing of enlightened amateurism in every field. It was then the mid-seventies. By Pop standards, anyone was eligible to make art. Anyone could have a punk band. Anyone could silk-screen Campbell’s-soup cans. Anything anyone declared to be sculpture was sculpture. Anyone could have his own cable-television show and invite his friends to appear on it and just act like themselves, and the show would be conceptually complete. This did indeed happen. Glenn O’Brien, a writer and Warhol acolyte, produced a television show on Manhattan’s public-access channel which was called “Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party”; it entailed nothing much more than his inviting his friends to hold a cocktail hour on the air. His friends—among them Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, David Byrne, and Arto Lindsay—were members of the social set that Freddy usually describes as “groovy downtown hipsters.” Freddy, who was a fan of Glenn’s column in Interview, arranged to have Glenn as a guest on a college radio show he was m.c.’ ing. Not long afterward, Freddy was seized with the desire to become a cameraman for “Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.” For two years, he was a cameraman for the show, and also, soon after starting, one of its on-camera personnel, and also, in time, a regular member of the groovy downtown hipsters and a Warhol devotee. He saw, first hand, the power of being a smart spectator and a collector, and the satisfaction of making yourself and your tastes well known. “Andy was the biggest influence on me,” Freddy now says. “I hung around with him as much as I could. For me and Jean-Michel, coming from where we were coming from, being young black males in this happening downtown scene, we were just operating on another planet, and Andy was it.”
Uptown, and in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the notion of populist street art was nothing new, but the forms it was taking—rapping, break dancing, and graffiti painting—were. Freddy would often ride the subway to the city parks in the South Bronx where rappers and break dancers set up and performed. He was, he says now, just a fan, but a fan with interesting connections. “I was, like, this person who understood the fine-art thing,” Freddy says. “I was hip enough to hang downtown at places like Danceteria with all these art people, gallery owners, all the groovy people, but I had the pure hip-hop roots as well. So this was my synthesis. I was credited with bringing rap downtown. I went onstage and rapped at the Mudd Club, which was a new-wave hangout. I knew I wasn’t much of a rapper, but I wanted to fuse the two worlds, and I figured the audience downtown wouldn’t know the difference if I was or wasn’t much of a rapper. I knew whatever I did down there would look interesting. I wanted people to see this whole hip-hop street-culture thing bubbling up under their noses.”
