Thanks to YouTube, a music video about the tricked-out bicycles posted to the site by some teenagers in Oakland, has attracted a cult following, with nearly 3 million views. The video spawned what is becoming a worldwide movement, even as it changed the lives of the young men who customized the bikes and made the video.One biker says "Because I was at a young age, getting into a lot of serious trouble, selling drugs and on the verge of going to jail. So my mom told me this is a way to channel anger and frustration, just focusing on something that's creative, something that's me, and the bikes is me."
Oakland is a town where hip-hop is king and cars known as "scrapers" are huge. They're large, bright and have rims so big that they scrape the inside of the wheel well. Stevenson and his friends took those aesthetics and applied them to bicycles, fitting large wheels on small frames.
Another biker who couldn't afford a car made do with a bike. But not just any bike. "The idea from the scraper bikes, it basically came from the cars that ride in Oakland — we call them scrapers — basically it's an old model car, such as a Buick, that's painted a custom color to match the rims. I wanted to take that and put a bike onto it."
