Welcome to Part One of the Hyphy show, or actually, the hyphy tour!

Your tour guide is 20-year-old Laquoia Simmons, hyphy aficionado and native of the San Francisco Bay Area, where hyphy was born.

Laquoia invites you to join five fellow travelers on our little excursion. There’s a lot on the itinerary…first, a local music shop, a store that has a very hyphy clientele…then you tune into a music theory expert who breaks down this brand of hip-hop…and another expert gives some straight talk on thizz, hyphy slang for the drug ecstacy…but don’t get too distracted by the talking heads…there’s a bigger mission at hand…you’re searching for the final resting place of hyphy’s godfather, rapper Mac Dre.

Will you find it?

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This week’s word – “crib” – slang for the place you call home, your shelter.  This hour you’re going to be touring the broadest range of cribs we could think of…

For example, one of our gang-involved correspondents goes on the road with a local realtor to hear about the challenges of buying a house (in the rival gangs’ neighborhood!)…

And then, our hosts get in the studio wtih a young man just back from prison and ask what it was like to call prison home…

And next we got all the way to New Orleans to hear what it’s like when your crib turns into a trap.

All that in this hour dedicated to defining the word “crib”.

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Hood – just an abbreviation for neighborhood? or something else entirely? This question is at the heart of this week’s audio dictionary entry.

In this hour – our local California kids join Chicago teens to describe the drama of their hoods.

Plus we get on the line with Mr. Kevin Eps, who, as the maker of “Straight Outta Hunter’s Point”, is the pioneer of the “hood” documentary.

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This week on Voice of Youth –

Where every week we take a different term of teen slang and define it as only youth can –

The word, “Transformer”, slang for someone who “defects” from one gang to its rival. But that definition is just the beginning of this audio dictionary entry.

Kids tell stories about “transformers”, full of dramatic twists and turns, one young woman reaps the benefits of a dramatic transformation in style, and a gay teen talks about the transformers of his everyday life.

And of course, our three hosts give you an earful of sagas and situations, questions and comments, all about the word “transformer”

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Every week we take a different word or phrase of teen slang and define it as only youth can. This week’s word – Beef.

 In this next hour – writer, editor, and director Pete Alton gives us the skinny on the scandalous beef between rappers…

A famous actor advises one of our producers to squash the beef…

A non-violence activist tells about her work squashing Middle East beef…

And of course, our hosts give you an earful of sagas and situations, questions and comments, all about beef.

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Bread, defined as money.  Listen as youth determine the three things money is supposed to be, and the times it’s not.

Silly side jobs, last-ditch loans, a coming market crash…all these things are touched on as you hear short stories from the streets, a visit to a paycheck advance place, a long-distance call with an economic anthropologist…

Three hosts, three acts, Voice of Youth, the bread show.

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Imagine if you will a living room, in the afternoon.  On the television, in the background, beautiful people, caught up in decadent drama, sobbing in soft focus, soap opera style.  In that room, in the foreground, everyday people erupting with real aggression, fighting and crying, police and paperwork.

A strange image but the strong one we were left with after two weeks of exploring the electoral process

An exploration less like a civics lesson and more like a Twilight Zone-type adventure, getting caught between two tangential but very separate universes:  the multi-million dollar election cycle choosing representatives for people, many of them, caught in a cycle of violence and poverty their representatives seem utterly unrelated and untouched by.

Coming up, a tale of two cycles, told with melancholy and the frustration of futility, in a collection of conversations and reflections.

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Election 2006: Who had _, got _, and went _.

Want to fill in the blanks? This show translates the mid-term election headlines into the words said among youth. On the way our hosts must drive towards the core of the questions: what is politics and why should I care?

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The focus of this show?

Violenc – and domestic violence in particular…so as you can imagine the show is not for the faint of heart…

so strap yourself in, because you’re about to hear the rapper that put the M in Mysogynist – that’s right Eminem, the rapper who many songs like this one coming up, a lurid fantasy about killing his ex-wife.

Remember the album of this song sold 19 million copies worldwide, so as you listen to this brief excerpt, just imagine how many young minds have taken in the following lyrics…

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