Graffiti Art, Hip-Hop Culture as We Know It: It All Started With Fab 5 Freddy

Exactly. The artists I was into were not looked at in this patronizing kind of light. I knew that people were going to try to say, This is what you are, but I wasn’t going to let that go down.

There was this artist, Olivier Mosset, who did these monochromatic paintings, and when I was just getting my feet into the art scene I was dating this French woman and she had a small Mosset. And I said, “This reminds me of a nice, clean wall.” I pulled out a marker and went to it, but she was like, “No, no, no, no, don’t.” I was just teasing, but she was like, “Oh God, no,” and pretty soon she tells the artist, Olivier, “Oh—I’m dating this guy and he’s one of these graffiti people, and he was going to tag on your painting.” And Olivier says to her, “Huh—that’s a very interesting idea.” So me and Olivier meet, and I’m talking about Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, and he was like, “You know about those guys?” I’m 19 or 20 at the time, but I was like, “Look, I’m into this shit.”

And we collaborated—I tagged on three or four of his paintings, and they were exhibited. One of the pieces I tagged Kneecap Art Pimps, and I write in the book about how I thought that the Red Brigade [Brigate Rosse, a violent far-left Italian paramilitary organization] might show up. I didn’t realize how highfalutin the gallery was, but I thought it might happen, because they were doing political graffiti attacking different politicians; they were shooting people in the knees.

I used to have one of their T-shirts; I heard about them through the Clash. I wore it out once to meet my father-in-law, who’s Italian, for dinner, and when he saw me wearing this shirt he freaked out and told me I couldn’t wear it in public—

Oh, shit.

Anyway, you’re in the flow of things now. Your graffiti work is being taken seriously; pretty soon you meet [writer and editor and Warhol figure] Glen O’Brien and become part of the crew around his legendary cable-access show TV Party.

They became family—those guys really guided me along for about three or four years, from late ’78 to ’81-ish. That was so pivotal—I met Chris [Stein] and Debbie [Harry] from Blondie, John Lurie, all the cream of the crop of the New Wave and No Wave music scenes. And the Mudd Club opened at that time, so we were all going there together after TV Party, and that just further embedded me in the scene with all different kinds of creators.

Is that where you also met a graffiti artist who was then known as SAMO?

No, Jean [Jean-Michel Basquiat] and I met at a party, but we became better friends through being associated with TV Party, and soon we began to get some attention from an art dealer in Rome. Some people were curious. The rest just saw us as wild savages defacing public property—which, a lot of it was that—but there were some creatives among us trying to emerge. I felt what we were doing was akin, contextually, to what New Wave and punk were doing.