209 GONE HYPHY

Two Sundays ago, promoters in the city of Modesto held a club for the under agers. Promoted as a "hyphy" event all over Myspace, the function ended up maximizing the 300 people capacity of the venue, thus leaving a plethora of youth to be left outside, congregating with nothing else to do. What ends up happening?

These articles might answer your question:

Brawl: 'Hyphy' or a lot of hype?

Downtown brawl still a puzzle

Brawl nips shot at 'best community' for kids list

Examine Sunday brawl and learn lessons from it

Police will attend meeting on melee

To sum up what happened: Bitter high schoolers use the streets of downtown Modesto to get dumb at. Someone gets their purse snatched. Cops are called in, in great numbers. Cops overreact and start attacking minors. 17 minors arrested. Cops blame hyphy culture; community activists blame the cops.

As much as I can assume that young fad riding "thizz kids" from Central California shared some of the responsibility to the irresponsible behavior, from what I've read and heard about the incident, the overseers officers clearly overstepped their boundaries.

Today, I arrived in Turlock to visit the family, and on the front page of the Modesto Bee is this article:

Parents, teens decry officers' response

My favorite part of this article has to be a quote from one of the defensive police officers:

"A promoter told me this hyphy stuff is just short of having sex," Wasden said. "Parents, you need to know what's being promoted to your children."

Several parents applauded Wasden's words about responsibility, even as many teens laughed at his definition of hyphy. The teens countered that hyphy is nothing more than a dance during which kids "get loose." One woman compared it to punk rockers who head bang.

Though, I would disagree with the "nothing more than a dance" explanation by the teens, the statement by the officer clearly shows his lack of understanding of youth culture, which is definitely a problem when trying to find solutions to the effects of youth idleness.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I go on my trips back home to Turlock to visit the family, I rarely have the opportunity to see what the nightlife is in the neighboring town of Modesto. While I have been to a few bars in Modesto, I never have the opportunity to do a full on ethnography about the local scene and to see how much the "hyphy movement" has spread to the region. So, I have never witnessed anything like this while I've been out in Modesto. It is without a doubt, though, that hyphy has left its footprint in the soil of the 209, as Bay Area rap has done for the past 15-20 years.

*In somewhat related news, Inside Edition aired their own piece on ghostriding the whip lasst Friday. Although I had to miss it because the San Diego channel fcuked up and aired an episode from the previous week, apparently our good friend Jonathan Lovecchio and the Middle Aged White Men Crisis Posse were in full effect in the segment.