![]() The closest thing to a scam-rap ur-text dates back more than a decade and a half, and it isn’t rap at all. But historically speaking, these rappers are latecomers to scamming music, which first gained prominence years ago, thousands of miles away. The lyrics bristle with local slang, and the music videos are bathed in the noir glow of Motor City back streets and strip malls. The music of Teejay圆 and fellow Detroit scam rappers - songs like Kasher Quon’s “CNN News” and Bandgang Javar’s “Only Scams” - has a distinctive Rust Belt flavor. (“You can get the process done perfectly if you listen closely/This an in-store Best Buy pickup method, listen to these steps.”) It’s unclear how reliable the songs are as guides to committing fraud, but they reflect real aspirations and articles of faith: the belief that systems and power structures, especially financial ones, can be subverted by anyone sufficiently gutsy and schooled in the dark arts. ![]() Many of Teejay圆’s songs, like Punchmade Dev’s, take the form of how-to manuals that purport to give foolproof advice. The song has little in the way of a hook, and the verses pour out in a chatty, unmetrical stream, a flow that owes as much to YouTube instructional videos as to rap itself. The viral hit “Swipe Story,” in which he uses a dummy credit card to load up on electronics and gift cards, generates suspense from a Walmart shopping spree. He has storytelling skills, a flair for action-adventure scenes in unlikely settings. Teejay圆 is funny: “Just got a fire profile and logged into Credit Karma/Can’t even get my hair cut no more ’cause I done scammed my barber,” he raps in “Apple” (2019). He took a novel approach, focusing monomaniacally on scamming in songs packed with hacker lingo and the technical nitty-gritty of dark-web swindles. ![]() A couple of years later, another young Detroiter, Teejay圆, emerged as the genre’s breakout star. Around 2017, a handful of rappers there began mixing the familiar sounds and stories of trap music - brawny, bass-heavy beats and narratives about the drug trade - with lyrics referencing ill-gotten online gains. The center of American scam rap is Detroit, a city that has birthed many musical future shocks. But it feels more trenchant - more tuned in to the anxious state of the world and the forces shaping culture and politics - than the big hits that dominate charts and streaming playlists. In 2022, scam rap is still a niche phenomenon. Scam rap is music by and of digital natives, a generation that has come of age on an internet swarming with dissemblers and con artists: social media grifters, phishing-scheme spammers, “Tinder swindlers,” cryptocurrency shills, conspiracy theorists, troll-farm armies that spread disinformation. But for M.C.s like Dev, scamming is a stock-in-trade, a muse, a worldview. In recent years, some star rappers have been shouting out “the scammers” and making references to online fraud. Hip-hop is always quick to pick up on cultural currents, including trends in not-quite-legal enterprises. Other songs have titles that mince no words: “Stolen Credit Cards,” “Internet Swiping,” “In $cams We Trust.”ĭev is a scam rapper, part of a vanguard of underground M.C.s who have begun creeping toward rap’s center stage. Dev’s nom de guerre refers to “punches,” slang both for entering the credit-card numbers onto new cards and for making illegal purchases. A “dump” is a kind of internet crime, in which fraudsters access stolen credit-card information to create clone cards. ![]() (“How to Write a Dump” is just over a minute and a half long.) What he is outlining, after all, is a caper. ![]() Punchmade Dev, from Lexington, Ky., delivers these lines over a rudimentary beat in a breathless rasp, the voice of a man who is trying to convey crucial information as quickly as possible. blunders: “No, dumbass, you don’t need EMV software/That’s only if you tryin’ to code the chip they put on there/You just need a MSR, plus the Deftun software.” “You better put a proxy server on/Or use public connection.” Some rappers aim insults at competitors’ weak rhymes or played-out styles. “Go and get a fire carder site/Go to the dump section,” he counsels. But few songs provide as detailed a tutorial as “How to Write a Dump,” a recent single by the rapper Punchmade Dev. For decades, hit records have offered instruction and edification, lessons from the Book of Love, step-by-step guides to dance crazes. Pop music has always had a pedagogical streak. ![]()
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