Fab 5 Freddy recently chopped it up with Brooklyn, New York’s Theophilus London for MTV2’s Sucker Free, discussing what life was like in the 1980s and how Hip Hop grew into such a magnanimous culture. During the conversation, Freddy, who recently launched a new gallery displaying his works, recalled the sentiment in the downtown scene at the time.
“It was just like a desire to get my message out at that time on the downtown scene in New York in the early ‘80s. It was basically not many of us, but when you met somebody that was on a similar track like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring, like Futura [2000], we immediately bonded because we were trying to do certain things,” he said. “We were trying to get our visual art out, which is what I’m back doing now, I’m in a gallery with a show of my new paintings. I was trying to help people understand what hip hop culture was about, so we were campaigning, if you will. And a lot of the people we campaigned to were downtown, new wave, punk-rock people, like people from the group Blondie, who became patrons of my work. Like Talking Heads, like so many cool people at that period just embraced what we were doing.”
Praising Theophilus for his recent work, Freddy also noted that he’s thrilled to see rappers embracing the past with their art. “I love seeing a new wave of artists figure it out by doing their history and making their contribution,” he said.
Watch the full interview below.
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