Hip-Hop's Renaissance Man

He was a graffiti-art pioneer, denizen of CBGB, friend of Basquiat, collaborator with Blondie, and host of the show that helped turn hip-hop global. On the 40th anniversary of Wild Style, the cult film that made him famous, FAB FIVE FREDDY takes stock

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STILL FAB – Fred Brathwaite (Fab Five Freddy), in his Harlem home, with a velvet print from his series on boxer Jack Johnson.

ON A SUNDAY afternoon in June, inside a cavernous warehouse in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, the 40th anniversary of Wild Style, the 1983 film that did more than any other to frame, codify, and promote the culture now known as hip-hop, was celebrated as the climax of the weekendlong Five Points Festival. It felt as if an old-school Bronx block party had been transported to 21st-century Brooklyn. The guy manning the turntables? That would be Grand Wizzard Theodore, the DJ widely credited with inventing scratching, the revolutionary technique that defined early hip-hop; the PA was set to a decibel level somewhere between a jackhammer and a Boeing 787. The director of Wild Style, Charlie Ahearn, a wiry guy with white hair and a friendly pink face dressed head to toe in red, milled around, receiving hugs from an expansive retinue of early hip-hop heroes who had appeared in the movie. There was Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers; Crazy Legs from the Rock Steady Crew, one of the original B-boys; and MC Busy Bee Starski, the Chief Rocker himself, who still somehow looked like a teenager. Members of the Fantastic 5 hammed it up as a phalanx of iPhones flashed in their faces.