Jean-Michel Basquiat: New York City Squalor, Art-World Slumming, and the 27 Club
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He sold his first painting to Blondie's Debbie Harry for $200. And less than a year later, his paintings would sell for more than $20,000. As a young, self-taught artist in a world built on pedigree, training, and experience, he was held at arm's length by the upper crust, dismissed as a passing fad. But he was no fad. Jean-Michel Basquiat made great art.

Art that was inspired by great music. From jazz to industrial to hip-hop. Unlike that loop I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called Turtle Rock MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to roll with it by Steve Winwood. And why would I play you that specific slice of back in the high life cheese could I afford it?

Because that was the number one song in America on August 12th, 1988. And that was the day that the life and career of one of the most original and sought-after artists in America came to a sudden and tragic end. On this episode, New York City squalor, CIA operations, self-taught artists, the gatekeepers of the art world's upper crust, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Debbie Harry was freaking out. The lead singer of Blondie paced back and forth under a lamppost on New York's Lower East Side. Behind her, two dudes spray painting went to work on the wall with a few cans of paint. A man dressed as Uncle Sam and another wearing a Native American headdress stood there staring at Debbie, waiting. They were all waiting. She checked her watch again.

Where the hell was Flash? Debbie Harry and her blondie bandmates weren't actually on the Lower East Side. They were a few miles uptown on a soundstage meant to look like the Lower East Side, doing something radical for 1981. They were shooting a music video, a video for the song Rapture, a song that continued the group's sonic push into a radical new direction, far from their early days at CBGB's. They wanted to create an equally radical video to accompany it.

One that would give the rest of the country a taste of that Lower East Side blend of the art, nightclub and hip-hop scenes currently inspiring them. That song, it owed a huge debt to one of the graffiti artists currently decorating the set, Fab Five Freddie. Freddie connected worlds. Freddie brought uptown street art into downtown galleries. Freddie brought downtown musicians to hear a new sound emerging uptown in the Bronx.

He brought Debbie Harry to a show at Webster Hall in the Bronx. And that's where Debbie saw the future. A DJ armed with a pair of turntables, laying waste to the packed house. It was like watching Jimi Hendrix for the first time. The DJ seamlessly stitched together snippets of beats and melodies in an ever-evolving loop.

He played the turntables behind his back, with his elbows, with his teeth. He was a master. But not just any master. Grandmaster. Flash. After the show, Debbie told Flash that she would write a song about him. Rapture. And that song paired Debbie's sultry vocals with a slinky bassline and a heavy hip-hop-inspired drum beat. It famously ends with Debbie delivering a surreal three-minute rap outro.

It might seem a little corny now, but in 1981, that rap and that song blew people's minds. As did the music video, which was supposed to feature the band's main source of inspiration, Grandmaster Flash. But as the cameras were about to roll on set, Flash was still missing. Debbie looked at her watch again. They had less than two hours to finish. She had no choice but to replace him. But with who?

She looked out into the crew of friends pressed into service and saw a familiar face. A young artist hanging next to Freddie. Skinny kid. Half Haitian, half Puerto Rican, barely 19. Awfully quiet, but handsome as hell. Lot of charisma. And even though he was young, the kid was already a fixture on the scene. Hair shaved into a mohawk, playing in noise rock bands at the Mud Club, selling his art postcards in Washington Square Park where Debbie sometimes saw him sleeping on park benches.

He hand-painted thrift store clothes and resold them to hip boutiques. And then there was his graffiti. It seemed to appear overnight, and it was outside every gallery, every bar, every nightclub in lower Manhattan. SAMO, as in S-A-M-O, for the copyright symbol at the end. SAMO, as in same old shit. Or at least that was the original idea.

That was the tag. Graffiti so omnipresent and so inescapable, the people in New York began to think it was part of some covert CIA operation.

I'm not kidding. I'm dead serious. The Village Voice even ran a story on it at the time. Rumor had it that the US government, in order to curb unwanted street art, was covering up all the empty canvas space in the city and tagging it "Samo." Perhaps a callback to the ways in which modern art was once used as a weapon in the Cold War. Or so the story goes.

Because these tags weren't elegant like Fab Five Freddy's. They were just quick scrawls with a felt tip marker or a spray can. But the words left an impression.

Samo as an end to the neon fantasy called life. Samo as an alternative to playing art with the radical chic on daddy's funds. Samo as an alternative to bullshit fake hippie whack cheer. Samo as an alternative to God, Star Trek, and Red Dye number two. It didn't take long for the truth to come out. This 19-year-old kid here on Debbie Harry's set was the Samo mastermind. Debbie knew his real name.

It was Jean-Michel Basquiat. She knew it from filming a low-budget movie a few weeks prior. Downtown 81 was created to showcase the city's rising no-wave music scene. Jean-Michel played the lead role, a homeless artist bouncing through lower Manhattan who tries to sell enough artwork to get back into his apartment. The role was not a stretch.

When Jean-Michel Basquiat wasn't sleeping on park benches in Washington Square Park, he was crashing on the floor of the film's dank bunker of a production office, or with friends in grimy tenement apartments in the rough section of the Lower East Side. He was a painter, too. And not just graffiti. But he didn't paint on canvases like some sophomore at the Pratt Institute. He painted on clothing, and doors, and walls.

It wasn't until the Downtown 81 movie that he painted on one of his first real canvases. And Debbie Harry liked it so much that when shooting wrapped for the film, she bought that painting for $200. And now Debbie Harry had a new opportunity for Jean-Michel Basquiat, stepping in for the absent Grandmaster Flash on Blondie's video shoot.

Within months, Americans were unknowingly getting their first look at Jean-Michel on MTV with the Rapture video. Not only the first hip-hop video shown on the brand new cable channel, but one of the videos selected for the network's first rotation block. This was happening at the same time that Jean-Michel was feverishly working on a dozen pieces for his first solo gallery show.

But he wasn't listening to Blondie while he worked. And he wasn't listening to the hip-hop currently dominating his home neighborhood in Brooklyn. He was listening to jazz. Specifically, to the alto saxophone of Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker, a.k.a. Bird, reminded him of childhood. A scribbling on scraps of paper while lying on the floor. His father in an armchair. His mother smiling.

before her troubles started and she was institutionalized, and before his father remarried. Jean-Michel Basquiat left home at 16, but no matter where he was sleeping or how he was scraping by, he always found a way to listen to Berklee. Jean-Michel wanted to paint the way that Charlie Parker played the saxophone. Charlie Parker played his way, setting fire to the rules of jazz harmony.

He wove bits of melodies from spirituals, show tunes, and Stravinsky into his playing. And then he shifted keys and bent them into something new. He played hard, and he lived hard, and he gave everything to his art. That's the way Jean-Michel would paint. Bird blew sweet, and Jean-Michel had long strokes of bright yellow acrylic across the canvas. Bird's horn picked up its pace, and Jean-Michel sketched a quick yard bird on the center of the canvas.

That Charlie Parker bird was wailing now. Jean-Michel felt the energy surge from the speakers toward his canvas. He didn't think, he just let the feelings wash over him. Swirls of notes filled the studio, then his canvas, then the whole city, all the way home to Brooklyn, waking the dead in Greenwood Cemetery. Jean-Michel scrawled "Paramora" to die across the canvas.

and laid down his brush. He was finished. He called it bird on money. Like Charlie Parker, Jean-Michel set fire to the rules. He gave everything to his art. He lived hard and worked hard. It was 1981, less than seven months since he painted his first canvas, less than seven years before he would paint his last. ♪

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Hey, Discos, if you want more Disgraceland, be sure to listen every Thursday to our weekly after-party bonus episode, where we dig deeper into the stories we tell in our full weekly episodes. In these after-party bonus episodes, we dive into your voicemails and texts, emails, and DMs,

and discuss your thoughts on the wild lives and behavior of the artists and entertainers that we're all obsessed with. So leave me a message at 617-906-6638, disgracelandpod at gmail.com or at disgracelandpod on the socials, and join the conversation every Thursday in our after-party bonus episode.

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The music was so loud it vibrated through his bones. The club was hot tonight. The bodies were sweaty, writhing to the rhythm of disco bass lines, lights catching a disco ball and sending shards of color splashing in every direction. It was magical, especially if you were on angel dust or cocaine. Wait, was it both?

Didn't matter. Whatever it was, Jean-Michel Basquiat was feeling incredible. Everyone and everything in the room looked like a work of art. He couldn't wait to get home and put it all on a canvas. But for now, he had his arm around the hottest piece of art in the building. Even her name sounded like a painting.

Madonna. And they were in the middle of the dance floor at the Roxy, the hippest night spot in Chelsea. Madonna, already with a few club hits under her many, many belts and a greatly anticipated debut album about to drop. And Jean-Michel, who had gone from an extra in a Blondie video to one of the hottest new contemporary artists in the world in the space of just one year. They were the perfect pair. Everyone in the club agreed. Everyone, except for one person.

Jean-Michel's girlfriend, Suzanne Malouk, watched her guy and the pop singer grinding against each other on the dance floor. And she could hardly believe it. Them. Together. In public. Here. At the Roxy.

After everything she did for Jean-Michel, working double shifts waitressing so he could focus on his art, cooking for him, putting up with his drug use and with the other women as well. But this was too much. Suzanne was seeing red, and not just from the colored lights swirling above her. She didn't want to think about it anymore, so she didn't think. She acted.

Suzanne elbowed her way through the crowded dance floor, and she shoved skinny party girls aside and cleared a path. A bee line straight towards them. Madonna had her back turned. Jean-Michel was in a completely different world, and they never saw it coming.

Suzanne went straight for Madonna's bullshit wannabe Debbie Harry pixie cut. She grabbed a huge handful of blonde hair and pulled down, hard, and Madonna cried out in pain. But in a crowded disco with a throbbing beat, no one can hear you scream. Madonna went down to the floor and Suzanne jumped on her, wailing at her with her fists, slapping her face, screaming at her to stay away. Stay the fuck away from Jean-Michel. Jean-Michel stood frozen.

with the cocaine and the angel dust in his system. Everything was moving in slow motion. It all seemed so far away, like he was watching a fight on television. Then, slowly it began to dawn on him. This wasn't TV. This was happening right in front of him. He stepped in to pull the two women apart, but by then Suzanne had mostly run out of steam. Jean-Michel looked over at Suzanne. His pupils dilated wide and he laughed.

He couldn't help it. The whole thing was just too surreal. Damn, he said, you beat her ass like a Puerto Rican girl. And just to be clear, that's a Jean-Michel quote, not mine. Suzanne may have won the fight, but Jean-Michel went home with Madonna. By 1982, home wasn't a park bench in Washington Square Park or a 250-square-foot tenement on the Lower East Side. Now home was an enormous Soho loft.

The fridge was stuffed with caviar and Cristal. But Jean-Michel hadn't changed a bit. Sure, he wore Armani suits, but he splattered them with paint as if he copped them at the Salvation Army. He was selling paintings for $10,000 or $20,000 a pop, but he didn't even have a bank account. He just stuffed the money under the couch cushions or in between the pages of books. Sometimes he just left cash out on the living room table for friends, right next to a huge amount of Colombian cocaine that was also free for the taking.

Because in 1982, drugs and work went hand in hand for Jean-Michel. Usually they worked great together. Until they didn't. Madonna woke up with a start. She looked at the clock. It was 4 a.m. She reached over to the other side of the mattress. The one that was on the corner of the floor of Jean-Michel's loft. He was gone. She quickly sat up, sick with worry. She got up and made her way around the wet canvases, paintbrushes, and coffee mugs littering the floor.

She frantically scanned the room, remembering the last time she woke up like this. She found him convulsing on the floor, halfway to death, overdosing. Somehow he pulled through. But still, every time she woke up to find him gone, it terrified her. Tonight, though, she didn't have any reason to be scared. Jean-Michel was standing on the other side of the room with a paintbrush in his hand.

His face was inches from a large canvas. He was working fast, moving almost like he was in a dream, adding tiny splashes of bright color to a pitch black background, replaying that scene from the Roxy earlier in the night over and over again in his head. He sped it up and he slowed it down. He chopped it to pieces, working like Grandmaster Flash at the turntable until he found the perfect beat.

The percussive boom of the fight. You beat her ass like a Puerto Rican girl. The sparkling highs of the cocaine. Sugar-coated corn pops. Warning, product contains dextrose. The dark nightclub and the flashes of colored lights and himself watching. Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday morning

In 1982, every experience was inspiration for Jean-Michel Basquiat. He completed dozens of pieces in the lead-up to one of his biggest shows yet, a solo exhibition at Fun Gallery, the punky upstart space in the East Village. Before that, he became the youngest artist ever to appear at the major contemporary art show Documenta in Germany. And he made a new friend, not just any friend, but one of his idols, Andy Warhol. ♪

In the early 1980s, Andy Warhol was at the lowest point of his career. But like many younger artists, Jean-Michel still revered him. Not just because of his work, because Andy inspired him personally. Jean-Michel still remembered the day as a teenager when he sold one of his little art postcards to Andy. Before then, Jean-Michel always thought that his stuff was good. But after that, he knew it was true.

So when they hit it off over lunch in October of 1982, Jean-Michel couldn't believe it. Andy had someone snap a Polaroid of them together. Jean-Michel grabbed the picture and disappeared. Two hours later, Andy heard a knock on his front door. Jean-Michel's assistant was standing there holding up a canvas, still wet. Jean-Michel's own interpretation of that Polaroid. Then the gesture kicked off a friendship.

But it was also clear that just as Andy needed Jean-Michel, Jean-Michel needed Andy. Because despite all of his success, the upper crust of the art world still held Jean-Michel Basquiat at arm's length. As a young, black, self-taught artist in a world built on pedigree, training, and experience, critics dismissed him as a fad, pop phenomenon, not a real artist. Jean-Michel hoped the connection with Andy Warhol would give him art world credibility.

And Andy Warhol hoped Jean-Michel would inject some youthful energy and excitement into his work. For better or for worse, it was a connection that would last the rest of their lives. The connection with Madonna, on the other hand, did not last. The material girl's career was heating up, and Jean-Michel's drug use was getting worse. She dreaded the day that she would wake up again at 4 a.m., this time to find him dead on the floor.

They went their separate ways just as Madonna's debut album began to make its slow and steady climb up the charts in 1983. Jean-Michel moved on fast. He demanded that Madonna return all the paintings he made for her. Then he covered them all in black paint. He moved on to other women. He moved on with other musicians, producing the classic hip-hop single "BeatBop" and jamming with David Byrne of Talking Heads for a project they were going to call "Famous Black Athletes." And like his hero, Charlie Parker,

He moved on to heroin. His old girlfriend, Suzanne, moved on too. She didn't cover the paintings Jean-Michel made for her in black paint though. She burned them. Then she found someone new. A man with striking good looks, just like Jean-Michel. Also an artist, like Jean-Michel. Skinny, with his hair in long braids, again like Jean-Michel. And just like Jean-Michel, he too would die young. Because despite their efforts to move on,

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He stepped out of the East Village Drag Club, lit a joint, and took a hit. He headed for the subway station. He was young, skinny, 140 pounds soaking wet, long braids sticking out in every direction. As he made his way down the steps and into the subway station, he looked around. It was deserted. He grabbed a felt-tip marker from his pocket and found a blank space on the wall, the perfect canvas.

because Michael Stewart wanted to be an artist. He studied at Pratt, but he knew that real art was made in the street. He knew that's how Jean-Michel Basquiat got his start. Michael knew this because he was friends with Jean-Michel. And what's more, he was now dating Jean-Michel's ex, Suzanne. What he didn't know was that the city's war on graffiti had ramped up a lot since the days of Samo, but he was about to find out. He flicked open the cap of the black marker and raised it to the wall, and he began to draw.

A voice rang out. "Hold it right there." Michael froze, the tip of the marker resting against the wall. He looked over his shoulder to see a pair of transit cops walking towards him. He raised up his hands and he knew he was caught. "Alright man, you got me." Then he put his hands behind his back. The cops didn't cuff him. They searched his pockets and found an unlit joint. "Shit."

One of the cops radioed for a transit van and began to walk Michael up the stairs. He was going to jail. At first he was calm, but then he began to think about his parents. They would be furious when they found out he was arrested. And not just for graffiti. Dope. He had to get the hell out of here. Halfway up the stairs, he bolted. The cops followed in hot pursuit, and Michael had his step on him, and he turned the corner to head back into the street. Back to freedom. Back to the safety of the East Village.

He made it all the way to the top step before one of the cops clipped his back foot. Then Michael staggered forward and then down. His face smashed into the pavement. Just then, the transit van pulled up. And two more cops, nightsticks. He felt one slam into his ribs, knocking the breath out of him again and again. And Michael screamed out, laying there on the ground as the beating continued. Screams so loud that students from the nearby Parsons School of Design later testified that they could hear it.

The pain, the fear, the weed. Michael was overwhelmed, panicking, fighting for his life. When suddenly a cop stood a baton under his neck. His screams were cut silent as his windpipe pinched shut. And the officer pulled tighter. And Michael Stewart stopped moving and stopped screaming. And then he slipped into a coma. Suzanne visited him in the hospital. She took pictures of his beaten and bruised body and gave them to the press.

She organized vigils and fundraisers. Madonna performed a benefit concert at Danceteria, and Jean-Michel donated artwork to the cause. Thirteen days later, Michael Stewart died. His death haunted Jean-Michel. It could have been him. He was once Michael Stewart, holding a felt-tip pen himself, not to a canvas, but on the street, just like Michael in the East Village.

Most in the East Village saw Jean-Michel as an artist, but institutions like the NYPD would always see him as a criminal. The injustice of it rubbed him raw. Raw like the industrial music that he used to make back at the Mud Club. A few nights after Michael's death, at the studio of his friend Keith Haring, Jean-Michel grabbed paint and a felt-tip black marker. He dropped the tape from British Industrial Pioneers' test department into a boombox and turned the volume up full blast.

And then he began to draw right there on the studio wall. The buzzing, aggressive sound filled his ears, his mind, his soul. Why? Two stick figures, batons raised, the howl of pain. Somebody help me. And that obsessive thought, it could have been me.

Over and over again, he could have been me. That void in his soul, the hatred of the world outside. Outrage roared out of the speakers and onto the studio wall. A moment of frustration frozen in time. In a painting that would have been lost to time had Keith Haring not cut what Jean-Michel had drawn out of the wall and mounted it on a frame. And good thing that he did.

Because that painting, " The Death of Michael Stewart," stands as one of Jean-Michel Basquiat's most powerful works of art. Jean-Michel himself was becoming more powerful, now making almost $2 million a year. His work featured in GQ and on MTV. But despite all this fame and success, it seemed that everything else was still out of reach.

How restaurants couldn't find his reservations unless he showed up with a white friend. How he could sell a painting for $50,000 in a gallery but couldn't hail a cab once he walked out of it. How critics, whether they loved his work or hated it, tended to assume that he was naive, uneducated, some sort of idiot savant. Meanwhile, his art dealers continued to demand more paintings, more gallery shows, more media tours. And the pressure was overwhelming. He was turning to heroin more and more.

a habit that was now costing him $500 a day. It was during this period that he moved into a loft owned by Andy Warhol on Great Jones Street. He rarely left the place. Andy had to remind him to exercise, had to remind him to shower, had to remind him to eat, to gently suggest he get help for his addictions. Jean-Michel brushed aside that last suggestion. He knew he was in bad shape, but he could still summon the spirit to create art with Andy.

and together they worked on a series of collaborations that they hoped would reintroduce Andy Warhol to a new generation and confirm to upper-crust art critics that Jean-Michel was more than just a flash in the pan. That meant less splashes of text and color in the background, a more classical style. Together they were sure the show would be a hit, a real spectacle, as the series of iconic promo shots of both men in boxing gloves and trunks promised. But the show was a disaster.

Critics said Jean-Michel was Andy's mascot. The insult stung and the relationship fractured. And then, on February 22nd, 1987, Andy Warhol died suddenly. Jean-Michel was devastated. He disappeared for days when he heard the news, only to reemerge at an East Village nightclub sobbing alone on the dance floor. Andy was dead. Michael was dead. Bird was dead.

Now, he could hear Charlie's horn calling him back home to Brooklyn, the Greenwood Cemetery. August, 1988.

The dealer heard a light rapping on the door of the bodega. He looked through the peephole and unlocked the door. It was one of his regulars. Hard to tell the guy's age. Maybe 27. Maybe 57. Looked like he'd been living on the street. Open sores on his face and arms. He was nice enough though. Soft spoken. Real soft spoken. First time he showed up, he said his name was Michelle. Michelle? Like the Beatles song? The dealer told him he could get his ass kicked with a name like that.

and the dealer was going to call him Mike, and so it was settled. Mike came in like clockwork every few days. 20 bags. No more, no less. $300 in cash. Most days he split right away. Sometimes, though, he hung around and rolled joints with the workers in the little backyard behind the store. The dealer always passed. Not a good idea to swap spit with someone who looks so far gone. Mike came by for weeks straight like that, until one day he just disappeared.

Nothing too unusual about a junkie falling off the face of the earth, so the dealer didn't pay it too much mind. Until today. On this hot summer day, Mike walked in for the first time in months. His order was different too. He asked for 10 bags instead of 20, and he didn't stick around to roll a joint. He was ready to split. But on his way out, he saw a few cans of spray paint, and he asked the dealer if he could paint something on the way out.

"Man, I don't give a fuck what you do. Just make sure you lock the door when you leave." Mike grabbed the cans of spray paint and he locked the door behind him. And as he stared at the door, he saw an empty canvas. He felt the rhythm of the street, the energy pulsing from the load of dope in his front pocket. He heard music, more like a chant, the devil on his shoulder growing louder and louder, screaming at him, devouring him. He aimed the can at the door and sketched out a man with devil horns.

Yell an eye for an eye, he sprayed below it. And then he was gone. Mike never returned to the bodega. Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose just a few days later. Were these two men one and the same? Was this spray-painted devil the final work of Jean-Michel Basquiat? Depends on who you ask. The dealer swears it was. Jean-Michel Basquiat's estate, on the other hand, says the painting is inauthentic.

After an article in New York Magazine brought this story to light over two decades later in 2011, a graffiti artist named Phil Frost came forward to say the work was actually his. And a decade after that, FBI agents came in through the front door of an art museum in Orlando and began to remove 25 Basquiat paintings from the walls, all of them never before seen by the public.

Why? Because each one was painted on cardboard that was manufactured in 1994, six years after Jean-Michel Basquiat's death. These are just a couple of the complicated cases that have emerged since Jean-Michel Basquiat's heroin overdose in August of 1988. The reason is clear: Basquiat's paintings have grown astronomically in value.

a former graffiti artist whose first painting sold to Debbie Harry for $200. His pieces now regularly top $50 million at auction. One even went for more than double that. Prices like these invite a certain reaction in most people. They look at modern art and laugh. My kid could do that, they say, like the fucking idiots that they are. They've got it backwards. Jean-Michel Basquiat created art that was so powerful that even a child can understand it.

but it's packed with enough layers to keep art critics talking about it decades after his death. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a paradox, a young self-taught artist with a unique style. He drew influences from an immense knowledge of art history.

His best work crosses the line between painting and poetry, between color and sound, white and black, uptown and downtown, high art, low art, rap, jazz, sex, violence, freedom, addiction. He gave everything to his art, and then he left us. But his work never will.

It's on a swatch. It's on a Strokes album cover. It's on Reebok sneakers and members-only jackets. It's in a Tiffany's ad campaign next to Beyonce and Jay-Z.

T-shirts, socks, backpacks, phone cases, skateboards, coffee mugs. If you're looking at Basquiat's art through consumer culture or if you're lucky enough to stand in front of a canvas in person, you can feel his energy surging at you like a blast of punk rock from the Mud Club, like a subwoofer rattling a hip-hop beat, like a fiery alto sax.

Because just like his idol, Charlie Parker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the artist, still echoes out across New York, across America, and across the world. But as for the man himself, Jean-Michel Basquiat's body is buried at Greenwood Cemetery. He died at just 27 years old. And that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. ♪

All right. Thank you for hanging with me here in this episode of Disgraceland Apple Podcast listeners. Please make sure you have auto downloads turned on so you don't miss any episodes. This week's question of the week is, which musician had the best second career? Was it Basquiat as a visual artist? Was it Johnny Depp as an actor? George Harrison? Rod Stewart? Who was it? Let me know. 617-906-6638. Leave me a voicemail. Send me a text and hear your answer on the after party bonus episode coming up right after this one.

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