The pain in Ray Vaughn’s voice cuts through the beat when he raps, especially on songs like “Bastard” and “FLAT Shasta” from his latest Top Dawg Entertainment release, The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu mixtape (April 25).
A native of Long Beach, California, Vaughn was raised by a mother who struggled with substance abuse and mental health issues. His father, although present in his life, didn’t live in the same household and, with seven children, his mother had a difficult time making ends meet. It was more common to come home to empty kitchen cabinets than to have a bounty of food.
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Despite his circumstances, Vaughn managed to pull himself off the dark path he was heading down and use his survival skills to manifest a rap career—and his lyrics reflect that. Largely autobiographical and, at times, uncomfortable, each word he spits reveals a young man tormented by his past but determined to have a better future.
On this particular day, Vaughn is in New York, soaking up the chaos of the city and reveling in the task at hand—promoting the mixtape. It’s a far cry from where he was five years ago, when he was living in his car with nothing but talent and a dream. In 2020, his life changed after landing a meeting with Top Dawg Entertainment CEO Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, who had discovered some of the music Vaughn had been uploading online. Impressed by what he heard, Tiffith signed him on the spot. Two weeks later, he had his own house.
“It made me feel like anything is possible,” he says. “When I got signed, I was sleeping in a car with my daughter in the back. It didn’t change overnight. It took like two weeks for me to get my first signing check, but yeah, it just made me be like, ‘OK, do you want to work hard enough so you never have to go back to that? Because you can easily go back to sleeping in your car.”
It also gave him a healthy amount of fear. As he explains, “I always keep my work mode turned on. It’s a blessing and a curse though. I’ll sacrifice time for my daughter because I’ll be like, ‘Yeah I’m scared as fuck of going back to that car.’”
Armed with an iron-clad work ethic, Vaughn got busy and pumped out his inaugural TDE project, the three-track, eight-minute Peer Pressure EP, in 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic was still wreaking havoc on the globe. Familiar themes of perseverance permeate each song with lyrics like “I’m rich in spirit/Not gonna die broke” and “’Member days when I was at the bus stop/Now I’m ballin’, I ain’t got a jump shot.”
It’s that vulnerability that makes him stand out though. While some of his peers are rapping about “bitches, bags, and Bentleys,” he’s purging his trauma. On “FLAT shasta,” for example, Vaughn divulges the excruciating truth about what it was like growing up with a mother who refused to get help.
“Momma, I used to watch you scam and sell dope,” he raps on the song. “But as of now I don’t know what to tell folks when they ask me ’bout you/Knowing it’s been a couple months since we done spoke/So I try to break the tension with a joke/Truth is…Momma you need meds for schizo but you won’t take it/If you lose all your marbles, you ain’t gone have none to play with.”
With each line, he gets more and more personal to the point it’s impossible not to empathize with what he’s experienced.
“It’s like therapy for me almost,” he says. “I don’t write for other people, I write for myself and people who resonate with it. They resonate with it because if it’s real, it’s real. I’ve looked at every situation I went through, like, ‘You ain’t the first person that went through it, so figure it out.’”
But that doesn’t mean Vaughn doesn’t occasionally show his age. At 29, he admits he can be “toxic” at times. There are plenty of occasions where he spits a few bars about his sexual conquests or boasts about being in the streets. Still, he agrees there’s too much “gangster” and a need for healing these days.
“I’m old enough to know better but young enough not to give a fuck,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t give a fuck and I might make a stupid comment. I’m youthful. I’m very funny usually when I’m not being serious. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m funny unless it’s time to be about business. But I do think we need that healing in the music. I agree with all that entirely. I’m sick of us talking about, like, “Yo, let’s kill each other.”
Vaughn had a couple of people in his life who inspired him to pursue music instead of various nefarious activities. Like his stepfather, who would wake him up at four in the morning to rap for his friends to, as he puts it, “flex” on them. His stepfather eventually bought him an old “big booty” Mac computer to start recording. While he remains grateful for those who encouraged him along the way, Vaughn is convinced he would have wound up exactly where he is today without them.
“I was going to do it regardless, to be honest with you,” Vaughn says. “I was like, ‘Anything that can get me out of this house, out of this shit hole.’ If it wasn’t those people, it was going to be somebody else. I’m a firm believer that that’s what God had for me. I figured if I don’t do this, I’m going to end up a nobody. I know I’m talented and smart, but I didn’t know what else to do but rap. If I just rap my way through everything, it’ll change everything and that’s kind of what I did.”
Simultaneously, there’s a sense he thinks he could be further along in his career considering it’s been five years since he signed the dotted line with TDE, the same label that launched Kendrick Lamar into the stratosphere.
“I feel like everybody thinks they could be further, but I was altered by COVID, so I give myself grace, because if it wasn’t COVID, I would be pulling my fucking hair out,” he confesses. “Everybody always says they could be further, but if you believe in God and divine timing, you’re like, “OK, I’m exactly where I need to be.’”
And so far, that divine timing is proving to be fruitful. In June 2024, he was part of Lamar’s “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends” concert at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, a defining moment in his career.
“It felt good,” he says of the show. “I was performing with Kendrick, ScHoolboy Q, Tyler, the Creator, people that I look up to, so being on that scale was like, ‘Oh damn.’ It just solidified that I’m here. It made it real.”
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