Joey Bada$$ Fires Back at Ray Vaughn On “The Finals”
If Ray Vaughn hoped to graduate from promising prospect to league-ready starter, the scoreboard after this “Finals” clash suggests he still has a season or two before he sees the floor again.
Joey Bada$$ wastes no time situating itself in the center of the East-versus-West chatter.
He is out here casting the whole affair as a decisive Game 7 in his running coastal rivalry and sealing a trilogy that began in January with “The Ruler’s Back.” Over a dusty, mid-tempo boom-bap groove reminiscent of DJ Premier’s late-’90s Knicks-playoff montage beats, Joey frames the record as the last game of a long series: one decisive outing to snuff out Top Dawg Entertainment’s new recruit, Ray Vaughn.
The opening line (“What kinda Top Dawg is you? You more Shih Tzu!”) sets up a double bind that never loosens. Joey flips the label’s canine branding into a diminutive lap-dog joke, then snaps it back into “artificial” versus “art official,” a homonym that questions both Vaughn’s authenticity and the legitimacy of his catalogue in one breath. The dog imagery multiplies: “hit dogs gon’ holler,” “euthanize sick pups,” “let your ass off of the leash.” Each phrase operates on three registers at once—street proverb, veterinary metaphor, and label politics—while internal consonance (“sick pups,” “Top drop”) keeps time with those rigid boom-bap snares.
Joey’s gun-magazine wordplay follows the same density curve that you heard way too much in battle raps and lyrical acrobatic songs. But here, the bar folds weaponry, print media, and the social-media “press” of a beef cycle into one clean punch, relying on the listener to juggle all three meanings mid-bar. The roster quip—“You’re the next nigga gettin’ dropped off the Top roster And I’ma be the Reason”—slips in a sly shout-out to TDE’s own lyrical marksman without pausing the flow, then rebrands Joey’s camp as “TDEast,” a cross-country franchise flex that undercuts Los Angeles supremacy with one half-syllable joke.
Mid-verse, Joey unleashes a barrage of “Ray” puns that feels like a stand-up routine delivered in double-time: “Sugar Ray,” “Rayman,” “Ray Liotta,” “Ray-Bans.” Each new reference drags Vaughn into a different arena—boxing lore, classic arcade gaming, mafia cinema, designer eyewear. while the rapper simultaneously questions his opponent’s punch power (“pillow hands”), underworld credentials (“how much you made man?”), and earning potential (“need an optician just to see Ray bands”). The momentum here isn’t just rhetorical; the multisyllabic rhyme chain (“pillow hands/lil’ man/Rayman/made man”) hits every snare for a 12-bar stretch, a rhythmic discipline Joey’s kept sharp since his 2012 mixtape days.
Kendrick Lamar’s shadow inevitably looms over any TDE confrontation, and Joey weaponizes two of Lamar’s most quoted imperatives—“sit down” and “be humble”—to scold Vaughn for stepping out of line. Later, he welds his own Makaveli homage (“Killuminati Part Two… that was my last shot”) onto the kitty-corner of a Gervonta Davis comparison, suggesting that even future champions need tune-up fights against lesser-known opponents before wearing the crown. Technical craftsmanship keeps the record from degenerating into pure insults. Internal slant rhymes link distant ideas (“artificial/art official/hard to miss you”; “dismiss you/missiles/issue”), and the verse accelerates into conversational free-fall in its final third—“I don’t just flow, I talk to your soul on the mic”—mirroring the on-camera spontaneity Joey displayed two nights earlier during a viral spiral-staircase cypher.
Context matters: Vaughn’s “Crashout Heritage” and the follow-up “Hoe Era” tried to flip Joey’s Red Bull freestyle taunts back eastward, but the reaction cycle favored the Brooklyn emcee. Across comment threads on social media platforms labeled “The Finals,” the release was met with a clear win within hours, citing both the lyrical intricacy and the nostalgic grit of the instrumental, but we’ll see how the battle unfolds.
Beyond that, “The Finals” is a master class in layered writing: sports tropes, kennel metaphors, firearms puns, corporate sub-branding, and pop-culture references all orbit a single narrative center without spinning off into chaos. The record’s immediate popularity underscores a larger point Joey buries near the end: “You need me to buzz, I’m light-years beyond Ray.” In other words, the song is reinforcing the idea that a well-crafted bar can still dominate headlines in an age of algorithmic virality, and that New York boom-bap, when handled by a seasoned voice, remains a global language of competitive rap.
If Ray Vaughn hoped to graduate from promising prospect to league-ready starter by barking at Joey, the scoreboard after this “Finals” clash suggests he still has a season or two before he sees the floor again.