Mac Dre and the Hyphy Movement

Andre Louis Hicks was born in Oakland on July fifth, nineteen seventy, and grew up in Vallejo. He began rapping in high school, became known as Mac Dre, and spent the nineteen nineties building an independent rap career from the Bay Area while periodically colliding with the federal justice system, he served time in the early nineties on charges related to a string of bank robberies he maintained he did not commit, recording albums by phone from prison in a move that became part of his legend.

By the early two thousands, Mac Dre had founded Thizz Entertainment and was one of the primary architects of a Bay Area hip-hop style and subculture called hyphy, a term coined by Oakland rapper Keak da Sneak meaning hyperactive, and a sound built on grinding, pounding rhythms, ecstatic dance, car culture including the practice of ghost-riding the whip, and slang dense enough to constitute a regional dialect. E Forty was there too, as was Too Short from Oakland. But for many Bay Area listeners, Mac Dre was hyphy's most vivid embodiment.

On November first, two thousand four, after a show in Kansas City, Missouri, an unidentified gunman shot at the van carrying Mac Dre and his crew as they traveled on U.S. Route Seventy-One in the early morning hours. The van crashed. Hicks was pronounced dead at the scene. He was thirty-four years old. The case has never been solved.

The hyphy movement reached national mainstream attention in two thousand six with E Forty's hit 'Tell Me When to Go.' Mac Dre did not live to see it.