While the old days of the Wild West might seem far gone, the spirit of Tombstone lives on in the town cars rolling down Dairy Avenue of Long Beach, California. Ray Vaughn is a 21st-century cowboy, trading the Stetson for a ball cap, the watering hole for the dollar menu, and polishing his rap game like the ivory handle of a six-shooter. Fresh off his first headlining tour, a full-length mixtape, and being named a part of the 2025 XXL Freshman class, Vaughn is back in California, and he’s hungry.

Amid a string of successes, the 29-year-old rapper made hip hop history when he fired back at Joey Bada$$’s January diss track, “The Ruler’s Back”. Vaughn’s single, “Crashout Heritage”, launched a six-month feud that sparked up the West Coast hip hop scene. Rappers like CJ Fly, REASON, and Daylyt all jumped in to feed fuel to the fire, but it was Bada$$ and Vaughn who came out on top with heated singles like “The Finals” and “Golden Eye”, respectively.

Now that the dust has settled, Vaughn sat down with The Needle Drop to reflect on the rap feud, discuss his newest mixtape, and share how his resilience has fed his creativity and studio process.

Hailing from Long Beach, California, Vaughn began rapping at an early age. Under the moniker “Ray Ray”, Vaughn was recording songs and putting out music videos as early as 2011. In 2016, Vaughn began uploading freestyles from the front seat of his car, slowly picking up online attention. “I used to drive a cab. So I would put the seat back and, like, fall asleep in that bitch, right?” he says. It was during that period of his life that Vaughn also had a child. “When that happened, I was living in my car, and then I found out that I was having a baby, so like, for that whole time my baby was brewing, I kind of, like, fixed myself, like, I got my shit together.”

Tackling personal trauma, parenthood, and living in his Toyota RAV4, Vaughn stayed motivated in his career and continued to pursue hip hop, keeping his head high. “I'm very tough-skinned,” he asserts. “I could be going through hell, and I'll be like, ‘[there’s] somebody going through worse, or went through worse, and they figured it out.’ So I wasn't complaining or trying to make the worst of it. I made light of it so it didn't beat me down. I'm not that type of person.”

Vaughn continued rapping in his car for years until, after a few viral freestyles and successful live shows, he was discovered and signed by Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) in 2020. He then released his first EP with the label, Peer Pressure, in 2021, and a string of loose singles until finally dropping his 42-minute mixtape, The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu, in April 2025.

When asked what inspired that record, Vaughn laughs. “Being broke,” he says. “I had the title before I even made the project. I want this to speak to everyone. ‘What is something I feel like everybody can relate to?’ I don't care if you rich or poor, like black or white. Like, everybody relates to the dollar menu.”

Vaughn further explains how that theme fueled the record’s title. “[Good] is, you know, steak, fish eyes, stuff like that. ‘Bad’ is sleep, ‘you getting sleep for dinner,’ you know? So the medium is like, ‘Oh you get the dollar menu, a little double cheeseburger, four-piece McNugget, you good. So it’s like something to hold you over, and everybody done been in that situation, [so this album is] for the people I'm expecting to relate to the music that I’m making.”

Vaughn had been wrapping up his mixtape when, on January 1, 2025, he heard Joey Bada$$’s track, “The Ruler’s Back”, where Bada$$ infamously called out former TDE rapper Kendrick Lamar, as well as the West Coast scene and the praise it had received across 2024. Vaughn took the track personally. “I felt like I gotta be the person to speak on it because he was taking indirect shots at Dot, but if you a rapper, you understand he’s shooting at Kendrick,” he says. “And then he shot at the West Coast… I already was gonna say something because I’m taking the back fades, but when you generalize your comment, ‘Oh, the West Coast,’ you just called us out.”

Steeped in West Coast influences, and embedded in the scene, Vaughn considered the issue a matter of cultural pride. He further describes it as a metaphor: “That’s [like] somebody walking into a party and saying, ‘I’ll beat all y’all up.’ If that person gets his ass beat by one of those people in there or all those people in there, he shouldn't be crying about it. He should have expected it. So that's how I felt. Like it wasn’t a surprise. Shouldn’t be a surprise. Somebody was gonna jump out their face. Had to be me.”

Vaughn fired back a few days later with “Crashout Heritage”, freestyling over Lamar’s “heart pt. 6” and directly addressing “The Ruler’s Back”. This early spat Vaughn has dubbed “Round 1”, which consisted of what he calls the “baby jabs” of the feud. The two artists released a few more tracks across February, such as Bada$$’s “Sorry Not Sorry” and Vaughn's “Impossible Patty”, but things heated back up in May when Bada$$ appeared on the “Red Bull Spiral Freestyle” alongside Big Sean and Ab-Soul. “That’s when he went full throttle,” Vaughn says. “And then I went full throttle, and then everybody else jumped in.”

Sparking hip hop’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, so to speak, “Round 2” began, and a slew of rappers started firing shots from across the continent. Vaughn popped off immediately with “Hoe Era”, which prompted Bada$$ to fire back with “The Finals”. Former TDE rapper, REASON, threw his hat in the ring with “The Dead Apple”; AZ Chike, who had just featured on Schoolboy Q’s song “Movie” and Lamar’s “Peekaboo”, dropped “What Would You Do?”; Daylyt put out “WRD2MIMVA”, mocking Bada$$ for trying to spur a response from Lamar.

Bada$$ took everyone on at once like John Marston defending the homestead, putting out “MY TOWN”, where the New York rapper took turns addressing every rapper that had dissed him so far. Vaughn replied to that with his final track of the feud, “Golden Eye”, where he mocked Bada$$’s relationship with Sean "Diddy" Combs. "If you’re standing next to Diddy, then you shouldn’t mention dick / ‘Cause if they ever show that footage, you gon’ have to plead the Fifth," he spat.

Reflecting on Round 2, Vaughn was frustrated by how many other rappers jumped into the fray. “So it was a narrative of Ray Vaughn versus Joey, [but then] it turned into Joey versus the West Coast, which is something I didn’t want to be a part of,” he explains. “If one person is fighting ten people, we gonna look at it like, ‘Oh, he didn’t get knocked out, so he the man, we appreciate him for not running off. When everybody starts shooting, [Bada$$ can say] ‘now I gotta fight everybody off,’ it turns into, like, a shield. It’s a double-edged sword for anybody to respond.”

Although Vaughn felt like too many people got involved, he says he’s proud of the attention the feud brought to hip hop. “It was good for hip hop, and it was good for the culture, and for the sport of it all. It was, it was beautiful.” That said, Vaughn says he regrets that the feud ended when it did. “I was upset that I had to put my guns down, because I definitely have more in the chamber,” he tells me. “I was doing XXL cover at the time and the freestyle when that was all going on. So it’s like, for sure, other doors open, but [when it ended] my competitive nature was like, ‘nah, nah,’ but it is what it is. I’m appreciative; I could have walked away with nothing.”

As the smoke clears on the 2025 rap feud, Vaughn is still standing. Counting the holes in his coat, Vaughn has been re-centered on his efforts, performing a string of shows across July and focusing on his major label debut. “I need to focus on making my single. I need four on the radio like Fetty Wap,” he says. “I got like two songs already, but it’s more like I need the name [for the album] and then I’ll be able to draw; like a book title.”

Vaughn’s success has seen him evolve from ordering off the dollar menu, and his desire to grow exposes an insatiable hunger. With a debut album on the way, Vaughn reiterates, “I definitely have more in the chamber.”