Fab 5 Freddy And The Accidental Musicians [WAAMN Chapter 4.1]
The hip-hop pioneer and pals like late legend Jean-Michel Basquiat show what visual artists can learn from musicians—and offer clues for the rest of us, too.
This is your weekly installment of my new book, We Are All Musicians Now. To make sure you don’t miss future serializations, subscribe here. Below you’ll find Chapter 4: The Accidental Musicians (Part 1). Enjoy!
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In 1981, the video for Blondie’s “Rapture” became the first to feature rap vocals on MTV. But the shoot almost went haywire—that is, until hip-hop trailblazer Fab 5 Freddy saved the day.
Legendary turntablist Grandmaster Flash had been scheduled to appear in the video spinning records, but didn’t show up to the shoot. Fab happened to be friends with one of the extras, an up-and-coming visual artist, and asked Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry and lead guitarist Chris Stein to have his pal serve as a last-minute replacement.
The extra’s name: Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“‘Let’s have him stand at the turntable and I’ll show him what the DJs do, just so he can look like he’s playing the part,’” Fab remembers explaining. “I told Jean, ‘Put your hand on the record and do like this to the rhythm.’ And Jean just looked at me, and when the cameras are rolling, he’s just standing there with a silly look on his face ... that’s the beginning of the rap when Debbie says, ‘Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly.’ So that becomes the first record where most people hear this idea of rapping.”
And that’s how two visual artists—Fab, who went on to create films from 1983’s Wild Style to 2019’s Grass Is Greener, and Basquiat, who proceeded to become one of the most celebrated painters in history—ended up accidentally using a musical blueprint to help take their careers to the next level.
Scores of successful individuals across a vast range of professions have followed a path similar to musicians—whether intentionally or not. That similarity is the subject of this next chapter of We Are All Musicians Now.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll hear the stories of folks ranging from magicians to skeleton racers. Each installment will offer a window into how another industry that seemingly has very little to do with music actually does.
And though plenty of these examples are unique and not so easily replicated, it’s my hope that—in addition to offering up some fascinating stories—this chapter will provide some lessons that readers can apply to their own careers.
Let’s take Fab as an example. He got his start as a graffiti artist famously plying his trade in the South Bronx, where he learned the importance of distribution. While many of his peers went about tagging stationary walls, Fab saved some of his best work for New York’s most mobile canvas: the subway.
“Basically, being Black in America, there’s not a lot that that’s gonna be handed to you via the traditional routes,” he says. “Art school [or] taking your slides around into galleries—getting them looked at, which was what you were taught you were supposed to do—wasn’t gonna work that well for us. So my motive was always to find another way in.”
That was the ethos of hip-hop more broadly, and it had to be—as Fab said, there was often no other way in. And so, in 1980, inspired by the pop art of Andy Warhol, Fab snuck into a rail yard in the dead of night and spray-painted an entire subway car with Campbell’s Soup can images, each with an unexpected flavor (like “Da-Da,” “Futurist,” and “Fred”). By the time the mobile installation rolled into midtown several hours later, Fab was already a celebrity.
Observers began to realize that a generation dismissed as miscreants happened to be studying pop art—and had delivered it to the masses in a deeply effective manner. Fab emerged as a key connector between the burgeoning hip-hop movement in the Bronx and the dynamic art scene downtown. And as Basquiat became a superstar, both grew close with Warhol himself (“Fred, you’re so famous!” the latter would say).
Fab had figured out a novel path into the art world, a better way of showing his work than any gallery. In a way, it was the graffiti equivalent of radio. Musicians had been accompanying commuters to work for decades, receiving no payment for their creative output on the airwaves aside from promotional value.
And just as Fab inadvertently followed a musical blueprint, he even became an actual musician—starting on the other side of the Atlantic.
“I got a chance to kind of make a record … it was only supposed to be released in France,” says Fab with a chuckle. “I’m like, I’m just trying to pay my rent. But when the record came back as an import, DJs got their hands on it and liked it. Next thing you know, the record was being played on the radio.”
Fab parlayed what could have been just “15 minutes of fame,” as Warhol would say, into a lifelong career ranging from his role as host of seminal hip-hop television show Yo! MTV Raps to his success as a filmmaker to this day. We’ll hear more from him at the end of the chapter.
But first, we’ve got a lot of accidental musicians to get through—including one on a quest for Olympic gold.
You just read Chapter 4: The Accidental Musicians (Part 1), a serialized segment of my new book, We Are All Musicians Now. Subscribe here, read my other books and follow me on Twitter and Instagram. For more, check out my recent appearance on the “Unstarving Musician” podcast, talking everything from superfans to NFTs to hip-hop to intellectual property.
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ALSO BY ZACK O’MALLEY GREENBURG
Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office
A-List Angels: How a Band of Actors, Artists & Athletes Hacked Silicon Valley
3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z & Hip-Hop’s Multibillion-Dollar Rise
Michael Jackson, Inc.: The Rise, Fall & Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire
Congrats on your kid's birth,thanks for sharing all the experiences.
Hello, the album called Face Value, as stated on the cover. Not Face Time!