What Motivational Educational Entertainment (MEE) has learned about popular urban youth culture and the "hip-hop generation" is updated and expanded, focusing on substance use and abuse, violence, and sexuality. Qualitative focus groups were used to obtain the opinions of former high school dropouts who were enrolled in General Equivalency Diploma (GED) programs, attendees at a rap concert, and inner city residents. The hip-hop generation remains difficult to categorize, with no real unifying force that allows use of a single strategy for influencing behaviors. Subgroups are differentiated by age, beliefs, and motivations. An important subgroup is young people involved in the drug subculture. Although many youth within this drug culture consider marijuana use as generally socially acceptable, as is use of alcohol, use of crack cocaine is not usually tolerated in friends. Violence remains interpersonal and one-on-one in nature, and the gun culture is generally recognized. The attitudes of urban teens toward sex and sexuality seem to be very much formed by peer pressure and the media. Awareness of sexually transmitted diseases is high, but explicit factual information about transmission and symptoms is lacking. Shifts of the boundaries and rules of the hip-hop culture are constant, and continual study is required to understand the trends in urban youth life. (SLD)