Vonn

Inglewood, Los Angeles · FARA Records

Vonn (Devonte Ashby, 23) is from Inglewood, where he watched his own neighbourhood get rebuilt around a stadium, an arena and a rail line in the space of a few years — new infrastructure, new money, very little of it landing on the people who'd actually lived there the whole time. That's the direct source of his eye for who a big event actually benefits, which is the entire subject of everything SIDE EYE makes. He came up freestyling in a school hallway and spent five years writing verses and hooks for other people before any of it had his own name attached, which is where his dense, fast, direction-changing delivery comes from — written to be flexible enough to fit whoever was paying for it.

Conversational, fast, never raised — his whole technique depends on staying level, because the comedy of a SIDE EYE verse dies the moment he sounds genuinely annoyed rather than amused. He reports rather than rants, packing a lot of specific detail into a small number of bars without ever tipping into a rant's cadence. His influences run conversational, detail-dense rap delivery, and five years of ghostwriting, which taught him to write verses flexible enough to survive being handed to somebody else's voice — a skill that shows up now in how adaptable his own delivery is.

Watchful and even-keeled, with a clear sense of which direction a story is actually pointing even when the internet consensus is pointing somewhere else. He watched his own neighbourhood get rebuilt around infrastructure that mostly benefited people who didn't live there, and it's given him a durable skepticism about who any big cultural event is really for. He spent five years writing for other artists before any record had his name on it. Sharp, level, unshowy.