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Backstage at New York’s Webster Hall, about 30 minutes before he’s due to go onstage, Babyface Ray sips lean from a white Styrofoam cup while a photographer snaps pictures of his extremely bright platinum chains. Born Marcellus Rayvon Register, he’s one of the top voices in Detroit’s street-rap scene, with a level of fame in the city that has gotten to the point where people often recognize his family. “Damn near every day, fans are into your personal life,” says Ray, who’s a father of six at age 32. “They know my name, my girl’s name, my mom’s name. It’s weird.”
Ray is on the road to promote his last album, 2022’s MOB — the best album of his career so far, full of the herky-jerky tracks and ripe sense of humor that have been his calling cards. On record, he’s a gently menacing vocal presence, with a flow that can resemble a flat affect. Talking to him suggests that he’s being under-expressive on purpose, as a way of showing how he stays collected through the wickedest of times. There have been plenty of those in his past, including an incident that left him on pain meds after a gunshot wound. As for the lean, it’s something he’d rather not discuss. “I don’t want to go into detail about why — it’s a thing that I am still facing,” Ray says. “I try not to let it wear me down. It is what it is.”
Throughout his time carrying the torch for Michigan rap, Ray has avoided the pitfalls faced by friends like Flint rapper 42 Dugg, who was recently sentenced to a year behind bars for failing to surrender to federal authorities over a weapons beef. Dugg has several songs with Ray, including the reverential “The Streets,” and Ray says they’ve spoken recently: “He was cool. Same old Dugg. He is going to be Dugg forever: in jail, out on the streets, in a conference room.” As for his own past street life, Ray has a matter-of-fact attitude. “It molded me into who I am today,” he says. “The stuff that I saw, the people who I was with. I got to see things that people would not normally see.”
Ray is clearly excited for his show in New York, talking backstage with Queens artist Shawny Binladen and citing the inspiration he’s taken from Fabolous, Jim Jones, and Juelz Santana. Going from city to city on this tour has Ray bullish for the future and surprised at how he is enjoying it: “I ain’t even sociable like that,” he says.
It’s almost showtime at Webster Hall, and he goes over his set-list sequence with a DJ; his hit “Sincerely Face,” which has 6 million YouTube views, is going second. Before he heads out to the stage, Ray tells me he’s releasing a new mixtape soon. “It’s really me in my bag,” he says. Though he won’t give away any more details, he adds: “The summer’s mine.”
