Cycling is a big deal in the emerging culture of Tulsa. The spiritual center of Tulsa’s cycling world is the Sound Pony, a bar that is filled to the brim with cycling memorabilia. It is also a special place within the conservative universe of Oklahoma where people of all stripes including punks, hip-hop heads, metal heads, electro-dance djs, and old school R&B vinyl djs all rub elbows and live in alignment with the ethos: unity. On any given night walking into the Sound Pony, there is no telling which scene is going to be represented, an eclectic vibe you would be hard-pressed to find even in the most underground clubs of Brooklyn or San Francisco. Tulsa’s modern hip-hop culture developed out of the Sound Pony and its slightly more hard edged next door neighbor, the Yeti. The Yeti boasts a back patio with an energy that must be experienced first-hand. This area has served as a sort of ‘church’ for the hip-hop culture in Tulsa over the years, where every-Monday events Cypher 120 and now The Situation create a free-flowing open-mic where rappers, poets, and singers can express themselves with a live house band. With these two venues as a base of operations, Tulsa’s millennial hip-hop scene flourished. Where there was once nearly zero hip-hop culture in downtown Tulsa, there is now a thriving scene.

The fact that this scene exists is a slight miracle considering the long denial of access that the city’s black community has experienced over the decades. First came a devastating massacre in 1921 on Black Wall Street, an area of Black American excellence. The prosperity of Tulsa’s oil boom couldn’t help but bleed into the black community, and entrepreneurship thrived after Booker T. Washington noted the opportunities available here. That all came to an end on May 31, 1921 when racist white mobs burned Black Wall Street to the ground. Countless black citizens were murdered. First-hand accounts from Tulsa attorney Buck Colbert Franklin describe makeshift bombs being dropped by airplanes into the Greenwood area. The devastation was unspeakable, and the land grab of black property after the massacre by established Tulsans like Tate Brady was purely evil. The black community built it all back and then some, until the catastrophic effects of urban renewal in the middle 1970s mandated the entire Greenwood district be leveled to make way for an expressway.

As a person gets a feel for the immense scars that inhibit this community, it is understandable to realize Tulsa hip-hop’s intense focus on self-actualization, empowerment and spirituality is not merely some hapless self-care zeitgeist bandwagoning, but a deeply meaningful movement to heal a community. With each empowering, uplifting, introspective song these artists produce, a little bit of shame is highlighted, then released from the collective consciousness. These artists are performing a great healing. It’s a community service that is greatly needed, but barely recognized by mainstream Tulsa itself. It’s no wonder that a seminal album in the new Tulsa hip-hop scene by an artist named First Verse had a line like, “Most of us grew up feeling like the city don’t want us,” and drew its title from the mantra of the late aughts in Tulsa — this is “The City That Always Sleeps.”

First Verse was a part of an influential group in Tulsa called Oil House, whose east-coast inspired artists were the trailblazers who brought hip-hop to the Arts District north of Tulsa’s downtown. Around the same time in the early part of our current decade, the media and graphic crew Clean Hands began to dot the city with innovative murals, bringing hip-hop culture into the greater Tulsa consciousness. Clean Hands partnered with Oil House rapper Doctor Freeman to curate an event series called “Lessons in Fresh” to turn their frustrations with a sleeping city into a crash-course in culture featuring live graffiti painting, freestyle sessions, b-boy dance battles, and classic vinyl DJ sessions where the city’s best turntablists display their crafts for the younger generation. Although several Oil House members continue to produce new music, Tulsa has un-mistakenly entered a new era spearheaded by World Culture Music.