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

Named a Must-Read Book by W Magazine, Time, and more

“Everybody’s 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 Stone

“An exuberant recounting of how a culturally omnivorous kid from Brooklyn willed himself into the wider, shinier world—like Moss Hart’s Act One, but with beatboxing and cans of Krylon spray paint.”
—The New Yorker

An 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 style

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.

Everybody’s Fly is a fast-moving, all-access pass to Fred’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 into the 1990s. He didn’t just shape culture, he synthesized it—from highbrow to street, the Bronx to the East Village, punk to rap, Warhol to Wild Style. Whether he’s skipping school to wander New York City’s museums, painting subway cars that became moving masterpieces, or bringing hip-hop to downtown clubs for the first time, Fred’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 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.

Fred Brathwaite, also known as Fab 5 Freddy, is a pioneering graffiti artist who became one of the first to exhibit his paintings internationally, helping to ignite the street-art movement. He coproduced, 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, produces and directs projects for film and television, and leads the social equity cannabis brand he cofounded, B Noble.

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. He lives in New York City and teaches nonfiction writing at Columbia University.