Fab 5 Freddy:
"The coming together of uptown and downtown was something that I kind of engineered. I was making paintings at the time and having exhibits. My entrée into the downtown scene was a person by the name of Glen O'Brian. He took me under his wing and allowed me to be a part of a public access cable TV show, done in black and white video. Through doing that show, I met Chris Stein, the guitarist from Blondie, who was like Glen's co-host. They would smoke joints right on the air. I was looking for people to be supporters of my work, having done graffiti on the subways to try to move into galleries. Chris Stein and Debbie Harry basically became my patrons."
Grandmaster Flash:
"Back in the days before Fab 5 Freddy became the huge personality at Yo! MTV, he used to come to my parties. He told me that he was close friends with Blondie, and that he would bring her [Debbie Harry] to one of my parties in the Bronx. I was like, 'Yeah, right.' The audience I was playing for at the particular time was primarily black so when I saw Freddy slowly coming through the crowd and this blonde-haired woman with him, I'm like in slight cardiac arrest almost. She was checking out the set. She said she was a fan, and was gonna do something with me on her next record. I was like, 'She's just telling me anything.' Lo and behold, a couple of months later there's the song and it's everywhere. In a lot of ways we had to go through the back door just to get accepted. Now I'm going through the front door with a high-powered, super influential pop artist like bang! It totally put me on a whole other level."
Doug E. Fresh:
"Blondie was like Madonna. Blondie was big. When we heard Flash's named mentioned, we was like, 'Yo! Blondie mentioned your name?! That's big playa, that's real big.' It was like it was no longer this little thing around the neighborhood. Now the world knew about it."
Kurtis Blow:
"January of 1980, Debbie Harry flew me out to England. I remember getting off the plane and here are all these cameras. It's like I'm Mohammed Ali or somebody, right? And all this press, man! She hooked up all of this stuff, and they all wanted to know what it is hip-hop? What is rap and how did it get started and why are you doing this? I'm like oh my God I can't believe this is happening to me."
Everlast:
"Blondie hit me a little bit more than the Sugarhill Gang 'cause it was bad. They had graffiti writers in the video, and Fab 5 Freddy pretending to write graffiti in the background. It was dope."
Nelson George:
"Black people are always suspicious of white people using their culture - period. But when Debbie Harry did Saturday Night Live, she had several rappers on with her. She had the Funky Four Plus One on SNL when she did "Rapture." She gave love, as they say. They were very cognizant of the fact that they were taking something from a community that pre-existed. The fact that Fab 5 Freddy and Jean Michel Basquiat are in the video, they knew that they were tapping into something that was larger than what they did."
|
