View the full episode transcript.
Despite the uptempo party music and the perception of free-spirited fun, it’s clear that 2006 was a violent year in my Northern Californian community. But until recently, I hadn’t stopped to consider the bigger picture.
By stepping back and looking at the issues impacting the kids of the Bay Area in the early 2000s, during the hyphy movement, I realized two things:
First, those issues– violence and crime, as well as poverty, sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination– are no different from the issues we’re facing today. Secondly, if you look closely enough, you’ll see that these issues are rooted in capitalism and imperialism.
In this episode we talk to Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who represents the East Bay, about her history of dealing with these issues while serving this community for the past 25 years.
We hear from Rich Iyala, a younger San Francisco based artist who grew up in the shadow of the hyphy movement and wrote a song that inspired multiple aerosol artists to write tags that read, “hyphy children got trauma(s)” and “hyphy kids got trauma.”
We also hear from a senior at Oakland’s Fremont High school, T’Jon, who was born in 2006. During a recent interview with filmmaker Boots Riley for KDOL’s show The Town Talks, T’Jon shares his thoughts about the power of art, culture and community, as exemplified by the hyphy movement.
Episode Transcript
Pendarvis Harshaw, host: Heads up, this podcast contains explicit language.
[Music]
Pendarvis Harshaw: All throughout my life, even before becoming a journalist, I’ve kept a journal. I still have every single notebook, and there’s over 60 of ‘em. Hella chicken scratch on yellow legal pads, little windows into my mindstate and notes on what was going on around me.
While working on this project, I looked back a few from 2006. An entry from July of that year reads,
“Hyphy/ Metros/ Purple/ Jordans/ And Bathing Ape Hoodies/ Bootleg movies/ Turf Dancers/ speakers in the grill of scrapers/ cut the dreads off/ return to fading/ faded. Dark liquor and shit/ bus fare is $1.10/ and that 10 cents kills it/ Rather do it that way/ than to put $3.00 a gallon/ in the tank/ unless you got candy paint and dubs on yo thang/ don’t even come out to play/ I mean I mean, the word is geese/ geeks/ smirkish streets/ clean = wet/ O.G. thers = Vet/ stay safe = you blessed/ So many laid to rest, I done seen RIP on every piece of clothing except a prom dress…”
Between these little scribbles were phone numbers and doodles– a bunch of crude self portraits drawn in pen. And there’s even a “To Do list” I wrote just before leaving Oakland, for Howard University.
[Muffled sounds of shuffling paper] “Before I leave for Washington, D.C: Finish the Zeus DVD, go to a baseball game, get three fitted caps, two pair of jeans…”
[sounds of distant and lively chatter outdoors]
[Music]
Pendarvis Harshaw: I spent the fall of 2006 in Washington D.C., adjusting to the weather and the social climate of the east coast.
I loved the diversity within the Black community on campus. There’s nothing like attending an HBCU. Dudes with gold ones and locs, pursuing their PhDs. Women in business suits, with Wall Street connections and fly hairdos. Weedheads who didn’t do anything but sit on the same bench stoned every day.
I was cool with em all, as well as the Cali club crew, a few D.C. folks and the poets, but I was still going through culture shock. I was hella far away from the Bay.
At one party I got laughed at for wearing glasses with no lenses, and in class, folks looked at me weird for rocking a hoodie with a picture of my deceased friend’s face on it. I grew homesick, and I left school and took an extended Thanksgiving break back in the Bay.
Covered in hugs from the people I love, I was happy to be home. But toward the end of my trip, I was walking out of my mom’s house, as I closed the gate, looked down the street, and saw police lights and yellow tape.
By the time I got to my cousin’s house, a five minute drive if you catch every green light, word had spread: Marcel Campbell, a friend who we called Cell, had been killed.
[Music]
Pendarvis Harshaw: Considered a young OG, Cell was more mature than his age, both through his fashion – peacoats and casual shoes, as well as through his temperament – ever cool. A short brotha with long locs, he’d share wisdom through jokes, shaking your hand while talking to you — simultaneous conversation and affirmation. He was yet another young person gone too soon.
I didn’t get to attend Cell’s memorial. I had to head back to school soon after we got the news of his passing.
I left the streets of the East Bay, headed back to the east coast for those final weeks of 2006. Looking out the airplane window and scribbling in my journal, I wrote a poem using the idea of a bridge as a metaphor for the shaky grounds my community was standing on.
[Music]
Pendarvis Harshaw:
Some would say never burn a bridge
But they never tell you to check on it/ make sure that it holds
The wind, the rain/ the heat and the snow
The moment I know
This infrastructure isn’t conducting
The reason why it was constructed
The bolts loosen/ the poles start to rust and
Weak links in the chain
The bridge ain’t standing the same
Lord forbid/ this bridge/ fall back into the Bay
I’m Pendarvis Harshaw, and this is Hyphy Kids Got Trauma.
While taking classes at Howard, I saw that Washington D.C. – almost three-thousand miles away from Oakland – was a world removed from scraper bikes and hyphy trains. By stepping outside of my Bay Area bubble, I was exposed to broader issues impacting the world.
And being in the nation’s capital, I was also closer to the elected officials who are in the seat of power in this country.
Not far from my dorm room there was someone else from Oakland who was also thinking about the bigger issues impacting this
generation, with a special focus on the people from the East Bay…
[Music]
Congresswoman Barbara Lee, guest: I am Congresswoman Barbara Lee and I represent the 12th Congressional District.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Rep. Lee’s district is in Alameda county, which includes the East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, and more. She tells me that she appreciates what hip-hop artists have done for the region.
Rep. Barbara Lee: It’s a really cool culture in Oakland…
Pendarvis Harshaw: And she sees how legislation has impacted the way of life for a generation of kids from the region she represents.
Rep. Barbara Lee: It’s really sad because this is the Bay Area and we shouldn’t have policies that allow for gentrification, but that… that happened.
Pendarvis Harshaw: When Congresswoman Lee entered office in April of 1998, Black folks accounted for nearly 40% of Oakland’s population. The most recent Census reports that Oakland’s Black population is down to about 20%.
Back at the turn of the millennium, when I was a teen living in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., it was Representative Lee’s vote – the sole ballot cast against going to war in Afghanistan – that introduced me to her work.
Over the years, I’ve watched as she’s championed reproductive health and combated racism. She’s fought for the rights of Black folks here and abroad, and represented her region at every turn.
While no person – especially a politician – is perfect, I’ve appreciated how she’s been critical of systemic racism and imperialism. She’s pushed for low-income housing, organized against air pollutants, and fought against the hyper-policing of Black people.
And even with these efforts over the years, Rep. Lee realizes that all of these layers of issues created a world where it’s damn near impossible for people to walk around unscathed.
Rep. Barbara Lee: I can understand the environment and the context of what was taking place during that time. In terms of the political environment, that causes a lot of anxiety. And a lot of, I don’t want to say depression, but quite a bit of pessimism, and uncertainty about where this country and where the world is going. Just like now.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Before even considering stats and numerical breakdowns of crime, poverty and the like, we have to start with the mindstate of folks at the time we’re talking about, 2006.
These hyphy teenagers, myself included, we were stepping into the world with so much pessimism that it toed the line of nihilism.
We were told to go out there and make a living while the unemployment rate was soaring. It jumped from about 5% in the year 2006 to nearly 10% in the year 2010.
No wonder after years of a downward trend, national crime reportedly had an uptick around that same period. To be clear, I’m not blaming the unemployed, not even the small-time criminals. Nah, I’m looking at the system that creates this environment.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee says that this country’s philosophy on violence has laid the foundation for my generation – and many generations of Americans. A lot of us think that violence is how we should solve our problems.
[Music]
Rep. Barbara Lee: I’ve been very involved in trying to prevent wars and trying to hold these presidents accountable for starting wars. And what the impact has been, I think, especially on young people, maybe like violence, you know, the government uses violence, so what’s the problem? You know, when I said the violence should not be an option, well, why does the government engage in violence? Why are there so many guns on the street? Why can’t you do something about stopping this kind of violence?
Pendarvis Harshaw: Stop the violence? Yeah right. Despite the many anti-violence initiatives and peace movements I’ve seen, this country is entrenched in violence.
I’ve gotten used to mass shootings happening on the regular, and videos of police killings circulate with the morning news. It’s a common thing, unfortunately.
Rep. Barbara Lee: I think the trauma and some of the political aspects of that time and now are very concerning to me
Pendarvis Harshaw: Man, I was concerned too, but most of my focus was on the issue of homicides, and other blatant examples of violence. I hadn’t stepped back and looked at the bigger picture of this nation. How violence is at its core; that’s how we’re governed.
Prisons are violent and oppressive by nature. And that’s only compounded when you consider the inadequate living conditions behind bars, and the unjust system that lands folks there in the first place.
Schools, through racist curriculum and social hierarchies, can be both emotionally and physically violent.
Housing – from redlining to gentrification – violent. As a person who faced a few evictions and stints of homelessness as a kid, I can tell you, there are few things more violent than losing your home.
Even our relationships with one another – especially those that are thought to be romantic – they have issues with violence being intertwined in everything from the way we communicate to the way we treat each other sexually.
And, if you look close enough, at the root of many of the issues I’ve mentioned are violent systems of capitalism and imperialism.
Here’s Congresswoman Lee again.
Rep. Barbara Lee: To sort through all of this, is- is pretty difficult when you’re just trying to survive and make ends meet and trying to make a life for yourself and your family.
Pendarvis Harshaw: We’re a generation who was constantly shown that violence is the answer, it’s no wonder that we’d find it completely rational to choose malicious ways to solve our problems. It provides a release. And back then, in 2006, that was just part of the culture.
Rich Iyala, guest: At that time, our particular generation, we would stomp your hood and we would fuck your car up and do all kind of crazy shit because we wanted to.
Pendarvis Harshaw: That’s Rich Iyala, a San Francisco-bred hip-hop artist who has been making music for over a decade. He can make hyphy blaps, political tracks or use agile lyrics over funky horns and cool drum patterns.
At the start of this podcast, I mentioned a piece of graffiti I saw on a wall near an underpass, on 27th street in West Oakland that read, “Hyphy Kids Got Trauma”
Those words were inspired by a more recent song from Rich Iyala, the lyrics went a little something like this:
Rich Iyala: Hyphy children got trauma and I put that on mommas. Hyphy children got trauma and I put that on mommas… It turned into a chant.
Pendarvis Harshaw: The song, in its entirety, is about kids going to school and having to step over drug-addicted adults who are laid out on the street.
Rich Iyala: PTSD from the choppa got me shaking like maracas. Thought my patna went to college. Why I seen him on the block again?
Pendarvis Harshaw: Rich has never recorded the song, he’s only done live performances of it. And evidently it resonates with folks.
Rich Iyala: It’s kind of like very sad. And I cracked my voice intentionally to kind of show pain. And that’s like a thing I do in a lot of my other songs to, like, convey a very close, raw emotion, like emotionality hyphy children got trauma, you know, kind of like I cry it out and I always see that it has people have a reaction, like all throughout the crowd.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Even with seeing how people reacted to it, Rich was completely blown away when he saw his words in graffiti written on a wall in West Oakland.
Rich Iyala: It was news to me, as much as it was to anybody else, for a while I was like, Wow. Like, what is this? Or why is why is this happening?
Pendarvis Harshaw: He knew why: people were feeling it. But the thing is, he didn’t know how many people were feeling it.
At the time, I saw a few posts on different social media platforms, photos taken of the words scrawled in different locations around town.
The artist who painted the one I saw, a graffiti writer who goes by Nasty, told me that Rich’s lyrics were the inspiration. And Nasty, he did a few tags, but he didn’t do all of ‘em. Others followed.
And Rich saw it spread.
[Music]
Rich Iyala: It was funny because I looked up and I was like, What the hell is this? And then I went downtown and somebody else tagged it there. They were taking up whole walls. They were taking up like bus stops. Like trash cans, all kind of shit.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Four simple words that eloquently and succinctly speak to a wave of folks from West Oakland to East Palo Alto, the north side of Vallejo to South San Francisco. Ask anyone, who was in the Bay Area in 2006 and was into hip-hop–a fan of hyphy music or not– I bet you they’ll have a story to tell. And many folks are just now finding the words to tell it.
Rich Iyala: we’re a generation now where a lot of us, we were able to look back now and Iike, see traumas, and we’re able to articulate traumas
Pendarvis Harshaw: Adults now, the kids who grew up in that era, might’ve metaphorically burned some rubber [tires screech] while trying to gain traction on the road of life, but eventually a lot of us got around that learning curve.
I know I had to crashout a few times before I learned. It took years to process the idea that constantly smoking and drinking was my way of masking pain, and that “we ain’t listening” mentality isn’t always the way.
I had to unlearn habits that were personally abusive in order to be in better community, and relationship with others. Misogynistic ideas of what male/ female interactions look like had to be processed. And I had to learn self-worth outside of a job or accomplishments, but just for simply being human.
Shit, I had to dig deep to even appreciate my culture as a reputable part of this thing we call hip-hop. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to make this podcast. And still, there’s more work to do… Lots more.
But I’ll admit, it’s wild seeing the kids who used to dance on top of cars, now running non-profit organizations. Much respect to the folks who’ve been intentional about working through their traumas.
Here’s Rich again.
Rich Iyala: There is a dope resurgence of like Black therapy popping off in the Bay, you know, and like ask, you know, I’m sure a lot of Black therapists in the Bay, they’ll tell you in a minute that hyphy shit it was crazy.
[Music]
Pendarvis Harshaw: You don’t need to be a licensed mental health professional to look back at that time period in this region, and know that the kids of the era were heavily impacted by what was going on. And in response, we made art that helped us deal with it all.
But, c’mon man, we’re talking about Black folks, Brown folks, Children of immigrants and working class folks in the United States. There’s nothing new about making art to overcome hard times.
Today in the Town the same issues exist: there’s still community violence and economic disparities. Problems with the police, schools, the media, and elected officials. As of right now, in Oakland this year, over 90 people have been killed.
And, if we were to step back and look at the bigger picture, we’d see that the issues we’re facing are very much bred from capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and systemic racism that have been fueling this country, the same issues, just remixed for today’s environment. And just like us, young folks today are finding ways of dealing with it all, while enjoying art, culture and community.
Just days before this podcast series dropped, I stopped by Oakland’s Fremont High School. Inside of a studio in the school’s media center, a handful of students were on stage, as they were in conversation with filmmaker and hip-hop artist, Boots Riley. This was for a video series produced by KDOL called The Town Talks.
My ears perked up and I sat forward in my seat, listening to the second question of the evening come in from a young man wearing a Bathing Ape shirt, stylish ripped jeans and some black Jordans:
T’Jon: Hello, my name is T’Jon, and my question is, what excites you about music?
Pendarvis Harshaw: Boots Riley, wearing red jogger sweats and a green jacket, as his trademark porkchop sideburns poked out of hat, responded.
Boots Riley: Mmmm. There’s an energy… you know, I like music that makes you feel alive, and um, you know, makes you feel the contradictions of the world around you, like there’s something pressing against the way things are. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’m not necessarily a fan of music that’s supposed to be in the background.
Pendarvis Harshaw: At that point, my head nearly exploded. For the past year I’d been writing about the contradictions of art and society, as well as music that can’t be relegated to the background. Boots wasn’t talking specifically about hyphy music, but when the question was turned around, and T’Jon was asked what he likes about music– the teenager with the fresh outfit mentioned the hyphy era.
T’Jon: It gets everybody together, like, everybody has the energy. Just like, like the hyphy movement, like everybody, it was a whole movement- like everybody in the whole city just felt it, you just could feel the vibe. It’s like, when you vibe to music it’s good. Like, you can tell it’s good. Good energy and stuff.
Pendarvis Harshaw: T’Jon was born on April 20th of 2006 – a 4/20 I’ll never forget. His dad is one of my best friends, we’ve known each other since the age of four. I was at the hospital to greet the family just after T’Jon was born.
Now, nearly 18 years later, this young man was reminding me about the power of the music that came out when I was his age.
[Music]
Pendarvis Harshaw: My generation of Bay Area folks had so little, and literally did the most. We took empty parking lots where grocery stores once fed our families, and used the pavement to feed our need for entertainment. We took our trauma, put it on 22 inch rims and covered it with candy paint jobs.
The hip-hop scene went years without getting national media attention, and when the cameras came we didn’t smile. Nope, we hit ‘em with a Thizz Face and showed ‘em a dance they’d never seen.
The Bay Area created something significant out of nothing, and did so in the face of adversity – and we made it look fun.
Pendarvis Harshaw: After hearing T’Jon’s reflections, I walked away thinking about the actual hyphy kids – the babies. The young folks born in that era who are teenagers now. How can we assist them as they navigate today’s climate?
Beyond fighting for systemic changes and holding elected officials accountable, there’s a few simple things we can do.
First and foremost: listen to the young folks. Slap their music, read their poetry, appreciate their art. It’ll do wonders in uplifting their spirits, and it’ll assist us older folks in understanding their plight.
Secondly, give them space to vent. It’s hard out here for all of us, and room to process things– safe spaces– are hard to come by.
Lastly, as adults, it’s on us to work as hard as we can on ourselves, so we don’t pass down our trauma to the next generation.
And if all else fails, when the world doesn’t make sense, show ‘em how to go dumb wit it, yeah.
This is Hyphy kids Got Trauma.
Hosted by me, Pendarvis Harshaw
Produced by Maya Cueva
Edited by Chris Hambrick
Sound design and original music by Trackademics
With support from Eric Arnold, Sheree Bishop, Jen Chien, Holly Kernan, Victoria Mauleon, Marisol Medina-Cadena, Gabe Meline, Xorje Olivares, Delency Parham, Cesar Saldaña, Sayre Quevedo, Katie Sprenger, Nastia Voynovskaya, and Ryce Stoughtenborough.
This project was produced with support from PRX and is made possible, in part, by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
And this is a part of KQED’s That’s My Word project, a year-long exploration of Bay Area Hip-Hop history. Find more at BayAreaHipHop.com
RIP to Marcel Campbell, and so many more.
Until next time, peace.
Rightnowish is an arts and culture podcast produced at KQED. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or click the play button at the top of this page and subscribe to the show on NPR One, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
