OKLAHOMA CITY – So much of the conversation about OKC music in 2025 has been centered on the indie, hardcore, and pop scenes, but a late push is looking to close out the year with eyes and ears firmly focused on the city’s remarkable rap game thanks to some recent releases.
While some cities and scenes across the nation have developed their own signature sounds, styles, and statures, OKC’s rap community is as diverse and varied as the culture of the city itself, even among the scene’s most consistent and prolific artists, showcasing everything from old-school beatmaking to post-modern genre-mashing.
But what these artists all have in common is their insistence on lifting up the community of OKC and its place in a modern rap world that’s been too long content with overlooking and underestimating our city.
Thanks to these blunt, relentlessly real MCs and some of our most creatively focused and groundbreaking producers, that could finally be changing.
Trip G & DJ Reaper – ‘No Vacancy’
Trip G has got to be one of the most prolific artists in OKC hip-hop over the past decade, building up a massive catalog of albums, mixtapes, and singles with new releases dropping on the regular.
But he’s also no stranger to elevating the city’s talent through his long-running Trip & Friends showcases, his Blunt Conversations podcast, and his inexhaustible drive for collaborations and guest spots.
Now, one of those collabs has grown into such a rich and productive partnership that it‘s spawned a full-length album with Trip and powerhouse producer DJ Reaper joining forces to drop “No Vacancy,” a twenty-track beast bursting with Reaper’s defining beat work and Trip’s singularly defiant confidence.
Why “No Vacancy”? Because with personalities and powers as larger-than-life as Trip and Reaper, there’s just no room for anyone else (save for a couple of vocal cameos from Alyse.)
Right out of the gate, a sample from throwback crime epic “Snowfall” announces the album’s defining theme: freedom.
For Trip, that means the confidence and the skills to be free from doubt and the clout and command to be free from the systems that would box him in or the disregard that would keep the country ignorant to Oklahoma’s rap prowess.
Track after track, he demonstrates that skill and command, not just through the requisite self-aggrandizing and comparisons to James Bond, but just as much through what feels like an endlessly versatile sense of flow and rhythm, and his signature, charismatic sense of humor. Just check out his lines about provolone and Pinterest.
But while the tracklist here is billed as “all songs that didn’t make any albums” throughout Trip and Reaper’s past collaborations and countless projects, that doesn’t mean this is an album of outtakes or castoffs.
It’s just as much a showcase for Reaper’s beat-building abilities as it is for Trip’s flow, with each new layer of string sections, blues guitars, sub bass drops, and Bond-ian orchestra stings adding to an unyielding evolution of the instrumental throughout.
Each and every track flows into the next, creating an unbroken experience that could just as easily play straight through as a half-hour, club-ready DJ set bespoke to show off Reaper’s legendary skills.
“No Vacancy” by Trip G and DJ Reaper is available on streaming services now.
S. Reidy – ‘I Think I Feel a Little Different: Part 2’
Late last year, hyper-modern indie rapper S. Reidy dropped what we thought was just a 15-minute EP of deeply honest and beautifully realized emo-rap snapshots of a scene vet opening up to age and mortality with “I Think I Feel a Little Different.”
But it turns out that was only the first half of an even deeper – and even more diverse – set of tracks tackling the biggest questions of life, death, and understanding.
So when “Part 2” dropped back in September, it completed a full album of personal declarations bisected by Reidy turning 30, with the two halves exploring all of that complicated ground on either side of that watershed.
Over shades of glitch-hop and deconstructed backbeats that recall his previous forays into electronica, Reidy bares his soul as much through the pleadingly sung emo vocals as the rhythmically motivated hip-hop bars, with “Way Up High” blurring the lines between the two maybe more than ever.
With last year’s first half focused on questioning himself, this second half turns that same line of questioning further outward, losing faith in his heroes on “Pose, Snap” and losing faith in plans and predictions on “Sure, Enough.”
But while the raps and rhymes come with all the creativity and confidence that you want from one of the hottest MCs of his scene, the standout moment comes in the form of “Ain’t That the Way,” an acoustic folk song with nothing like traditional rap to be found.
It’s a song of solidarity for everyone being crushed under the wheels of the world, regardless of what side of whose lines they’re on, which is to say it’s a genuinely old-school style folk song. Just by its inclusion here, it fits into the recent culture-wide conversation of the bridges between rap and country music and the reality that they’re all just “folk” music in different forms.
The complete “I Think I Feel a Little Different: Parts 1 & 2” by S. Reidy is available on streaming services now.
Chris The God Mc Cain & SauceMeUpGQ – ‘Birds Fly East’
In just 25 minutes, Chris McCain and producer extraordinaire SauceMeUpGQ shoot to honor the culture and community of the Eastside, elevate the whole of Oklahoma onto the national hip-hop map, and pay respects to the entire history of Black music throughout American history.
The fact that they pull it all off makes “Birds Fly East” an immediate standout for 2025.
The album doesn’t kick the doors in or crash the gates. It unfolds slowly at first, opening with a patient build that sees GQ introducing his motif and his subtly epic string loops around McCain’s fiery confidence for a full minute before ever dropping anything like a backbeat.
This is a work by two artists unconcerned with shocking or impressing their audience, keeping their eyes instead on their goal of lifting up their city and exploring its place in Black musical history.
“Home Sweet Home” introduces gospel vocalizing and 70s soul. “This a Hardtop” incorporates all the synth-y hallmarks of 80s dancefloor funk and 90s slow-jam R&B.
It grows to be all-encompassing, layering in jazz nods, human beatboxing, and even barbershop, with McCain similarly layering in the ground-level stories of life across generations in Eastside with decades spent watching rap respect start at the country’s edges and only slowly begin to move inward.
For McCain, there’s a constant battle between his mind and ambitions wanting to break out and conquer the whole world and his heart remaining forever in OKC.
The only solution is to bring the world to Oklahoma.
When he’s joined by Tony Foster Jr. on “Take Your Song Worldwide,” it’s just as much as defiant anthem of global success as it is a plea for artists to think bigger about their community and even about their own lives.
That’s How McCain is thinking on centerpiece “Wait,” all built around the repeating “I’ll wait for you to come to me.” It’s a declaration of faith in the creative strength of OKC and the long overdue attention that it’s finally starting to receive, not by trying to mimic the other, tired hotspots around the country, but by leaning on the true uniqueness of itself (even shouting out Jakian Parks for leading the way.)
With more eyes turning everyday toward our city, owed to sports domination, film production, political grandstanding, or any number of other factors, a recurring conversation across every scene right now is how artists can lift up and truly elevate their community.
Chris McCain and SauceMeUpGQ may have just dropped a masterclass in how to do it right.
“Birds Fly East” by Chris The God Mc Cain and SauceMeUpGQ is available on streaming services now.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is our Arts and Entertainment Editor. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for 15+ years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
