Ray Vaughn is another good kid in a mad city, and his tape The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu shows exactly what it takes to survive with your soul still intact.
Release date: April 23, 2025 | Top Dawg Entertainment | Instagram | Twitter | TikTok | Stream/Purchase
There’s a lot of shit being stirred up right now. By the time this publishes, it could very well be another full-blown war of words between the West Coast and East Coast, namely California and New York because, well, those are the biggest states with skin in the game and history to back it up. At the center of it currently is Joey Bada$$, now considered a vet with well over a decade in the game and several solid-to-great projects under his belt, and kind-of-newcomer Ray Vaughn, making a name for himself still with a big cosign and direct support from one of the most revered labels in rap, Top Dawg Entertainment. To be clear, it’s healthy competition so far – though some personal jabs have been traded as rap is wont to do, it’s mostly a showcase of regional styles and skills, spurred on by last year’s mammoth, though mostly one-sided battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. The West is up, I feel like that shouldn’t be some controversial or glaze-adjacent statement to make.
Ray Vaughn‘s journey so far has culminated in his new mixtape, The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu. I say mixtape of course to respect word-of-God classification of it, but it’s more album-like than you’d expect a tape to historically be, kind of like with his labelmate Doechii‘s Alligator Bites Never Heal from last year which was as cohesive and high concept as any album released around it. Regardless though, I knew I had to make time to write about this one because, goddamn, it’s good as hell. It grew on me too – a listen or two showcases Vaughn’s ear for beats and diverse rapping with flows and tones, but diving deeper is where things get ultra real. And that’s what hip-hop’s all about, right? Key tenet: realness – to me, simply a synonym of vulnerability. We as hip-hop fans and the artists themselves constantly debate who is real, realer, and the realest. For Vaughn, there’s a particular sort of realness that pervades The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu, and a lot of it comes down to that final unit of the triad.
Without getting too, too deep into the politics of fast food and poverty, it goes without saying that fast food preys on the poor. It’s cheaply made, cheaply priced shit that, if you grew up like Vaughn or me, was sometimes the only shit you could afford to eat. Even if you could afford fresh groceries for a day or two, our single parents working jobs often didn’t have the time or energy to make a meal for the family, but Uncle McDonald and Aunt Wendy got you if you got a few bills or pocketful of change. Can’t understate the importance of the dollar menu or value meal at various places growing up when money was tight, which was always for some of us.
All of this plays a key part of The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu. The tape starts out with a little intro skit of a couple dudes clowning Ray Vaughn (or at least a fictionalized version) for wanting to rob Poly Burgers, a popular joint in the Long Beach area that’s also featured on the cover art. Deemed a ‘crashout mission‘ by one of the guys that talks sense into the would-be robber, it’s easy to see how someone would get to that point once “FLOCKER’S remorse” plays out. It laments the struggle of a poor modern family with some heartbreaking, relatable lyrics laid down over somber piano:
‘Phone disconnected, God then went AWOL
The same time I seen my stepdaddy hit a eight-ball
That’s trill life, either way it is what it is
Had to split a six-piece nugget with my motherfuckin’ kids
That type of pain’ll make your heart explode‘
It sets the stage for the tape, one that basks in the emotional and moral complexity of growing up poor flanked by drug use, mental illness, and how it all affects you. Ultimately, it paints Ray Vaughn as a sympathetic, vulnerable person, but not a hopeless or helpless one. I don’t like the notion that struggle builds character, but Vaughn is the type of guy that makes it hard to disagree with. He’s straight-up charming on a lot of these songs – “XXXL Tee” showcases deft flows that any ScHoolboy Q fan should get on well with and some gems for bars like ‘CJ from GTA taught me to drive/I’m very demure, bitch, never mind‘ and ‘Big Worm should’ve shot Craig, yeah/And blame it on Kanye meds‘. “KLOWN dance” is a smooth-ass record with a classic horn sample all about the hustle to survive at any cost… well, almost any. The refrain has one of the hardest lines on the whole tape: ‘I ain’t scared of shit but my mama belt and that DA‘. Jay Rock sounds great as a standout feature rapping about flocking (robbing) and making bail with a lawyer on retainer, a must for anyone trying to get by, by any means.
Speaking of Ray Vaughn and his mother, by far the most heartfelt and emotionally destructive song on the tape is “FLAT shasta”, one that hits about as hard as and similarly to Eminem‘s “Headlights” did over a decade ago. Vaughn gets very personal, rapping about his mother’s past as a drug dealer, suicide attempts, and vicious struggles with schizophrenia, it taking the woman he grew up with little by little and passing generational trauma onto him from seeing her be abused by partners. One of the realest set of lines here is ‘If you lose all your marbles, you ain’t gon’ have none to play with/A Black woman who crying for help and I’m tryna save her/The last thing you wanna be called in this world is crazy‘, because we all know how the world treats mentally ill Black women. It’s really, really hard to watch a parent lose themself even temporarily to mental illness and knowing they won’t or can’t get help for it, and Vaughn is waaaay too good at capturing that effect on you with the imagery, raw reactions, and voice inflection, to the point of the track making me tear up many times. You can hear his voice giving out ever so slightly as he finishes the second verse by begging, ‘Can I borrow one of your laughs, and can I steal one of your smiles?/And can I hold onto your joy ’cause I ain’t felt that since a child/And if it wasn’t for your womb, I wouldn’t be breathing right now/I swear to God, I just need you right now‘.
On the song “DOLLAR menu”, those eponymous deals are used as a barometer of that impoverished life that he came up in, but also a point of flexing. In the first 90 seconds, Ray Vaughn exclaims ‘last night I had sleep for dinner‘ and how the dollar menu saved his life as he reflects on his time as a teen over a sunny and playful beat (this part sadly isn’t in the video above). The rest of the track flips the dollar menu as almost a point of shame as Vaughn starts feeling himself after making it in life and becoming more secure – ‘Standin’ on couches ’cause I’m tryna fuck that bitch, bring the bottles to me/Y’all be in DMs beggin’ these hoes I feed off the dollar menu‘. It’s a colorfully arrogant moment that, in the context of this tape, almost feels farcical, like this is young Vaughn dreaming big, of money, of cars, of having a harem of women to send home in his throwaway Shaka Wear after a night in. It’s vivid, and the sinister beat change that bisects both parts of the song is one of the best moments on this tape.
I say ‘one of’ because THEE best moment on the tape by a fair margin for me is “LOOK @ GOD” which is a Bay Area banger featuring LaRussell where he and Vaughn are given room to more realistically flex and appreciate the come-up they’ve respectively had. Both show off lyrically with some fun bars and agile flows that are West Coast as hell. Ray Vaughn brags about fucking two mixed girls and making a new race, or saying ‘white girl ridin’ shotgun, they love In-N-Out‘ (facts), and LaRussell ends his wordplay-heavy verse with the punctuating ‘you ever make 60K in six days? Prolly nooooot!‘ (you’re right, sir, I have not, I barely make that a year). The production is explosive and car system ready, so take this shit to the whip and prepare to share it with a three-mile radius.
The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu ends up being one of the best projects of the year so far, and not even solely because of the above. I didn’t even get into the Cali vibe-heavy “EAST CHATT” with Isaiah Rashad or the thoughtful, supremely introspective “JANKY moral COMPASS” assisted by Samara Cyn. By the end, Vaughn seems to have seen it all: his family broken apart, him being caught flocking by cops, down and out from drugs and depression (the line ‘I only wanna see my daughters when I’m buzzed‘ from “MILES AWAY from heaven” is devastating). But still, Vaughn finds his center. One of the most profound things said on this tape is from a friend of his in a voicemail saying, ‘you gotta remember, bro, how you was raised… keep God first ’cause the pen is around the corner, and we miles away from heaven‘. While our centers aren’t always God or something grander than ourselves – hell, maybe it can be as simple as that dollar menu – as long as we find it, we’ll be all right.
Finishing this review up over the course of a few days, Ray Vaughn has since dropped another diss track to Joey Bada$$, and a pretty good one at that, over a 50 Cent beat. Dude’s on fire, likely bolstered from getting this project out – I’d be feeling myself too. The West is still up and it’s dudes like Vaughn that make it so. TDE‘s involvement or not, he’s a stupendously capable rapper and storyteller with charisma and miles of realness to tap into, the type of guy that could really be the next up in the upcoming years. This project is California to the bone, the vibes calling forth visions of purple sunsets stenciled by palm trees over streetlights in the foreground and crisp, cool beach air tussling your hair, offering a reprieve when nothing else will. Hip-hop heads and other enjoyers would do well to not sleep on this as it’s up there with the best of the year so far.
I also recommend checking out Dead End Hip Hop‘s review of this project.
