"It's sad to say, but it's a special thing to be in that position: to be one of the best and be a woman at the same time. "It's a male-dominated field, so when women can do music just as great as men, they don't want to share that," Dej says. Women in rap: Despite the uptick in her own career - signed to Columbia Records in October and hard at work on her debut album now - Dej thinks the main problem still plaguing many female rappers is the unfortunate idea there can only be one. "I went and I checked and I saw he was following me, and I was like, 'That's dope.' Drake is one of the biggest artists of our era, so when he follows you, you know you're onto something.'" But Drake wasn't the only one to notice: Ever since Drake posted lyrics to Try Me on his Instagram in September, remixes of the song have been popping up right and left, from the likes of T.I., Wiz Khalifa, E-40 and Remy Ma. "I was thinking, 'How did you even know Drake followed me? How did you catch that?'" Dej says. Life-changing cosign: That all changed this summer when a fan alerted her that Drake followed her on Twitter. "I wasn't sure what I was going to do next." "It just wasn't me, it was terrible," Dej says. I was a loner." After graduating high school and enrolling in nursing school, she dropped out after three semesters and tried to focus on music, working odd jobs at Tim Hortons and as a Chrysler plant janitor to pay the bills. I just did what I did, I wrote music and played basketball.
"I didn't really have the urge to go do stuff that I knew I wasn't supposed to. "I just tried to stay out of trouble as much as possible," says Dej, 23, who started writing lyrics when she was 9 and whose surname stems from her love of loafers shoes. Making ends meet: Dej was raised by a single mom in the Detroit projects with her two brothers (her father was killed when she was 4).
Released this past summer, the song just hit No. "It could've been a good thing they were looking, but I took it bad, so I stopped in the mall, pulled out my phone and recorded a voice memo." That brief note soon became the sing-songy chorus of her melodic yet vicious Try Me, which she recorded just days after over a DDS-produced beat. Walking around with her friend one day, "people were looking at us like they wanted to fight or something," the rapper (real name: Deja Trimble) says. Worth a Try: For Dej Loaf, even a stroll through the mall can turn into a breakthrough hit.
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