Nine Vicious Calls OPM Babi a Rat From the Rolling Loud Stage in Orlando

TL;DR

• Nine Vicious made his Rolling Loud debut tonight (Saturday, May 9, 2026) on the Verizon Stage at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, in the 8:25 PM ET slot before headliner Rich the Kid.
• Mid-set, he addressed the crowd directly to call producer OPM Babi a rat. The moment was captured on multiple phones in the pit and is already circulating on Instagram and X.
• "Rat" in this scene means snitch. It is the single heaviest accusation a rapper can make in public, and once it leaves the mic, it does not come back.
• The two have been in a slow-burning back-and-forth for months — despite OPM Babi having three production credits on Nine Vicious's own catalog, including the 2025 leak "PTSO."
• OPM Babi responded on Instagram the night of May 9 — but didn't deny the rat accusation. His story instead made four counter-claims about Nine's manager, Nine's nerve, and a prior altercation (full quote and context below). Rolling Loud has not commented.

What He Said From the Stage

Nine Vicious — born Trevon O'Ryan Echols, 23, from Athens, Georgia, signed to Young Thug's YSL Records — was scheduled for a 35-minute set on the Verizon Stage at 8:25 PM ET, the warm-up to Rich the Kid's 9:30 close on Day 2.

It was his Rolling Loud debut.

Mid-set, he stopped the music. He pointed at the crowd. He told them OPM Babi is a rat. The clip is already on Instagram, multiple angles from the pit, the phones held up high enough that the back of the Verizon Stage banner is visible behind him.

For anyone outside the underground rap conversation: in this scene, "rat" does not mean what it means at a wedding. It means snitch. It means someone allegedly cooperated with police, gave up information on people in their orbit, or talked to investigators when they shouldn't have. It is the single most damaging accusation a rapper can make against another figure, and it is not a word that gets thrown around as a joke. Once it is on tape, it follows the person it is aimed at into every session, every credit, every room.

It is also the kind of thing festival organizers do not love hearing artists say from their stages.

“"Rat" in this scene means snitch. It does not get thrown around as a joke. Once it is on tape, it follows the person it is aimed at into every session, every credit, every room.”

Who OPM Babi Is

OPM Babi (also credited as OpiumBaby and opiumbaby — pronounced "opium baby") is a producer, not a rapper. The "OPM" in the name is shorthand for Opium, Playboi Carti's label and aesthetic universe. They have been in Carti's production circle since at least 2020.

The credit list is real: Whole Lotta Red (Playboi Carti, 2020), Da Real Oso (Glokk40Spaz, 2024), Music (Playboi Carti, 2025), Homixide Lifestyle 2 (Homixide Gang, 2025), days b4 maison (Skaiwater, 2025). The 23rd track on Carti's 2025 Music album is literally titled "OPM Babi" — an homage track produced by OpiumBaby, Clayco and Streo, named after the producer it sampled.

OPM Babi has also produced for Nine Vicious. The 2025 SoundCloud leak "PTSO" is credited to "Opm Babi + Clayco + n9ck," with Perk later added on the cleaner-mixed version that surfaced in early 2026. So we are not talking about two strangers. We are talking about a rapper who has tracks in his catalog produced by the person he just called a rat to twenty thousand people in Orlando.

That is the part that makes this serious.

How We Got Here

This is not the first round. Fans have been tracking the Nine Vicious / OPM Babi tension for months — long enough that, as soon as Nine's Rolling Loud slot was confirmed, X started openly speculating it would spill onto the festival.

A representative post from a few weeks back: "i really hope this whole beef with nine vicious and opm babi doesnt get nine kicked off rolling loud like how carti did benji blue bills last year." The reference is to Carti's Rolling Loud California 2025 set, where, per scene reporting at the time, internal Opium beef cost Benji Blue Bills his slot. The fan worry, in other words, was that whatever was simmering between Nine and OPM Babi was loud enough to be a logistical problem before it was a stage problem.

Instagram has at least two posts from the last several months referencing the back-and-forth — one alleging an in-person meet-up between Nine and OPM Babi, another flagging a Nine Vicious response to OPM Babi. Neither has the kind of paper-trail clarity that would let us reconstruct the exact pretext for the beef. What is clear is that whatever was building has been building for a while, and tonight Nine Vicious decided the festival stage was where it was getting put on tape.

Why "Rat" Is the Word That Matters

A diss is one thing. Two bars on a SoundCloud loosie, a subtweet, a stream rant — those are part of the standard scene economy. They get answered, they get absorbed, they cycle out.

A snitch accusation is not that.

In rap's internal logic, calling someone a rat is the one allegation that does real, durable career damage. It is the reason artists and producers fight legal battles over what is in court documents. It is the reason a single line in a deposition can get you blackballed from sessions for years. It is also why most artists, even in active beef, route around the word — they will call somebody fake, broke, washed, biting flow, anything but that.

Nine Vicious did not route around it.

That is what makes tonight different from the Jane Remover / Young Dabo back-and-forth that lit the underground up earlier this week. That one was two bars on a SoundCloud release, answered with a misogynistic stream rant and a diss track. Ugly, scene-defining, but recoverable. This is a different category of accusation, and it was made on the loudest stage either party has ever stood on.

It is also, for the record, an accusation. Calling OPM Babi a rat is something Nine Vicious said. It is not something we can independently confirm, and we are not asserting it. There is no court record, no public statement of cooperation, no documentation in the record connecting OPM Babi to anything that would substantiate the word. What we can report is the moment itself, on a Rolling Loud stage, on May 9, 2026, in front of every phone in the pit.

The Festival Optics

The Verizon Stage is not the main stage at Camping World — Carti was over at the Under Armour Stage closing the night at 9:30. But the Verizon Stage was the rage corner of Day 2. The set sequence ran K Scott, Champagne937, soWAYV, Baby Mel, Karrahbooo, Hooligan Hefs, Rosama, Untiljapan, Nino Breeze, DJ Five Venoms & Derrick Milano Experience, Babychiefdoit, Skai Isyourgod, Nine Vicious, Rich the Kid. A full afternoon of underground rap building toward the headliner — and Nine got the prime slot in that build.

He used it to make news.

Rolling Loud has not, as of publication, said anything about the moment. Whether that holds depends on what OPM Babi does next, what Carti's camp does next, and whether the clip travels far enough that the festival has to decide whether saying nothing reads as an endorsement.

OPM Babi Responds

Hours after Nine Vicious left the Verizon Stage, OPM Babi answered — on Instagram story, the night of May 9, the same day as the accusation. Story format means it expires in 24 hours. Screenshots are already moving.

Four counter-claims, in order.

First, a sexual humiliation framing aimed at Nine's manager — "ya manager pay 2 eat man- meat." It puts the beef's pretext on Nine's camp, not OPM Babi's.

Second, a reversal of who dropped who: "I DROPPED U SOON AS I FOUND OUT U SKARY DEN a MF." The counter-narrative is that OPM Babi cut Nine off for being a coward — not the other way around.

Third, a protection claim: "IM THE REASON WHY YO FACE AINT GET MUSHED IN." The reference is to "dem lil oway niggas" — some prior crew, prior incident — that OPM Babi says he kept off Nine. The line positions him as the reason Nine made it out of an earlier room intact.

Fourth, the sign-off: "PS: Don't say my name no mo." A boundary, not a threat.

“"PS: Don't say my name no mo."”

What is not in the post: any engagement with the word "rat." No denial. No "I've never talked to police." No threat of legal action, no demand for a retraction, no announcement of a track in response. The accusation Nine made from the stage was specifically about snitching. The response is about everything except that.

Where Things Stand

OPM Babi has now responded — but not to the actual accusation. The Carti / Opium camp has not publicly weighed in. Skaiwater has stayed quiet. Given OPM Babi's production credits across Carti, Skaiwater, and Homixide Gang — three of the most aesthetically aligned camps in current underground rap — a fuller response, when it comes, will pull a lot of names into the same orbit.

What to watch for in the next 48 hours:

• Whether OPM Babi follows the IG story with anything else. A track, an X thread, or — most consequentially — silence after the deflection.
• A Carti / Opium camp signal. OPM Babi is in their production rotation. If the wider Opium ecosystem pushes back on Nine, this becomes a label-versus-label fight, not a two-person beef.
• What Skaiwater does, if anything. Skaiwater used OPM Babi on days b4 maison and was already involved in the Jane Remover / Young Dabo discourse this week. Two scene fights at once is a lot to be at the center of.
• Whether Rolling Loud comments. Festivals usually don't, until they have to.
• Whether Nine doubles down on record. A SoundCloud loosie this week with the same accusation in a verse would turn this from a stage moment into a permanent line in the catalog.

The clip is already moving. The accusation is on tape. From here, the next move belongs to OPM Babi.

Why It Matters Beyond the Beef

Underground rap right now is a tangle of tiny labels, producer collectives, and overlapping rosters where the same five producers are on everyone's projects and the same fifteen artists are tagged in everyone's stories. It is also a scene where the financial infrastructure under the artists is thinner than the scale of their cultural footprint suggests.

When something like this happens — a rapper calling a producer who has worked on his own records a rat, in public, on a festival stage — what gets exposed is how interlocked everyone is, and how much damage a single sentence can do to a credit list, to a session schedule, to a paycheck. OPM Babi, regardless of whether the accusation has any substance behind it, is going to feel this in their inbox by Monday. The producers and labels who route work to them will have a decision to make.

That is the part of the underground that almost never gets reported on: the money. Who gets paid, who decides who gets paid, who has the leverage to cut someone off, and who finds out about a beef from the bookkeeping side a month after it happens.

That is also the part signed.trade is built around.

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4. Tracks have a market cap that moves with performance. Sales and streams drive the cap. Fans can listen and invest in how a track actually does.

In a scene where one stage moment can quietly cut a producer out of half their year's work and nobody on the outside knows for months, a public ledger is not a feature. It is the difference between artists getting squeezed in the dark and artists getting paid in the open.

If you have read this far, you are already in the scene. Join the waitlist at signed.trade.