‘My little hood’: One of rap’s rising stars is from Florida, but he’s not from the 305

BossMan Dlow is exhausted.

The Port Salerno, Fla. native spent the last week of March crisscrossing the country. He went from Los Angeles, where he shot the music video for the recently released “Finesse (Remix)” with Glorilla, to Alabama for a show. From there, he flew to Oklahoma City for another performance. Then Oklahoma City to Myrtle Beach, S.C. for his first hard ticket show where he sold out the 1,300-seat House of Blues. After a subsequent club appearance in Cheraw, S.C., he and his team drove down the coast to Miami to perform at the People Matter Fest.

“They don’t understand — it’s not just a mixtape title,” BossMan Dlow said referencing his recently released project “Mr. Beat the Road.” As he speaks in a slow, syrupy southern accent unique to Florida, he puffs a fat backwood, the smoke swirling in the air as his driver glides down I-95 in a white Chevrolet Suburban. “S*** for real. What we doing right now: beating the road. ”

It’s hard to go anywhere in South Florida without hearing the 25-year-old born Devante McCreary’s music. That’s in large part due to “Get in With Me,” a heavy bass-laden track eleased in mid-January that has since transformed into a viral, TikTok sensation. Stars – from Lil Baby to Ciara to even hometown heroes like Plies – are beginning to notice yet as his career continues to take him across the country.

“It’s still unbelievable,” BossMan Dlow said of his success, admitting that sometimes he’s “tired as hell.” “It definitely happened fast but as far as the grinding, it wasn’t fast.”

That, in a sense, has been the driving force behind BossMan Dlow’s unique brand of trap music. Listen to any BossMan Dlow song and you immediately want to either go hustle or do something moderately reckless like “driving a Bentley Bentayga like I don’t love my life.” As his manager Brehaa “Tymeout” Johnson said, it’s “money-making music.”

“It gives me a good feeling,” added Alamo Records A&R Joey Walker who signed BossMan Dlow. Walker also founded the hip-hop blog Daily Chiefers. “I want to have fun, I want to do aggressive activities, I want to drive fast in my car.”

Then there’s the pinch of levity – see “bad b*** 50 floor eating hibachi” or his brilliant use of sound effects mid-verse – that leads to laughter almost instinctively. Humor seems to be part of his personality: when he discusses the growing COVID numbers during the pandemic, he adopts a news anchor voice.

“I’m just watching all this, all the numbers going,” BossMan Dlow said normally before seamlessly switching to a Walter Cronkite-esque voice — “200,000 people. 400,000 people. 533,000 people” — and back as if nothing happened.

Added Walker: “His music is everything he is. It evokes emotion – it just made me smile, it made me laugh, it made me crack up.”

‘Bring shine to my city’

BossManDlow’s hometown of Port Salerno continues to be a driving force of his success.

Once the Suburban stops at the People Matter Fest and BossMan Dlow exits, a swarm of hometown friends surround him. He puts on a pair of recently purchased Rick Owens Black Kriester shades. One of his friends joke about how the shades were indicative of his superstar status. Another one of his friends talks about who couldn’t make it. There’s a certain excitement present – and not just because he’s Port Salerno’s first mainstream rapper. It’s because as much as people try to label him a South Florida rapper, his loyalties lie elsewhere.

“I came up with my hood you know what I’m saying,” BossMan Dlow said. “My little hood. South Florida is big. Everybody knows South Florida. Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach – everybody know that. It’s like salute to them but I’m trying to bring shine to my city.”

A small unincorporated community in Martin County on Florida’s eastern coast, Port Salerno is a “get money” place where hustling reigns supreme. BossMan Dlow himself was in the streets before he even turned 14.

“Ain’t nothing else to do,” BossMan Dlow recalled. “If you ain’t gonna make it in sports, the next thing to do around my way is get out here and try to get you some money. Basically that’s what everybody ‘round doing.”

Before long, BossMan Dlow was selling weed, which is where his “Big Za” moniker originated. This would lead to him getting kicked out of high school as a sophomore and eventually a 20-month stint behind bars on drug possession charges that ended in August 2020. His incarceration experience during COVID seem to have taught him a very important lesson about time.

“I ain’t gonna sit here and tell no fairytale story,” he said. “But it’s just like, this made me realize like, you get locked up, time ain’t stopping. It’s still bills getting paid, money getting shifted, bank getting collected. Then you just inside. So like, nah bro, I can’t. I gotta make something shake.”

His first job after his release was with the county painting fire hydrants. It didn’t last long, he recalled. “Quit in about two, three weeks, man. I’m straight.”

While he was locked up, his friends had pooled money for a studio. But he waited; he studied the game; he wrote multiple songs just to maximize his studio time. That’s when he noticed his lane.

“The game?” he asked rhetorically. “I felt like it was missing a real trap rapper. Like a real trap rapper.”

And what makes a real trap rapper?

“You got to know how to say trap,” he continued (slang for drug dealing). “Everybody like to trap and get money. Trapping ain’t just drug dealing. Your salon can be a trap. Your executive office can be a trap. You got to know how to say it for everybody to grasp it – females, kids, older people.”

As the Suburban approaches the backstage of the People Matter Fest, the conversation switches to fame and how he’s dealing with it. “Get In With Me” has racked up more than 20 million streams on Spotify as of this writing and his debut tape “Too Slippery” hasn’t even been out 18 months. Ironically, BossMan Dlow compares it to jail.

“You just have to get used to it. I am what I am,” he said. “That said, it’s kinda like jail: once you there, you there. It’s no, ‘Damn I think I got to adapt.’ No, you better adapt.”