By Shannon Carlin
Four months ago, Dej Loaf was struggling. She had just quit her janitorial job at the Chrysler plant in her hometown of Detroit and was trying to figure out her next move. The 23-year-old, who had been writing rhymes since she was a kid, wanted to release a few of the tracks she had lying around, but didn’t have the money for a proper release. On a whim, she decided to put her track “Try Me” on Soundcloud.
“It kind of caught way,” Dej tells Radio.com over the phone from Detroit, “and changed my life.”
That is the understatement of the year.
Besides a handful of cool kids in Oakland, Calif., who took to the track immediately, it took two months for most others to catch on, including Drake, who co-signed the track when he posted the line “Love wearing black you should see my closet” on his Instagram.
“He’s one of the best artists of our time, it’s crazy,” Dej says. “I mean, how did he even hear it? I was definitely like, ‘Wow.'”
Soon Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant was tweeting about the song, Kylie Jenner was shouting it out on Instagram and every rapper from Wiz Khalifa to T.I. was jumping on a remix of the track, which was simply inspired by a trip to the mall.
“I was walking around shopping and I saw people staring at me and recorded the chorus on a voice memo. It was playful,” she explains, “like, ‘Why do you keep looking at me like you want to kill me?’…I didn’t want it to promote violence or negativity, but it was something I felt. Music to me is my diary. It lets me express how I feel.”
It was getting Remy Ma to lay down a verse for the official remix of “Try Me” though that made Dej feel like she had really made it.
“[Remy Ma] just makes like dope music. She really has bars,” Dej says. “She just got out of prison, but if she didn’t have to do that time she would have had her place in the game. I think she still does, but I think that definitely effected what she could have been.”
Dej Loaf — real name Deja Trimble — grew up in the Detroit projects, but had no interest in becoming another statistic. Her father was killed when she was only four years old, so she was raised by her mom, who has always been supportive of her music. Dej’s mom even joined her onstage at her first show in New York City earlier this month. Dej is also very close to her two brothers, the eldest of which is her personal hairdresser. “He’s the only one who can do it right,” she says, before noting she’d like to give other members of her family jobs in her camp in the future.
Dej says she was a shy kid who understood the difference between right and wrong. “I was kind of uptight, a loner, music was a tool,” she says. “I was the serious girl and everyone wondered, ‘Why she in the house? Why she never come out? Why she doesn’t come to the parties?’ Now they see me and they see I kind of saved myself from a lot of stuff I could have gotten into.”
Dej just dropped the Sell Soul mixtape and is already getting ready to work on her debut album, set to be released on Columbia Records — home to Beyoncé, John Legend and now, Dej Loaf.
She also has a spot on Eminem‘s new track “Detroit Vs. Everybody,” off his two-disc compilation ShadyXV celebrating 15 years of Shady Records, which features a who’s who of the Detroit rap scene: Royce Da 5’9″, Big Sean, Danny Brown, Trick Trick.
Detroit rap is synonymous with Eminem, but Dej says the greatest part of the Motor City hip-hop scene is “all the flavors.”
“You can’t put a title on it, what we do,” she says. “What we offer in Detroit, musically, it goes beyond labels.”
Her hope is that more people will come to her hometown to see what the rap scene has to offer. “People do get killed everyday here. But, people get killed everyday other places too and we’re rebuilding. We’ll be alright. The thing is, don’t be afraid to come here. It’s fine. You’ll live,” Dej says.
But, it is true that people in Detroit seem to get killed more often. Last year, Forbes named Detroit the most dangerous city for the fifth year in a row with a murder rate that was 10 times that of the national average. The only good news to come from this list was that Detroit actually saw a dip in its murder rate, going from 386 criminal homicides in 2012—the highest murder rate in over 20 years—to 333 in 2013.
Dej doesn’t sidestep the problems that her city faces, they’re part of her own story. Throughout Sell Sole she references those she has lost, from her father to her cousins. On “Birdcall,” she goes from talking about Omarion’s dance skills in You Got Served to rapping about forgoing magazine spreads for funeral services. On “I Got It,” she raps, “Where I’m from they use alleys for the caskets…I’m not tryna promote violence, a lot of s–t be on my conscience.” The title track has her saying she wants to make enough money to get her mom out of the projects and into a house in Beverly Hills.
Her ability to humanize the statistics — to put a face to all the pain and suffering — has earned Dej comparisons to Kendrick Lamar, who, being from Compton, also represents the hopeful side of what many consider a hopeless city. It’s the only comparison she enjoys hearing.
“good kid, m.A.A.d city, that was me, that was me alright growing up. I was always the good kid,” she says. “I wasn’t in the best place, but I trained myself to be who I am, force myself to not do what my crew was doing.”
Dej, however, doesn’t like the comparisons to other female rappers like Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea — or, for that matter, even being called a “female rapper.” In her opinion those two words keep women in hip-hop down by setting a precedent that they’re somehow different—perhaps, even inferior—to any rapper who happens to be a man. Her worry is that women in rap have started to believe it too.
“You have a bunch of women complaining about how hard it is when it’s not really hard. You have to make good music and everything will flow better. If you make good music, you’re going to get back what you put out,” she says. “I’m going to just be Dej Loaf. You know what I’m saying? I’m just an artist. I make music for everybody. I want the world listening to me. I know what the people want to hear, what the guys want to hear, what the ladies want to hear, the kids, the grandmas. Everybody.”
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