E-40, a Bay Area icon, has been sitting on the sidelines of the Golden State Warriors NBA Finals games, rocking a yellow-and-blue hoodie and chunky chains from his indie label Sick Wid It Records, established in 1989. The title is at stake tonight during game 5 in Oakland as the Warriors come in with a 3-1 lead against the Cavaliers, but the team already proved that talent, perseverance and, of course, refined strategy fuel its city. Read more…

40 has always repped his hometown, from spearheading the mobb music movement in the ’90s (a slower, 808-driven precursor to hyphy pioneered by Mike Mosley, Studio Ton and Sam Bostic) to building up the hyphy movement in the early 2000s. Ten years ago, in 2006, rappers including E-40, Mistah F.A.B., Too $hort, and Keak Da Sneak crystallized hyphy, finishing the work started by the late Mac Dre, who passed away in 2004. The movement was defined by its parties (called “sideshows” by those in the know), wearing stunna shades, and ghost riding the whip (a dangerous and highly criticized act in which the driver puts a car in neutral and walks alongside or on top of it as it rolls)—not to mention its particular musical style, anthems with BPMs cranked high.

“Gettin’ hyphy is just gettin’ hype, takin’ it there,” Draymond Green says while on the set of Beats By Dre’s latest commercial shoot. The Warriors power forward elaborates, “Like gettin’ in your zone and just being live. That’s the whole theme. That’s the Bay in a nutshell, you know? Be live, be you. You ain’t gotta change—just be yourself and be live wit’ it.”

Coined by Keak Da Sneak in 1994, hyphy had its moment in 2006, when E-40 dropped his pivotal album My Ghetto Report Card, spawning the mainstream radio hit “Tell Me When To Go,” featuring Keak. 40 and Keak invoked the past for the new Beats By Dre commercial, recreating the song’s original music video, including Green in the foreground of the sideshows.

Back in 2006, E-40 had signed with Warner Bros., which also welcomed rap trio the Federation (produced by hyphy sound innovator Rick Rock) to its roster, and hyphy was poised to break on a mainstream level—even MTV stopped by the Bay to film a documentary on the little subgenre that could.

“The whole hyphy movement came from the ‘hood,” says T-7 of Turf Feinz, a prominent dance crew from Oakland that formed around the time hyphy took hold. “It was like one block from another block expressin’ theyself without having to take it to violence. Hyphy was young kids our age finding something positive to represent where we from.”

But it was a short-lived, hard-boiled glimpse of what could be. Rappers in the Bay weren’t ready to deal with the influx of attention, and few had the business acumen to carry it through. Labels kept their focus narrow, on just a few rappers, and the Internet wasn’t so ubiquitous to serve as a promotional tool for the insular movement. As soon as the mainstream media determined that hyphy was up next, it died down before the Bay’s very eyes. Elements of hyphy linger on—in the cold, upbeat bounce of DJ Mustard’s beats, in EDM’s infatuation with hip-hop, in the contemporary rap lexicon—but the Bay wasn’t prepared to attain mainstream glory in a pre-YouTube era, commodified by a corporate system that didn’t know how to properly promote its artists.

Ten years after hyphy’s explosion, the Bay’s finest weigh in on how it happened and what could have been.

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