Non-fiction for you to dance to.
How the Bay Area staked a claim in the world of hip-hop.
Who's that driving? Patrick Swayze?
When E-40’s Tell Me When To Go single was released in March 2006, Hyphy was relatively unknown to the world outside of the bay area. However, hip-hop culture at this point had already been developing in the bay area for quite some time. Since the early 90s the bay area has been developing it’s own kind of rap music, Hyphy. Hyphy is different than most hip-hop due to subtle changes in what normal hip-hop music has to offer. It has faster, more up-tempo rhythms, and a fat, pounding beat. Dancing to Hyphy, or “going dumb,” is a matter of releasing a lot of energy in a ridiculous or overstated style. Throwing your head back and appearing to “lose control” in a relatively controlled manner reflects the integration of the chaotic, or the “stupid,” “dumb,” and “retarded,” into this stylized genre. This inversion of traditionally negative values allows Hyphy to exist as an opposite of the mainstream, constantly provoking it to be the “underground,” even as it grows in popularity. Keak Da Sneak, a bay area rapper, coined the term “Hyphy” in 1994.
Hyphy has roots in Mobb rap, the more violent, gang-related bay area hip-hop genre. Tupac Shakur and Ray Luv are some of the biggest names of Mobb rap, characterized by its street-violence related lyrics and the aggression often associated with different “groups” of rappers based on geographical origin. The biggest change in between Hyphy and Mobb rap is that Hyphy is more comedic. Mobb rap takes itself very seriously, pulling its listeners into an aggressive battle that is already in progress. Hyphy promotes laughter and carries a tongue-in-cheek humour over losing control. Hyphy, in some ways, is a response to Mobb rap, imploring everyone to just party and have a good time instead of fighting.
Hyphy’s emphasis on letting go and celebrating is a combination of several factors. The most significant, in my opinion is the lack of violence and much glorification thereof. The second, though this becomes increasingly less true with time, is the de-emphasis of sex and the objectification of women. The main point of many of the most important Hyphy songs seems to be on dancing, “going dumb,” and creating more music. Celebration is highly valued, and on that note, drugs often come in to the picture. However, the celebration of drug-use is different in Hyphy music than it can be in Mobb rap. The Mobb rap pushing of drugs becomes a form of bravado for the dealer or pusher, namely the speaker of the lyrics, while Hyphy praising of drugs is mostly because of the pleasurable and silly effects the user, usually the speaker and his/her friends, experiences from said drug use. The kind of drugs pushed in these two types of music differs as well. Mobb rap pushes heroine, crack, and more “hard drugs.” Hyphy pushes marijuana, alcohol, and the combination of both, known as “getting Krunk,” or c(k)razy drunk. Hyphy also often references ecstasy. I’ll return to this later.
Another recreational drug promoted in Hyphy is purple drank, or codeine/promethazine-based cough syrup with a jolly rancher in it. The sedative effects of purple juice are said, according to The Nation of Thizzlam bay-area blog, to have helped create the chopped-and-screwed effect of Krunk music, a contemporary rap cousin and predecessor to Hyphy. The importance of drug culture in the Krunk scene is inextricably linked, as the genre’s name suggests. Though Krunk is explicitly a Southern United States hip-hop movement, it has been integral to the formation of Hyphy. Then, by extension, that purple drank is a common name-drop for Hyphy lyricists. Hyphy and Krunk share more than drugs as well. There’s a large crossover of artists even though these are geographically specific genres. E-40’s Hyphy success album, My Ghetto Report Card, was partially produced by one of Krunk’s most famous voices, Lil’ Jon. Lil’ Jon’s reputation is largely based on his slow, heavy beats and his raspy, quotable voice: “Yeah, OK! What? Yeah!” The meeting point for Krunk and Hyphy is large and the genres overlap more than might be expected, considering the differences in tempo, rhythm, and lyric quality.
Lyric quality in Hyphy is always particularly humorous. The aim of the lyrics is to surprise and amuse the listener while they are dancing, and not only to emphasize the grandeur of the speaker. Arrogance, though a part of Hyphy culture just like a lot of hip-hop, takes a backseat to having a generally good time. A few lines from Tell Me When to Go emphasize this:
Jesus Christ had dreads, so shake ‘em
I ain’t got none, but I’m planning on growing some
Imagine all the Hebrews going dumb
Dancing on top of chariots and turning tight one
These particular lyrics invoke a hilarious image of celebration being part of every culture since the dawn of time (i.e., since the Hebrews’ time). Jesus Christ is immediately owned as a part of black culture by giving him dreads, allowing him to be owned as a celebratory figure even within the projected sadness often associated with the martyrdom of Christ. If even this somber figure of penitence is “going dumb,” than it makes sense the listener should also be celebrating no matter what other cause he has to be dismal. In fact, the speaker suggests, everyone should have dreads. Everyone should be able to dance like dancers in E-40’s Tell Me When to Go video.
It should be noted that everyone in this E-40 video is having a good time, or at least watching someone else having a good time. The images don’t include women being objectified nor do they include blatant drug use. The main visual of this video are groups of people dancing, namely members of the black community dancing in Oakland streets, inside what appears to be a hotel, and at a bay area sideshow (I’ll come back to this in a second). The cuts in between (mostly men) dancing and ghost-riding focus on the same population on a more quotidian level. There are old men, children, dogs, and average, working-class black men staring soberly into the screen without movement. This sharply contrasts with the wild, gyrating movement that characterizes the other shots. Dancers all move at incredible speeds, shaking heads, dreads, and limbs to the beat. Slow-motion cops, dogs, children, and elderly offer an alternative to this fast-paced life, but it appears to be just a different facet of the same area: Oakland.
Now, on sideshows which are a huge part of Hyphy culture and which are addressed in E-40’s Tell When To Go. Oakland is referred to by name in this song and shouted out to in several Hyphy songs. It is cross-listed as the “land of the sideshow.” Ghost riding, then, is also often alluded to in Hyphy songs. Ghost riding as a form of risky automobile behavior has been appropriated by the Hyphy movement to its easy recognition as something “dumb” or “retarded” to do. While many may consider dancing on top of a moving vehicle a dangerous or unwise thing to do, this creates the very appeal for sideshow and Hyphy aficionados. For the driver, the process offers a form to express agility and mobility through times of potential danger. Ghost Riding the Whip, specifically, is when a driver turns on some Hyphy, brings his car to a certain (hopefully low) speed, positions the car into cruise control, gets out of the car, and proceeds to dance next, on, or even across the roof of the car, eventually jumping off the back. The process is most well explained and glorified in another Hyphy hit, Mistah Fabb’s Ghost Ride It music video.
The basic rhythm is a spoof on the Ghost Buster’s theme and encourages the driver to “get out the way/go crazy/make room in the seat for Patrick Swayze.”
Being able to go through the Hyphy vocabulary, or slanguage, makes outsiders consistently feel like they’re being translated for and thus allows Hyphy and Hyphy culture to keep a stronghold on its underground status, at least for now. More evidence to support this comes with the use of the slanguage to describe simple physical appearance and alters to identity, specifically cars. Stunner shades on your face, grills in your mouth, rolling in your scraper boils down roughly to Sunglasses on your face, fake teeth in your mouth, driving your fancy car. Thizzin’ is smiling ridiculously, referring to the facial expression of those who are drunk or on drugs.
Returning to the dance aspect of Hyphy, it’s important to note that it is closely related to clowning and turfing. Turfing specifically is related to Hyphy and has grown up around the rhythms and bass beats that distinguish Hyphy. Turfing can be recognized by it’s leaning-back stance and spinning of the body while shaking the head. It lends itself well as a subset of clowning, a manner of dancing that demands the audience pay attention to the goofiness and foolery of the movement instead of the aggression that is usually more particular to krump. A comical attitude and quickness to the movements must accompany Hyphy music, because of how up beat the tempo often is. Facial expression is almost as much as the Hyphy dance movement as body shaking is. Kids roll their eyes back in their heads, flail their hands like they’re trying not to drown, wiggle shamelessly, and squat their knees together until bruising prevents doing so. It epitomizes a release, a lack of concern for safety, the anti-crotchety-ness of the music world. It’s incongruent with professionalism, with academia, with stiffness of any particular variety, and for this matter becomes a difficult matter for musicologists to comment on. I feel a little guilty of trying to reduce the genre to an analytic paper, but in some ways Hyphy benefits from contextualization and close-readings.
Hyphy has been around before its musical aspect developed. The dancing, the car-shows, the slang, and the attitude lead to the genre of music. The music ties the culture together, putting Hyphy forward as the Bay Area’s equivalent of Krunk. The word “Hyphy” itself has been around as a shortening of “hyperactive.” The idea of a people moving faster than everything around them centralizes part of the attitude. The intensity of a hyphy-dancing crowd can immediately make an outsider feel like extremely out of place. Hyphy, despite having roots in Krunk and other geographical genres, has an isolationist flavor to it. You’re either going nuts with a crowd or you’re watching a crowd oscillating in unison and feeling crotchety. Turning down a good hyphy dance crowd feels like admitting you hate fun. It might not make sense to be an outsider, but there is a draw to not looking like an outsider, to just moving. Smiling ridiculously (thizzin’) feels almost obligatory. I’ve never felt more obligated to have a good time then when I’ve been in an Oakland parking lot, waiting for a few kids to start scratching on the spot, hearing the Federation come on as the first track: 18 Dummy. Crowds go absolutely ridiculous. No matter how stodgy you come to these events, it’s hard to not laugh a little as people begin to move. The answer to most things in Hyphy is to laugh.
Why is laughter so appealing in violent ghetto culture? It seems illogical, considering the problems facing cities like Oakland, East Palo Alto, Richmond, and Fairfield. Oakland in particular has been sectioned off and renown according to how many murders per block have occurred. One such area, originally known as the Foster Hoover District, was renamed Ghost Town after a huge chunk of the residents lost their homes due to poverty and repossession in the late 1980s. The remainder of the population grew to experience enough violence to either kill or scare off the majority of those left behind. Even for Oakland’s standards, Ghost Town became completely out of control in its violence. As the streets grew emptier, sideshows began to spring up as a popular form of recreation. Street corners, parking areas, and abandoned lots saw a left behind generation growing into their own spacious Ghost Town. Ghost riding began here, in the early 90s, along with some of the earlier forms of electronic, fizzy hip-hop that never slowed down. Some attributed the speedy, surreal movements associated with the up-and-coming hyphy with speed, heroine, and crack/cocaine use, but it’s equally as possible that the rise of fast, hardcore electronica from San Francisco was feeding into the local hip-hop scene. Young people in Oakland were being ground to a stop, surrounded by violence, poverty, and a hopelessness that would not let up during the depression of the early 90s, and the answer became to let the inherent dramatics of the situation to level it all out, to laugh. Oakland embraced a self-established culture and began to try and shut out some of the outside influences. Ghost town wanted its own voice, a culture to call its own, and Hyphy became that.
Earlier Hyphy, the stuff that was going around in the mid- to late-90s, was a little angrier and harder than what’s going around at the very moment. Most of that earlier Hyphy was E-40 being grittier and less bouncy, best noted by his 1996 album “The Hall of Game.” More hilarious and much faster, the Federation broke through with their first single “Hyphy” in 2003. It featured E-40 and was produced by another popular Hyphy artist, Rick Rock. The members of the Federation, Goldie Gold, Doonie Baby, and Stressmatic, gained instant popularity in the Bay Area. Rick Rock supported and produced several artists and came to be known as a cornerstone of the Hyphy movement. Fully capable of laying down a few simple beats and matching them to talented vocalists, Rick Rock has been responsible for a many of the biggest Hyphy hits of the last ten years. E-40 hardly considers entering a studio without the assistance of Rick Rock. The Federation continuously thanks Rick Rock for his technical recording assistance. The artists that do spring up are usually popularized by the wit of their lyrics.
Humor and self-deprecation in lyric form can be epitomized in Mac Dre songs. For example, the song Thizzle Dance is about smiling ridiculously and scrunching your nose up. He enunciates his words far too thoroughly, his clarity exaggerated for comic effect. Mac Dre manages to keep his listeners eager to hear his next word, which never seems to match with the first. Turns of phrases are challenged and additions of different senses, for example: smelling, are important. A similar effect happens in Get Low by Flow-Rida and T-Pain.
Shawty had them Apple Bottom jeans
Boots with the fur
The whole club was looking at her
Shit hit the flo’
Next thing you know
Shawty got low low low low low low low low
As the listener views the female in question, he grows to appraise the same aspects of her that the speaker does: her slick dance moves. The female in question can get exceptionally low, which is an excellent thing in Hyphy. Lowering your body down against the dance floor while still hovering (not touching the ground) is desirable. The Apple-Bottom jeans are a style of pants that emphasize roundness of the female physique. Nelly, another rapper, has an entire clothing line named after this look. The boots are another allusion to the ideal Hyphy look. The whole club is mesmerized by her ability to maintain standards of beauty while getting super duper hyphy. Getting low is a feat accomplished due to flexibility and vibrancy, both of which are associated with youth. The speaker’s praising of her ability to maintain style and goofiness within the same breath speaks to what is desirable within the Hyphy community.
Ecstasy has its place in Hyphy culture as well. Going back to Mac Dre’s Thizzle Dance, the concept of a thizz-face is an expression that appears on a person’s face when he or she is on ecstasy. It is by extension, then, that one understands what a Thizzle Dance is. Dancing with unbelievable joy becomes an exciting option for those who are already on ecstasy. Mac Dre’s promotion of drug use seems to be a small throw back to earlier Hyphy in its harshness, but its celebration of mindless oscillation works with contemporary Hyphy quite well. Mac Dre’s untimely death has not hampered his music’s success or its reception in the Bay Area community. Mac Dre, who was shot to death in 2004, is still seeing great album sales.
The most prominent question for Hyphy now is where it’s going. As Hyphy becomes increasingly popular, it becomes more open to interpretation through other districts of music. Krunk, Chopped-N’-Screwed, Mobb, and then all the other, less-hip-hop related genres, are beginning to swap features and mix with Hyphy. There are currently over fifteen popular remixes of E-40’s Tell Me When To Go. The DJ Rocko remix has chopped the song up and made it more accessible to more Southern audiences by thinning out the mini-effects (like the bells and strange bloop! that punctuates the beats) and replaced them with a heavy Krunk bass line.
The Nhueng Remix substitutes the movement of some of the faster melodies with the slow and lingering bass lines of Chopped-N’-Screwed.
The ability of this Hyphy hit to be adapted to these different district genres has allowed the movement to have recently spread to new regions.
Even Art-House darlings like Radiohead have seen remixes that involve Hyphy. Only a few months after In Rainbows came out, Oakland Hyphy DJ AmpLive put together his Rainydayz Remixes , an 8-track collection featuring Too $hort, MC Zumi of Zion, Chali2na of Jurassic 5, and Del the Funky Homosapien. E-40 and Rick Rock were also involved in the project, coming to visit AmpLive throughout the mixing project and offering the creative knowledge on the Hyphy scene. The expansion of Hyphy into the mainstream white American audience allowed by the integration of Radiohead has seen effects even the most pretentious of Portland hipster circles. When Pitchfork announced that the Rainydayz Remixes are available for mass distribution on the internet for free , hipsters everywhere suddenly knew a little more about Hyphy than they had bargained for. What could be more unexpected than scene kids looking for their Radiohead fix and discovering fat bass beats, oscillating sexuality, and goofiness?
Having lived in East Palo Alto, one of my smaller but pressing fears is that Hyphy will be appropriated by ironic hipsters who will over-congratulate themselves for being so open-minded. Hyphy is still a genre of rap, which is Race music if anything can be called Race music. Aside from that, Hyphy is also a variety of District music, belonging to a place just as much as to a group of people. Taken too far out from the Bay Area, Hyphy looses its roots and connection with its original audience. Hyphy is constantly contextualized by its location, a matter of the culture as well as its musical elements. It is questionable whether laying down the same beats and mixing at similar tempos in Portland would do any justice to the exact same music being created in Oakland. The location is vital to the music. The people, the dancing, the slanguage, the sideshows, the specific events taking place in the Bay Area: these things all effect exactly how Hyphy has come together and how it continues to develop. There are references to the Ikea I worked at in high school in E-40’s Tell Me When To Go. The houses bulldozed to build the Ikea were places where artists and audience members alike lived. This music belongs just as much to its area as it does to its producers. There are a lot of places Hyphy might go outside of the Bay Area, but ultimately it’s subject to its place of birth, the soil where all the other rappers are getting their lingo from. You can set the Hyphy as a ringtone outside of the Yay, but you can’t take the Yay out of Hyphy.
Loved this!