Everybody's Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture

ISBN: 0593834909

Author: Fab 5 Freddy

Condition: New

Named a Must-Read Book by W Magazine, Time, and moreEverybodys Fly could comfortably sit alongside books by Richard Price, Lucy Sante, Tom Wolfe, or Ed McBain, chronicling New York from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s with both vivid, journalistic descriptions and the outsized flair from a person who was at the center of it all.-Rolling StoneAn exuberant recounting of how a culturally omnivorous kid from Brooklyn willed himself into the wider, shinier world-like Moss Harts Act One, but with beatboxing and cans of Krylon spray paint.-The New YorkerAn electrifying memoir from the pioneering cultural icon The New Yorker called the coolest person in New York, whose fearless creativity reshaped the worlds of art, music, and styleFab 5 Freddy doesnt just have a great story-he is the story. Name a seismic cultural shift, and chances are, he wasnt just there-he was helping to make it happen. Hes 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 Blondies number-one smash hit Rapture-Fab 5 Freddy told me everybodys 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.Everybodys Fly is a fast-moving, all-access pass to Freds extraordinary life-one that begins in a book- and jazz-filled Brooklyn home and takes us deep into New Yorks creative explosions from the 1970s into the 1990s. He didnt just shape culture, he synthesized it-from highbrow to street, the Bronx to the East Village, punk to rap, Warhol to Wild Style. Whether hes skipping school to wander New York Citys museums, painting subway cars that became moving masterpieces, or bringing hip-hop to downtown clubs for the first time, Freds genius has always been in seeing what others couldnt-until he made them see it too.Vibrant, rhapsodic, and compulsively readable, Everybodys 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.