by Susan Orlean
“What’s the flavor, Moses?” Freddy said in greeting.
“We’re missing half of Stetsasonic, but we’re going to start anyway,” Moses said. “It’s going to be totally def.”
Show No. 117A of Yo! MTV Raps would eventually consist, like Show No. 1, of an opening (a frantic video montage of rap artists and graphics) and five one-and-a-half-to-two-minute segments of Freddy interviewing his guests (a rapper or a rap group, usually enjoying a current hit), dropped between ten rap videos, which Ted Demme and his staff had selected. The formula has worked well for three years. It is one of MTV’s highest-rated blocks of programming. Its viewers span a broad range of age and race. It has spawned a spin-off (a daily late-afternoon studio version, with a former rapper named Ed Lover and the former Beastie Boys DJ Doctor Dré as hosts). So dominant is its position in the rap world these days that its choices of videos and guests prefigure and, in fact, preordain rap hits.
The genesis of the show is uncomplicated: Ted Demme, who grew up on Long Island admiring black street music, and who apprenticed his way through the entry levels at MTV, persuaded the company in 1988 to let him produce a rap video special, with Run-D.M.C. as host. Two facts conspired to make this a logical enterprise: MTV had had great success playing Run-D.M.C.’s “Walk This Way,” the first real rap record to be popular with a mainstream white audience, and had recently introduced, also successfully, its first programs offering something other than wall-to-wall videos—a game show and a dance show. A third fact, though, was less encouraging. At that time, despite Run-D.M.C.’s breakthrough, rap was still seen as marginal music: ghetto noise that was little more than monotonal chanting in rhyme—sometimes lewd, sometimes militant—to rhythm tracks, usually lifted without ceremony or license from another record. That rap had been around for quite a few years without moving much beyond its small, young black male audience was equally unencouraging. (The one exception was the white rock band Blondie’s 1981 hit “Rapture,” a novelty rap that happened to include a reference to Fab Five Freddy.) Nonetheless, MTV’s programming department let Demme produce the special, on the strength of Run-D.M.C.’s popularity, and sat up in surprise when it drew a huge audience. In short order, a weekly show was planned. Searching for a host, Demme asked for a recommendation from Peter Dougherty, who is now the director of on-air promotion for MTV Europe but was then a producer with the network. “All the time we were putting the show together, I was imagining Freddy as the host,” Dougherty says. The two had met ten years earlier at one of the many groovy-downtown-hipster functions that both frequented—something at the Fun Gallery, or maybe the Roxy, or maybe a party for Keith Haring or Futura 2000 or Warhol. In any case, Freddy had impressed Dougherty as being a legitimate Renaissance character and also a bit of a ham. “There used to be these guys fifty years ago or so who knew everyone, did everything, could move around the city with ease. They’d even meet dignitaries at the airport,” Dougherty says. “They called themselves Ambassadors of New York. That’s what Freddy’s like. I mean that in a very positive way.” No one else was even auditioned for the job.
WEST FORTY-EIGHTH STREET, in a gathering crowd. “Welcome to Yo! MTV Raps, the coolest hour on television,” Freddy announced when the camera started running. “Getting ready to hip-hop you right out of your living-room seat right about now.” After this introductory segment, Freddy turned to his guests. “I’m here with the bad Stetsasonic. My man Daddy-O, what’s up?”
“What up, what up, what up, what up! How you been, man?” Daddy-O said.
“What’s been going on with Stetsasonic?” Freddy pointed the microphone at Daddy-O.
They bantered about the band’s new album, about Stetsasonic’s upcoming trip to Africa (“That’s real inspirational,” Freddy commented. “Going back to the motherland”), about the video that would be played next. They spent a few minutes discussing the burgeoning bootleg-tape trade. Each week, Freddy likes to touch on a serious subject, and bootlegging has been one of his favorites. Otherwise, the interviews are friendly volleys, a little posturing, a lot of promotion, some gossip. Freddy takes care of business, too. During the Stetsasonic taping, he dropped mentions of having attended Nelson Mandela’s first American appearance, of having worked on New Jack City, and of having directed Stetsasonic’s first video, which he assessed thus: “Yo, it’s cool.”
The three members of the group—the missing Stets never appeared—bounced around in front of the camera and delivered sharp answers to Freddy’s wide outside pitches. Nearly every segment was shot in one try. Word is that the early shows were rather raw, Freddy being hyper and jivey, a catalog of distracting mannerisms. These days, he is mostly unselfconscious and funny, displaying good-natured bravado and manicured cool. These days, too, most of his guests are one-take, media-savvy, well traveled, and fine-tuned. Rap has come a long way. It is still a musical genre that requires little in the way of initial capitalization and has an unrefined immediacy that suggests songs written between subway stops, but now it is also a big, profitable, important business. The best-selling album of 1990 (over 10 million copies) was M. C. Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em; one of the top four best-selling singles was the white rapper Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”; and a recent survey showed that 24 percent of all active music consumers in this country had bought a rap recording in the last six months. More significant is that over half of those customers were white. Most significant, by pop-culture standards, is that this year the soap opera One Life to Live added a rap group to its cast of regulars.
Still, Freddy’s social skills are often called upon in the show. One afternoon, I accompanied Freddy to a Yo! taping in Washington Square Park. His guest was a young rapper called Special Ed, who had an Eraserhead-style fade hairdo, a hit record, and a dreamy, distracted aura that warned of dead air. Freddy was in a particularly chipper mood that day. The interview went something like this:
FREDDY: So, Special Ed, I want to ask you, you’ve been able to get your message across to a particular audience—that is, the teenage females. What do you think it is about you or your music that’s getting through to them?
SPECIAL ED: I don’t know.
FREDDY: Any idea of what it is about what you’re doing that’s hitting that particular demographic?
SPECIAL ED: Nope. (A pause, during which Freddy laughs loudly.)
FREDDY: Yo, Ed, what’s the best thing about MTV?
SPECIAL ED: I don’t know. I don’t have cable.
Stetsasonic is of a different order. At the Sam Ash taping, the comments of the three who were present tumbled on top of one another; at one point, they burst into a spontaneous wild rap. They were articulate and funny, and they never stopped talking. During one of the breaks, they and the camera crew gathered in the back of the Sam Ash store.
“I was just thinking about this dope kung-fu movie,” Daddy-O was saying. “It was about this baby who has swords for fists—it was called something like The Avenging Fists.”
D.B.C., the group’s keyboardist, said, “Uh-uh, that’s the one when the baby’s got the superpowerful fists. The sword one, that was so ill—it had a different name.”
“It was ill! He was in his baby carriage, and it’s whip, whip, whip with those swords!”
Freddy, standing nearby, was ignoring the discussion. He said to Moses Edinborough, “You signed on to direct a video? That’s excellent. What kind of bread they paying you?”
“Very nice bread,” Moses said.
“Do you have a financial adviser?” Freddy asked. The kung-fu conversation continued noisily behind him. “Because, man, you start getting nice bread, you ought to have someone doing something dope with it.”
“I’m planning on it, man.”
From behind: “I think it was The Fists of the Avenger, maybe.”
“No, man, that was the other one, not the baby but the little boy who was so bad, he was so powerful, he could chop through the door of a safe.”
The man who had been standing on
the sidewalk fingering a cassette walked into the store and headed toward Freddy, saying, “Man, I know what you’re doing, I like what you’re doing. I want you to listen to this tape.”
“Chill, brother,” Freddy said to him, and he turned back to Moses. “Financial planning. Yo, I recommend it.”
WALKING THROUGH TIMES SQUARE on our way back to Freddy’s apartment, we were greeted by all sorts of people: teenagers, who whistled and preened to cover up their admiration; a security guard, who looked way too old to be a Yo! audience member; a young, buxom, underdressed woman, walking with her uncle or so; more kids. Freddy responded to each of them with a wave or a “Yo!” or a genuine-sounding “How’s it going, man?” He was smiling, a little preoccupied, as he walked along. The taping had gone well. It would be a good show. It would make up for last week, when a boxing match on another channel in the Yo! time slot—Saturday night from ten to eleven—administered a nasty uppercut to his ratings. Freddy keeps track of the ratings, of the demographics, of the competition, of the number of people who recognize him on the street. Crossing Broadway, he noticed a gigantic Kodak billboard featuring a gigantic likeness of Bill Cosby. The Cos beamed down on the thicket of traffic and jostling crowds. “See that?” Freddy said. “He couldn’t walk through here. He’s too big. He can’t live his life. What I have now, as far as fame, is excellent. I’m known, but I’m not too known. I can still walk around, I can still eat dinner out. It’s not too much. Not yet.” Another clump of kids, passing, called out to him. He answered them, and added, “I like having some of this, being able to flex my muscles, but it can be painful. Fame can be painful sometimes.”
It was four-thirty when we arrived at Freddy’s building. As we passed through the lobby, one of the porters, a heavyset man with a grizzled beard, stopped us and told Freddy he had something for him. He led us back to the mailroom and, after some negotiations with a pile of crates, shoved a huge, sagging cardboard box marked MTV in Freddy’s direction.
Getting the box upstairs took some doing. Once inside his apartment, Freddy put on a Frank Sinatra compact disc and started digging through the contents of the box. It was full of mail addressed to him in care of the show. We were seated at an antique secretary in his living room. The living room also contained a large-screen television; a black leather couch; a low, wide, biomorphic coffee table; some amusing kitsch collectibles; a photograph of Freddy mugging with Andy Warhol; a photograph of Freddy on the set of New Jack City; an issue of Paper with a photograph of Freddy and his former girlfriend, the model Veronica Webb, on the cover; an issue of Details folded open to a full-page photograph of Freddy; and several telephones. Hanging across from the secretary was a large, lively painting of a martini glass and a goblet. The style was late-seventies graffiti. The artist was Fab Five Freddy. It is one of many paintings he turned out, with alacrity, during his painting phase. “I focused on painting for a while,” he says now. “That’s when Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and I were really tight. I was painting a lot, but when I saw Jean-Michel’s career really take off and explode I started wondering when it was going to happen for me.” It did happen, sort of. In 1979, he and Lee Quinones had a show at the Galleria la Medusa, in Rome, and in 1985, after including him in several group shows, Holly Solomon gave him a one-man show at her gallery. He had his moment, but he never really threatened to explode. Anyway, by that time he was getting bored with painting. “I got to a point where I was good, but I got tired of the art world,” he says. “I was also tired of not being able to reach a wide audience. I wanted to see things I’d thought of filtering out into the whole culture.” He says he will paint again, but the painting will be Freddy style: “I won’t present it just as painting. Painting now seems small, a little trite, you know? I will come back to it in the next year, and it will be multimedia. I’ll have backing from some major corporations, and it will be shown someplace other than a gallery or where you’d ordinarily see painting.”
In the box were letters, tapes, records, much-delayed Christmas presents, a box of chocolate truffles from a record company, more letters, more tapes. First, Freddy opened the truffles. Then he started on the letters. “Here’s a guy writing to me from Nigeria, this is excellent. . . . Here’s a kid writing from jail. . . . Here’s more people writing from Nigeria—yo, what’s going on there in Nigeria? I guess it’s time for me to go to Nigeria.” He started singing along with “Autumn in New York,” and then the phone rang.
“Yo, girl, how you been?” he shouted into the phone. As I listened, it became clear to me that the young woman on the line was an employee of a striptease establishment in Times Square called Show World, and that while she was working there the day before, one of her colleagues happened to get hacked to death in the back of the club. Freddy questioned the woman with enthusiasm. At one point, he put his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered to me, “She says the guy who did it was the dead girl’s boyfriend. I guess the relationship wasn’t going so well, so he decided to murder her.” He went back to the call. He cradled the phone under his chin, continued to open the mail, lowered the volume on Sinatra, and turned the television on to Video Music Box, an afternoon rap video show on a local cable channel. “Autumn in New York” now appeared to be coming out of the mouths of De La Soul. After a few minutes, Freddy got a call on his other line, so he put the Show World employee on hold and started yelling into the phone: “Yo, I said I’d consider being in the movie for the marquee value, but no one’s telling me where anything is at!” These negotiations—for Freddy to play himself in an upcoming movie called Juice—went on loudly for many minutes. Freddy hung up. Then he took a call from Ted Demme about Mario Van Peebles, who had appeared that afternoon on the daytime Yo! saying things about New Jack City that Freddy didn’t like. Then he dialed an executive at a record company with whom he was negotiating to direct a video of a record by Shabba Ranks. He put the executive on his speaker phone and continued to open mail. The executive’s hiccupy exclamations about the brilliance of the proposed video boomed through the apartment. Freddy hung up, called a friend about dinner plans, saying, “Yo, I just got back from Europe, where I was shooting a Colt 45 ad with Billy Dee Williams. I guess Billy Dee wasn’t reaching the younger beer drinker anymore, so they brought me in.” His friend put him on hold. While he was waiting, Freddy handed me a book that was sitting under a press kit for Digital Underground and said, “I just got this great book on semiotics—it’s very interesting shit. You should read it.” Salt ’N Pepa appeared on Video Music Box. Sinatra off, Salt ’N Pepa on, extra loud. After finishing his call to his friend, Freddy hung up, slouched in his chair for a few moments, then abruptly sat up, grabbed the phone, and tried to retrieve his call from the Show World employee, who by this time would have been on hold for thirty-five minutes. At some point during those thirty-five minutes, she had apparently had feelings of abandonment and hung up. “Damn, damn, that’s wack,” Freddy said, sounding sad. “I lost her.”
THE PLAZA HOTEL’S EDWARDIAN ROOM is one of those hushed, dim chambers where everything is so padded and plushy that it seems as if the carpets have carpets. Heavy swag curtains fall across the windows. Heavy linens drape the tables. Everywhere there are little candles, large men, fancy-looking women, trim waiters, glinting platters, mother lodes of silver, and an air of genteel excess. Freddy eats here often, but not in the dining room. He eats in the middle of the kitchen, where Kerry Simon, the young chef who runs the place, keeps a table for a few friends. This is some complicated form of inverted reverse snobbery. The Edwardian Room is not a groovy-downtown-hipster kind of place by any stretch of the imagination, but the chef’s table in the kitchen has become a hot ticket these days. When Freddy has dinner here, he is escorted by a delicate, doe-eyed, sweet-natured woman named Paige Powell, who is the advertising director of Interview and was formerly a frequent escort of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. These days, Freddy refers to her as “my social coach.” Paige refers to Freddy as “a forward-thinking
catalyst who should have broad-reach international exposure.” They are clearly fond of each other. Over the last month or so, Paige got Freddy invitations to a dinner for Giorgio Armani and the one for the people from Ebel watches. “I’d like to see him cross-connect,” she said to me recently. “He should get to know these people, so they can take his great energy and use it somehow. I can almost imagine him as an anchor on an international news program on CNN, or something.”
Our dinner group was to be Paige, Freddy, and Freddy’s friend Great Adventure, whose real name is Roy. Great Adventure—handsome, immaculately tailored, broad shouldered—had just returned from Brazil, where he had been promoting rap concerts. He is Freddy’s current best friend and the man Freddy describes as his fashion coach, for graduating him from his previous B-boy style to his present amalgam of street and chic. Freddy knows exactly what good turn each of his friends and associates has done for him. It is as if he saw his life as a project to which a number of people have generously contributed. Considering that three of his best friends—Warhol, Haring, and Basquiat—are now dead, such accounting seems these days to have particular meaning.
“Yo, Kerry,” Freddy said as we walked into the kitchen. “I know this is definitely about to be something beyond food, and totally artistic.”
Paige and Great Adventure joined us, and we sat down at a large, round table set a few feet away from the grill. The kitchen was clattery, warm, buttery smelling, industrial looking. The table was set in pure white, with pale flowers and heavy silverware. Sitting at it, I felt as if I’d been encased in a clean, quiet capsule and dropped into the middle of a stew. Freddy, Paige, and Great Adventure were discussing an upcoming concert in Rio when the first course arrived—a construction of squid and fat pellets of Arborio rice, piled together in a way that called to mind a Japanese pagoda.