Twenty years ago, hyphy, a music and cultural movement that came out of Oakland and the Bay Area, exploded nationally. It had its own slang, fashion, dance style, car culture, and much more. <\/p>\n
This year, The Oaklandside published two stories looking back at that moment<\/a> and at what has happened since<\/a>, both reported by Eric K. Arnold. Eric has covered the Bay Area\u2019s hip hop scene since the \u201990s and chronicled hyphy\u2019s rise and fall as it happened. <\/p>\n Eric joined me to talk about the summer of 2006, when the movement broke nationally, and to what happened when the spotlight faded. He also picks up the story today, as a new generation of Bay Area artists reaches back to reclaim that sound, and some of the people who lived through it start talking openly about what happened behind the music. <\/p>\n Below is a short version of our conversation. Hear the whole thing \u2014 I highly recommend it \u2014 above or anywhere you get podcasts<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u2014 Tasneem Raja, editor-in-chief, The Oaklandside<\/p>\n Eric, for someone new to all of this, what was hyphy?<\/p>\n Hyphy was not just a music genre. It was the soundtrack to a culture and a lifestyle that started out in the streets of Oakland. It combined sideshow culture with hardcore rap, and there was a club element and a fashion element. <\/p>\n Hyphy had a kind of neo-psychedelic aspect to it. People wore these huge sunglasses they called stunna shades, and very vibrant colors. You\u2019d see people in these loud hoodies, in colors most people would be scared to wear, but that was the dress code.<\/p>\n What about the sound?<\/p>\n The sound of hyphy is an evolution of the Bay Area sound. The Bay Area underground sound is bass-driven and funk-driven, and it\u2019s slow to mid-tempo. Hyphy upped the tempo and took away the funk basslines, so now you just have the bass drops, like the 808.<\/p>\n Lyrically, what were hyphy artists interested in?<\/p>\n Hyphy artists were mainly talking about their lifestyles, and those lifestyles were about rebellion and youthful expression from a 2000s counterculture point of view. This was the sound of inner-city Oakland. They jump in their car, they ride down Foothill. They may smoke a blunt. They may try to holler at some women. Later on they go to the club, meet up with their partners, and get hyphy.<\/p>\n You wrote that in Bay Area hip hop circles, \u201c2006 now holds the kind of reverence 1988 does on the East Coast, a legendary year.\u201d What made it legendary?<\/p>\n For frame of reference, 1988 in East Coast hip hop is when Public Enemy dropped, and when Eric B. & Rakim dropped their second album. The whole year was studded with releases that became landmarks and classics. When I looked back at what was released in 2006, it was like, whoa, this is a motherlode.<\/p>\n You had Too Short. You had E-40. Mistah FAB from Oakland started the year with \u201cYellow Bus\u201d and ended it with \u201cGhost Ride It.\u201d Every single month, there were two or three notable albums dropping. Plus, the Bay got featured on MTV and BET and in USA Today. Everyone was talking about the hyphy movement, and it came after a buildup of three or four years before it reached fever pitch.<\/p>\n 2005 was pretty intense, too. But then in 2006, when you think you can\u2019t top it, here comes the video for E-40\u2019s \u201cTell Me When to Go.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n That song and video are widely credited with putting hyphy on the national map. What was it about them?<\/p>\n It was just a great treatment. First, you have the beat, made by Lil Jon, the godfather of crunk music from Atlanta. It\u2019s a very primal, tribal-sounding beat that starts out with just hand claps and kick drums. Then the 808 kicks in with a Run-DMC sample, and it builds in intensity. Even in the first 20 to 30 seconds, before the raps kick in, you feel like you\u2019re being taken on a journey to the land of Oakland, the land of hyphy.<\/p>\n You hear the chorus before you hear the verses, so you\u2019re already primed for a peak experience. Then E-40 comes in with a verse full of biblical imagery.<\/p>\n What are we seeing in the video while all this is happening?<\/p>\n It\u2019s very cinematic. It\u2019s in black and white, and it\u2019s very stylized. It makes Oakland look like this amazing, almost futuristic world, even though they use very street locations, like Ben\u2019s Burgers, the East Bay Dragons headquarters, and Youth Uprising out on MacArthur and 82nd.<\/p>\n There are quick jump cuts before the verses by E-40 and Keak Da Sneak. They show the Turf Feinz, a turf dance group, going wild and shaking their dreads, intercut with quick shots of Keak, E-40, and others who cameo in the video. It all builds up to E-40\u2019s verse, which tells you there\u2019s something going on in the Bay.<\/p>\n It also sets the stage for Keak Da Sneak, who is an acquired taste, shall we say, because his rap style is so unique. He\u2019s one of the most unique voices in all of rap history. No one can imitate or duplicate his style, and when his verse comes in, it\u2019s something uniquely Oakland.<\/p>\n It\u2019s more minimal, and there are almost no melodic elements to it. It\u2019s all rhythm. It\u2019s all percussion.<\/p>\n There are songs from this era that you see as just as iconic as \u201cTell Me When to Go.\u201d Tell us about some of them.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t have a hyphy movement without \u201cSuper Hyphy\u201d by Keak Da Sneak. That came out in 2005, and it took hyphy to another level. It was promoted in other markets outside the Bay, and it did really well there. It set the table for \u201cTell Me When to Go.\u201d<\/p>\n Also in 2005, there was Mistah FAB\u2019s \u201cSuper Sick Wit It,\u201d off his Son of a Pimp album on Thizz Entertainment. It brought Oakland and Vallejo together like they were one neighborhood, because Turf Talk, who I think is E-40\u2019s cousin, is featured on it, and so is E-40. Bay Area rap is very regional, and it can feel territorial at times. When different cities come together, it sends a message of unity, and that\u2019s what that song did. Plus, the beat was inescapable.<\/p>\n Tell us about Keak Da Sneak. What was his life like in Oakland before all this blew up?<\/p>\n Keak goes all the way back to the mob music era of the \u201990s. He was in the group 3X Krazy from East Oakland, and they released an album called Stackin\u2019 Chips in 1997 on Virgin\u2019s Noo Trybe label. I actually wrote the press release for it. I remember Keak, Agerman, and Bart coming to our office and sitting down for the interview, and they were talking so much slang that I had no idea what they were talking about. They had their own language, their own code. There wasn\u2019t a word left untouched.<\/p>\n Keak took that with him when he became a solo artist in the late \u201990s, and I think his album Sneakacydal was the first mention of hyphy on a record. He claims to have made up the word, which is a combination of \u201chyper\u201d and \u201cfly.\u201d Originally, it had negative connotations, because it meant you were doing too much. You walk into a room and knock over all the cups, and you don\u2019t even look back to pick them up. You just go sit down. That\u2019s hyphy. But over time, it became an expression of a vibrant energy that had a value all its own.<\/p>\n Keak\u2019s first appearance was in the early \u201990s, on C-Bo\u2019s Autopsy, when he was a teenager, alongside Agerman. So he\u2019s always been in the hardcore gangster rap arena. But his character is interesting because he combines the gangster and the trickster from African American folklore. On one hand, he\u2019s hardcore, and he\u2019s not afraid of confrontation. On the other hand, he\u2019s a trickster, always bragging that he\u2019s so hyphy he\u2019ll steal your girl. I went back and listened to Sonny Boy Williamson II and John Lee Hooker, blues from the 1950s, and they\u2019re talking about the same things.<\/p>\n The \u201cTell Me When to Go\u201d video was filmed in part at YouthUprising<\/a>, a youth center in deep East Oakland that still operates today and used to hold turf dance battles. What was the relationship between these artists and Oakland institutions and communities?<\/p>\n The artists were embraced by the community. Too Short volunteered at Youth Uprising; I wrote a story about that for the East Bay Express in, I believe, 2007. They were giving young people free studio time as part of an initiative to get them off the streets and into something productive. While you were there, they\u2019d encourage you to take a teen pregnancy class or sign up for employment training. It had all these wraparound services, but they were definitely using hip hop as a way to get youth in the door.<\/p>\n They started hosting turf dancing competitions that drew hundreds of people. There were three or four main groups, like the Animaniacs, the Architeckz, and the Turf Feinz, but it was open to everyone, so people from the community who had been practicing could compete, too. It was very vibrant.<\/p>\n When I did a feature for Vibe in 2006, we did the photo shoot at Youth Uprising. E-40 was there, FAB was there, and all these people came out to be part of the vibe and represent the hyphy movement. It felt great that these rappers were giving something back to the community.<\/p>\n Many of our readers know Mistah FAB today as the streetwear designer behind Dope Era<\/a> and as an Oakland community organizer. In your story, he describes 2006 as both the best and the most chaotic year of his life. Bring us inside his story.<\/p>\n FAB was at the center of the storm. His 2005 album Son of a Pimp on Thizz Entertainment was one of the most iconic hyphy albums. I\u2019d put it alongside The Slapaddict by Traxamillion, which is a compilation of tracks he produced but sounds like a coherent album because it\u2019s all one producer.<\/p>\n FAB started out as a battle rapper and a conscious rapper. If you listen to his debut album from around 2002 or 2003, there\u2019s no hyphy on it at all, because hyphy wasn\u2019t a thing yet. By 2005, it was. When I talked to him, he told me he only had three hyphy tracks on Son of a Pimp. But those three tracks were infectious. They got on the radio, they defined the moment, and they accelerated the movement.<\/p>\n The photos in your first story were taken by Bay Area photojournalist D-Ray. Who is she, and how did she make those images?<\/p>\n