Huge article on E-40 in usa today
- Thread starter sfgiants2001
- Start date
Rapper E-40's raucous hit Tell Me When to Go, with Keak da Sneak, is giving the mainstream a glimpse of the Bay Area's hyphy craze. The music, which is an even rowdier cousin to the South's crunk, is part of a youth-oriented movement that has its own dances, slang, fashion and car culture.
The veteran rapper hopes the attention hyphy (pronounced HIGH-fee) is attracting will return the hip-hop spotlight to the influential but long-neglected Northern California region.
LEARN THE LINGO: Learn hyphy slang
"It started out in Oakland and just spread through the Bay Area," says E-40 (Earl Stevens), whose recently released album, My Ghetto Report Card, was produced by crunk king Lil' Jon. "The word hyphy itself means energetic or fired up or just doing the fool. It's a stress reliever. The music makes the kids go silly, go bananas, go coconuts, go stupid."
Going stupid can entail anything from frenzied dancing to doing donuts in vintage muscle cars to riding with all the car doors open and the speakers blaring. The movement is about letting go of inhibitions and having fun, and it takes some intense party music to incite its release. E-40 highlights the local kids' typical spontaneous, frenzied wilding out in Tell Me's black-and-white video as the song intones "tell me where to go ... Go dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb" over a thumping bass line.
Kids can go hyphy in clubs or in the streets or in long strings of cars, vans and campers, where they dance on the hoods and stand up through sunroofs to shake their dreadlocks.
Most of the elements of the hyphy movement were already present in the Bay Area before it was ever given a name.
Hyphy was originally neighborhood slang for uncontrolled anger, but eventually came to mean an unbridled release of energy. Keak da Sneak was the first rapper to use the term, on the song Cool from his 1998 album Sneakacidle. But it wasn't until 2004's Hyphy by The Federation, featuring E-40, that the music really got its name and style. Since then, hyphy music has proliferated with such acts as Mistah F.A.B., Messy Marv, Kin Smoke, Turf Talk, Droop-e and others, some of whom are now getting attention from major labels.
"We've always been different out here, and that's how the younger generation expresses themselves," says Turf Talk, who burned up the local airwaves last year with The Slumper and is an in-demand guest rapper on other records. "That is what is making people pay attention to us because they are seeing how much energy and fun we're having out here."
Producer Droop-e, E-40's 18-year-old son, who just released the album Fedi Fetcher and the Money Stretcher with B-Slimm, says the music "really has to do with the bass and how it hits you and what it makes you want to do." Droop-e (Earl Stevens Jr.), whose father surprised him with a home studio when he was 15, has become one of the movement's hottest beatmakers.
Rick Rock (Ricardo Thomas), who has worked with the likes of Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes and Mariah Carey, says he recognized that kids were getting hyphy to almost any uptempo party music. He decided that it deserved its own unique sound.
"I told E-40 that they'll go dumb to whatever — a Lil' Jon song or anything — but this is ours," he says. "It reflects our culture. Our demographic. It was like in the South, where they used to listen to everything. Then they found their own sound, and that's what they listened to. We found ourselves, and we are going to go stupid to our own stuff and really feel proud about what we are doing."
Allen Gordon, former chief editor of Rap Pages magazine and a longtime Bay Area resident, says the late Mac Dre (who was gunned down in Kansas City in 2004) and his Thizz Entertainment camp were the first to pay attention to the way kids were reacting at their concerts and in the streets, and began catering to them at the shows and on records. Those activities had been going on for several years before coalescing into the hyphy movement. He says bass-driven productions such as Rick Rock's, for example, are tailored to the head-snapping and high-speed foot and shoulder movements of hyphy dances.
"The Bay Area has always been known for dancing," says Turf Talk, who is working with Rock and others on his upcoming album, West Coast Vaccine. "You might find the hardest gangsters out here dancing, because that's in our blood."
The music of the Bay Area has always reflected its independence from mainstream trends, whether it was the '60s R&B of Sly & the Family Stone or later, Tony Toni Toné, or its own brand of hip-hop, from Digital Underground onward.
E-40 says it has been more than a dozen years since Bay Area hip-hop has had so much attention. At that time, he and rappers such as Too Short, Spice-1 and others started getting major label deals after selling thousands of records as independents. He says they originally created a street demand for their music and sold records out of the trunks of their cars.
"We've always been hustlers and I'm not speaking about illegal hustlers," says E-40. "We know how to make a way out of no way. Too Short is the godfather and I'm like the ambassador."
But despite some individual success, the region's rappers never exploded in the mainstream the way those from other cities did. E-40 says Master P, for example, took the lessons he learned while living in Richmond, Calif., and built his No Limit empire in his native New Orleans.
"Every record label was getting at us at that time, but we fumbled the ball," says E-40, whose My Ghetto Report Card entered the Billboard album chart at No. 3 in March. "I hung on like a hubcap in the fast lane along with a few other rappers, and now it's time again. We had a 10-year drought and they went to other regions and were bypassing us like the surgery out here. But we're trendsetters, and the rap game without the Bay Area is like old folks without bingo."
The region is responsible for much of hip-hop's lingo, though it doesn't always get credit for it. E-40, who is legendary for his use and creation of slang (e.g., "fa sheezy" and "fa shizzle," "collar poppin'," "it's all gravy," "what's up pimpin' " — see sidebar), is working on E-40's Dictionary Book of Slang, Vol. 1 to put it all in one place.
"I was hesitant to do it for many years because I didn't know if I was going to be giving too much game up," says E-40, who is also producing a Hype on Hyphy DVD. "If I got paid for every word that I put out there in the air where it's fair, I'd be a billionaire. But they are running away with the game now. I'm not mad at them. We're just innovators."
At the moment, E-40 is as hot as he has ever been. His album is out on Lil' Jon's Warner Bros.-affiliated BME imprint, and his second single, U and Dat, with T-Pain and Kandi Girl, is already headed up the charts. He says he had known Lil' Jon for years through their mutual friendship with Too Short. E-40 had several offers for a record label deal after his 10-year stay at Jive Records ended, and felt that signing with Lil' Jon was the best fit.
"I knew he could hyphy because people in the Bay would dance off his music when it doesn't even say anything about hyphy," he says.
Meanwhile, he's featured along with Sean Paul of The Youngbloodz on Lil' Jon's new hit, Snap Yo' Fingers.
"I'm a part of two movements now," he says, referring to Atlanta's snap music, which has been popularized by Dem Franchize Boyz and D4L.
Gordon says that E-40's My Ghetto Report Card has given hyphy a boost, but whether it will become a lasting trend remains to be seen.
"It was a great album and it might send some eyes this way to see who else is out here," Gordon says. "You'll probably see a lot of artists now have hyphy songs on their albums."
Rock, who's producing The Federation's upcoming album, It's Whatever, which is due on Warner Bros. this summer, says Bay Area artists can win mainstream appeal beyond the hyphy movement. The key, he feels, is putting out good music, similar to what happened in the South, which has produced a slew of mainstream artists in recent years.
"Look at a group like Outkast," he says. "That's a group that's going to be there, because they broke the chain of just being a regional group. That's what I'm trying to do now with my group. If we can do nice, big records and not just hyphy records, we will do well."
Flambosting the hyphy nation
Updated 4/13/2006 8:34 PM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this
The Bay Area's hyphy movement has spawned a rich lexicon of slang and customs. USA TODAY's Steve Jones translates.
•Flambosting: All manner of showing off.
FIND OUT MORE: Hyphy pulls a Bay Area breakout
•Ghostride the whip: Driver walks alongside slow-rolling car with the door open, giving the appearance that the car is driving itself. Passengers ride with all the doors open and sometimes leap out of the moving cars.
•Gas-brake dippin': Driving while quickly alternating between stomping on the gas and the brake.
•Hyphy train: A wild, mobile party with a long line of cars with all the doors open, in which occupants ghost-ride, flambost, dance on the hood and roof, and otherwise get hyphy.
•Scrapers: Vintage four-door American sedans with whistling pipes, oversize spinning rims and a powerful stereo system. They hang low in the back and send off sparks when you're gas-brake dipping.
•Stunna shades: Oversized dark glasses that help accessorize the sagging jeans, white T-shirts and dreadlocks that are part of hyphy fashion.
•Stunting: Turning donuts, figure eights and other car tricks. Allen Gordon, former editor of Rap Pages magazine, says, "If you can spell out your name in tire tracks in the street — you're the man."
•Thizzing: The feeling that comes from popping pills while listening to the music and getting hyphy. Not condoned by many hyphy followers.
SLY said:
Keak da Sneak was the first rapper to use the term, on the song Cool from his 1998 album Sneakacidle. But it wasn't until 2004's Hyphy by The Federation, featuring E-40, that the music really got its name and style. Since then, hyphy music has proliferated with such acts as Mistah F.A.B., Messy Marv, Kin Smoke, Turf Talk, Droop-e and others, some of whom are now getting attention from major labels.