by Susan Orlean
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 theater 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 4 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 emceeing. 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, firsthand, 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.”
Freddy’s next big synthesis was proposing that graffiti and break dancing and rapping were related forms of street art which, taken as a whole, defined the new aesthetic of black hip-hop culture. This might seem obvious now, but at the time the three were considered separate, transitory impulses at best and discrete forms of public nuisance at worst. Freddy, being Freddy, came up with the idea, and then followed it with this proposal: “Damn, put this all in a movie, it would be dope.” Charlie Ahearn, after being approached by Freddy, agreed that it would be very dope to make a movie about hip-hop. Freddy’s relationship with the resulting project, Wild Style, is a Freddy classic. As Ahearn now recalls it, Freddy initially planned to co-write the screenplay with him but didn’t have the patience to niggle over the fine points of screenwriting, and initially planned to co-direct it but didn’t have the patience to labor over the details of film direction. In the end, Freddy helped Chris Stein produce the soundtrack. He also wound up with a major role, even though acting happened to be one of the few job positions in the film he had not been interested in filling.
Ahearn is extremely complimentary when it comes to Freddy’s contributions. “First of all, he’s the best actor in the film,” he says. “He didn’t want to be in it. That was my idea. As far as the other stuff, Freddy didn’t have the focus at that particular time to write or direct, although he was very interested in doing both. His incredible talents lay more in his charisma, his ability to form relationships with a huge number of people, and to have this unique vision of street culture, and to have the desire to bring the ghetto scene downtown. In a way, he was the one who brought it all together.”
Wild Style is the story of a South Bronx graffiti artist who has to decide whether he should remain an anonymous outlaw vandal making street art for nothing or cash in and start selling his graffiti paintings to effete, upscale collectors. Freddy plays a fast-talking, cynical smoothy named Phade, who has no particular job but lots of important positions: He appears to be, at various times, a club manager, a concert promoter, a businessman, a tour guide, a master of ceremonies, a negotiator, and a general all-around operator. When word gets out that a reporter from a downtown newspaper is coming to the South Bronx to write about the graffiti artist and his friends—rappers and break-dancers—most of them are wary. Phade, on the other hand, positions himself to escort the reporter and act as her agent. He laughs at the notion that it would be better to keep hip-hop unexposed. “You serious?” Phade says at one point, sounding incredulous. “Hey, man, it’s about time we got some publicity for this goddam rap shit.”
FORTY-EIGHTH STREET between Sixth and Seventh Avenues is the professional musicians’ block in midtown Manhattan. It is a jammed, jumbled, slightly seedy street, which seems to generate its own constant buzz. The sidewalks are skinny and sooty. Flyers advertising band jobs and guitarists for hire flutter in the gutters. Hand trucks stacked with Bose speakers and Fender guitars line the sidewalks. The buildings are low and plain faced, and have unglamorous storefronts, with amplifiers, mixing boards, guitar strings, and computer consoles piled haphazardly in their windows. It is one place where the fraternity of musicianship prevails over the diffusions of musical genre. As our cab worked its way down the street, I noticed country-and-western guitarists and heavy metallists and soul singers side by side, window-shopping for equipment.
Today’s Yo! MTV Raps was going to be taped outside Sam Ash Music, one of the biggest stores on the block. Yo! is always shot on location. Recent episodes have been filmed under the Brooklyn Bridge, in the Roosevelt Island tram, on 125th Street, and in an airplane flying down to a rap convention in New Orleans. It was Freddy’s idea to place the show—that is, the segments consisting of him and his guests, which are interspersed with the videos—somewhere on the street rather than in a studio, to emphasize its immediacy. It is in keeping with Freddy’s nature that he enjoys having a crowd watch him work. And it’s in keeping with his ability to recognize someone anywhere he goes that on a shoot he often sees someone he knows—either a friend or a famous person. At the Yo! shoot on 125th Street, he ran into Afrika Bambaataa, a friend and a famous person. During a shoot on the Roosevelt Island tram, he spotted Grandpa Munster, a famous person but not a friend.
Yo! was the first MTV show to be entirely “remote,” and Freddy is irked that other shows on the channel are now imitating him by shooting their host segments outside a studio. “Man, I thought of this, I came up with this,” he says when he’s discussing his imitators. “I hate being copied, man—I made it on my own ideas in this business. I don’t got no uncles in the business, if you know what I mean. I’m not dissing it that hard, but my ideas are my business.”
Other things were on his mind when the cab was on its way to Sam Ash. “You know what movie’s really dope?” he asked Ted Demme, who was riding with us.
“Speak,” Ted said.
“La Femme Nikita,” Freddy said, chuckling. “I saw that shit twice, it made me so extra happy. I’ll go peep it again with you, dude, it’s so def.”
“Yo,” Ted said.
The conversation then turned to the Oscars. Freddy expre
ssed admiration for Joe Pesci, the GoodFellas star. “You know what I’m wondering, though?” he said, dropping his voice. “I’m wondering this. I was at that restaurant Columbus one night. You know that place, a lot of actors and a lot of hip people go there for burgers, that’s the flavor—it’s an acting hangout. And I’m there with Veronica, my old girlfriend, and Joe Pesci comes over to our table to say hello, and I’m telling you, for real, he had no hair. So I’m looking at the Oscars last night, and I see him with all that hair, and I’m thinking, Yo! My man! Joe Pesci! Is that a rug, or what?”
“That is too ill,” Ted exclaimed. “Joe Pesci is wearing a lid?”
“Yo, I swear,” Freddy answered. “I swear! I’m right there at Columbus, and there he is, at my table, in the sight of everyone, not a hair on his bald head.”
The two of them laughed wildly and then, after a moment, sat and mused. Then Ted abruptly said, “Yo, Freddy, you have a car, don’t you? So this weekend we could peep some locations uptown for the KRS video?”
Freddy shrugged. “I do have a car, but, seriously, I’m not too into running around in it,” he said. “It is a lovely vehicle, though—lovely, lovely, love-ly. A ’57 Chevy, turquoise. It’s the color of a Tiffany box.”
We were now in front of Sam Ash. So were Moses Edinborough, the show’s associate producer and its director; the camera crew; three members of a rap group called Stetsasonic; a scrawny guy with long, tattooed arms who was furiously loading boxes marked PEAVEY AMPLIFIERS into a panel truck; two adolescent boys with the avid, skittish air of truants; a man in dark glasses rotating a cassette tape over and over in one hand; and three Asian tourists, standing at attention. Freddy emerged from the cab and surveyed the gathering crowd with deliberate aloofness. His mood had turned distinctly Garboesque. This was a sea change from the Joey Bishop he had been doing in the cab on the way over and from his Sally Field turn at the morning meeting. We regrouped on the sidewalk. In front of us, Moses was pacing back and forth, wagging a finger at Daddy-O, Stetsasonic’s main rapper, and saying with mock seriousness, “Now, I don’t want you all to be bugging out here, got that?” Seeing Freddy, he interrupted himself, grinned, and said, “Yo, Fab.”