The Pressure’s off for now, but Queen Caution is still pushing local hip-hop.
When Queen Caution (linktr.ee/queencaution), aka Carissa Cudjo, realized her Pressure battle-rap competition was not fostering the uplifting community environment she intended, she changed the format and name to Neighborhood Noise, a local hip-hop showcase on the third Wednesday of the month at Hubbly Bubbly, 2900 N. Classen Blvd., Suite K.
“It’s definitely a lot more positive,” Cudjo said. “People can connect on a deeper level and not feel like a competition. … I like seeing artists come together.”
Cudjo wants to provide newer artists the kind of supportive space she enjoyed at two previous Hubbly Bubbly institutions: The Art of Rap, a three-round competition, and The Heart of Hip-Hop, a showcase featuring winners from the competition performing alongside more established artists.
“They created a place for me to share my art and stuff when I was first getting out there,” Cudjo said. “I’m to a pretty comfortable state in my music, so I was like, ‘Why not do something for my city, for my community, to give other artists that were coming up a chance as well?’”
While the intense competition at The Art of Rap helped Cudjo hone her skills as a younger artist, she said a “more easy-going” showcase seems to suit newer performers now.
“I don’t want to create something that’s going to discourage these artists,” Cudjo said. “It was a lot different for me coming up in the hip-hop scene here in the original culture where we had battle raps. We were out here at The Art of Rap competing for just $50, and it got real intense because it was for the culture.”
Cudjo’s Neighborhood co-host HusL (lnk.bio/husl), aka Keyan Chukwurah, said the format change is intended to support new artists in a way that’s comfortable for them.
“Maybe not everybody is ready to do battle rap,” Chukwurah said. “But maybe there are some people who still take their craft really seriously, and we want to showcase those people.”
The showcase continues the legacy of previous Hubbly Bubbly events in other ways. Nymasis, who DJ’d for both The Art and The Heart, returns to the turntables for Neighborhood Noise, and the showcase keeps one of its predecessors’ most-repeated requirements: Do not rap over your own vocals.
Chukwurah compares it to an artist doing karaoke of their own song.
“One, unless your song is mixed very well, it does not sound good whenever you’re having two vocals competing for the same space,” Chukwurah said. “Two, it shows that you don’t really know your craft. … Rock ’n’ roll artists are praised on their ability to hit certain notes or to be able to produce certain sounds … their ability to play the instrument. But with rap specifically, the only thing you have to go off of is your vocal, your rap IQ, in a sense. … your lyrical ability, your cadences, how you’re able to perform breath control, how you’re able to engage the crowd, how you’re able to say something meaningful. … If you get up there and perform a song over your own vocals, it shows you don’t really know the song. … It’s a bad habit to learn because it teaches you not to be confident in vocal performance and your rap ability.”
Settling for less can hold back artistic progress, Chukwurah said, for individuals and for the culture at large.
“In my honest opinion, I feel like rap should be a lot more advanced than it is now, but I feel like we’re regressing,” Chukwurah said. “It’s very over-saturated. Before, we were just wondering, ‘How do we become rappers? How can we get on and do the things that we see on TV?’ Now that everybody has access to the technology and the means to do it, you’re starting to realize that it’s not as good as you would have hoped for. There’s a lot of people who don’t even understand the history of rap, and there’s a lot of people that are only using it as a vehicle to get to something else. … A lot of people do not really care what the previous generation had to do. They don’t care about what the pioneers had to do.”
Neighborhood Noise is for the “niche community of people who care about the art form and who want to see it advanced,” Chukwurah said.
“There’s at least a thousand rappers in Oklahoma City specifically,” Chukwurah said. “Whenever I or Queen Caution tells them what the requirements are, all of a sudden, that list drops to about 10 percent. … You consider yourself a professional recording artist, but you cannot rap without supporting tracks in the background. That seems problematic.
“We’re trying to get them to understand the difference between the music that will last and the trendy stuff, and there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s a lane for everything, but what we’re trying to do specifically is something that’s real and raw that you don’t get at other showcases because they don’t care. They let you rap over vocals. The lyrics don’t really have to make sense. … The newer challenge is we are essentially living in a microwave generation. Everybody wants everything instantly and they want it now, and if it takes time or if it takes any type of hard work, it’s looked at as lame, boring or something that’s not worth doing.”
Local scene
Chukwurah’s Local Scene, a 21-track album featuring beats from local producers, is scheduled for release Thursday, May 15.
“I’ve seen a lot of things within the city in the 12 years I’ve been doing music, and I’m just kind of showcasing what it means to me,” Chukwurah said.
Cudjo is currently working on a follow-up to her album The Misfit, released in 2024.
“It’s going to be a full singing album because I actually did start off singing first,” Cudjo said. “I’ve always been in love with singing, and I felt like this would be a good time to, you know, show my fans a side of me that I never really expressed before.”
And while she’s welcoming new artists to the Neighborhood, she’s still not giving up on getting them battle-ready.
“Sometimes after the showcase, we’ll do a cypher or we’ll do a rap battle,” Cudjo said. “I’m hoping we can get them to a point where it’s like, ‘I want to do that,’ you know, by just showcasing it.”
Chukwurah said battle rap can be respectfully competitive without getting messy.
“People are in competitive kung-fu or boxing,” Chukwurah said. “They fight all the time, and at the end, they shake hands and go on about their thing. They learn what they needed to do, and they come back harder. … I’m not attacking your character. I’m just trying to get you to apply what you do better. It’s easy to write a rap, but can you continually do it? Can you consistently do it when nobody’s pushing you to, whenever you’re not getting the engagement that you want, whenever you feel like no one is supporting you? Do you still care about the art form if nobody’s watching?”
Neighborhood Noise will take a break in May but return on Wednesday, June 18. Visit facebook.com/hubblybubblyokc.
This article appears in Summer Guide 2025.