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As those of you who hit up hip hop blogs other than 33jones know, the hyphy movement has been gaining momentum recently. Hyphy ("hyper/fly") has been around for a couple of years, but really has only gotten some play in the mainstream in the last couple of months. As far as I can tell, hyphy consists of three things:
A rap song with a beat that's like something Lil John would put out on a bad day (though thankfully without the Lil' John adlibs, oookaaaay) and lyrics filled with a bunch of Bay area slang. Example: Keak Da Sneak.
A crowd dancing like escapees from a mental institution tripping off of x, a.k.a. "Riding the Yellow Bus." Example: this dude.
The third part of being hyphy, and the one that actually makes this whole "movement" interesting for me, is Ghost Riding. I'll just take the definition directly from wikipedia: Ghost Riding is a popular activity in Oakland, California. It involves getting out of your moving car and dancing on the hood of the car. You probably can't fully appreciate this until you see a video of it, so here you go.
For those of you who saw MTv's My Block: The Bay, you've seen ghost riding. At one point in Mtv's documentary, host Sway is riding down the street with Too Short. Out of nowhere, heading in the other direction, are two dudes walking outside of their $50,000 Escalade while its going about 5mph. The best part is that no one in the neighborhood is acting like this is anything out of the ordinary. If you pulled that out here in Jersey, I'm not exactly sure how far you would get, but it would eventually involve the police department and an overnight in the hospital to remove the nightstick from your cranium.
One of the songs that seems to have spurred recent interest in hyphy is E-40's Tell Me When To Go featuring Keak Da Sneak. I'm putting up the remix of the song, featuring Kanye West. Ultimately, I don't think hyphy is going to take off like Crunk music did. Crunk at least had the advantage of being popular in strip clubs. Judge for yourself though:
Download Tell Me When To Go Remix (mp3)
Brief, somewhat related footnote: the first time I ever heard "iz" or "izzle" added to a word (ex. Fo Shizzle my Nizzle) was in a UTFO song from the mid 80's. So while E-40 may create a bunch of slang, he sometimes gets a little more credit than he deserves.
3/20/2006 1:16:30 PM posted by Fresh