Hip-Hop Stunt ‘Recipe For Disaster’

“Ghost riding the whip,” a stunt in which a driver gets out of his car and dances around and on top of the slowly moving vehicle to a thumping hip-hop beat, has gotten at least two people killed, led to numerous injuries and alarmed police on the West Coast and beyond.

A fad among devotees of a West Coast strain of hip-hop music called hyphy, the stunt has been celebrated in song and performed in numerous homemade videos posted on YouTube.

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Earlier this month, Davender Gulley, a ghost-riding 18-year-old, died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out of the window of an SUV in Stockton, police said. In October, a 36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada’s first ghost-riding fatality.

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Hyphy was born in the San Francisco Bay cities of Oakland, Richmond and Vallejo in the late 1990s, and devotees often hold late-night car rallies called sideshows, where crowds perform risky stunts, including ghost riding.

Ghost riding refers to the absence of a driver. “The whip” is urban slang for your car. Typically, the driver drops the car into neutral and dances around and on top of the vehicle while it inches forward.

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The Vallejo-bred rapper E-40 introduced mainstream listeners to ghost riding with the single “Tell Me When to Go,” whose lyrics describe how to pull it off. Another single, “Ghostride It,” by Oakland rapper Mistah F.A.B., offers a step-by-step guide: “Pull up. Hop out, all in one motion. Dancing on the hood, while the car still rollin’.”

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