“My bikes goes hard, don’t need no car” says the scraper bikers of the San Francisco Bay Area hyphy movement.
The scraper bike movement that originated in Oakland, Calif. is now sweeping the world. “Scrapers” in the hip-hop world are huge cars with rims so big they scrape the inside of the wheel well. According to a NRP story aired last year, Tyrone Stevenson Jr. (better known as “Scraper Bike King”) first thought to apply the aesthetic of the scraper car by fitting large wheels on small bike frames and painting the frames to match the rims, accenting them with colorful foil wrappers from food like Oreos, Doritos and Lemonhead. I saw several scraper bikes on display at the Oakland Airport on a recent trip to my hometown in the South Bay. They’re works of art as much as they are vehicles.
Stevenson made his first scraper bike because he couldn’t afford the car version. Now he makes a living designing them, while giving teenagers in his community creative and healthy ways to channel their energy.
Click here to watch the YouTube rap music video that started the now world-wide scraper bike phenomenon.