Meet Punchmade Dev, a rapper who only makes sense in a post-opioid crisis America. Dev, who was inspired by Soulja Boy and Chief Keef to start rapping in 2019, is primarily interested in music that explores scamming — particularly how to scam others via identity theft and credit-card fraud — and drugs, namely their production and distribution.


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Talking to This is 50, Dev explained, “I choose to rap about my accomplishments and the wins I take. Hopefully listening to my music motivates you.” In the music video for his most recent song, “Geeker Party,” a Black woman can be seen boarding a bus and sitting near the front, with the subtitles reading “1955 — Montgomery, Alabama.” Evidently, this woman is meant to represent Rosa Parks. The video then transitions to Dev and his friends sitting at the back of the bus, showing off their chains and pills, as Dev raps about the various deals he offers his clients on pills (“If it’s your first time, it’s free”) and name-drops George Floyd (“Rest in peace to George Floyd but what that got to do with me?”).



He ends by rapping about Parks being a ham, because when he rides the bus, Dev prefers to sit in the back seat. He illustrates this point by throwing a crumpled-up piece of paper bearing the words “UR A HAM” at the Parks we saw at the beginning of the video. It is not immediately clear what this song should motivate listeners to do: Buy pills? Ride the bus? Harass Civil Rights icons?



In another song released last month, “Long Live Heather,” Dev raps over the top of Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’s 2003 hit “Get Low” about his drug tester, Heather, who he killed with laced pills. Following Heather’s death, Dev raps, “I was really fucked-up for a week, but then I got it together” and returned to Heather’s body with a “suicide letter.” Later in the song, Dev worries, “I pray after I kill them with pills I won’t go to hell” only to spit, a few short lines later, “I’m trying to see somebody die today.”


He doesn’t just sing about producing and distributing laced pills, however; he also sings about scamming people in songs like “Internet Swiping,” “Easy Scams” and “Scam Tag.” Knowing all of that, would you be interested in paying Dev to learn how to make money by scamming people? No? That’s a shame, since he does offer such services via Telegram, for a fee, naturally.



As one Redditor put it, “You really about to get scammed trying to learn how to scam?”