
DEJ LOAF NO FEAR PRODUCER PROFESSIONAL
It was during the latter stretch that she stepped up her involvement in music and joined the Creative Minds Coalition and so began her journey into full-time professional music. She slacked off as a janitor at a factory that built pickup trucks. When she still went by Deja, Ms Dej quit nursing school and did tours as a cashier at a coffee shop and a Dairy Queen. It is hard to align this kind of focus with someone who sounded more…introspective than prolific. For what will soon be four years, seven if you count her pre-fame work. She had maintained a steady stream of work that has involved, been noticed by, or at the behest of some of the genre’s big guns. Impressively, these new pressures have not dented DeJ’s relentlessness. Unintentionally, her choice to exercise her right to withhold information has made it that much more salacious. And yet they persist and they push for more information, more personal material: sexual orientation, beefs, that kind of thing. The kind of questions you would never ask someone you cared about in a tastelessly direct manor. People crowd her, fans and media and assorted lookers-on. We are all present-day recipients of the results of that work and the quiet drive that adds to Dej’s mystique and magnetism. Young Deja began writing young and got a head start on developing a voice to communicate with the world. These events were unwelcome and heavy and needed processing. Her dad’s means of employment led to his murder, which tragically happened in front of his own home. Life was difficult and she was intelligent, muted and needed a means of expression. And she wrote in her ever-present notebooks.

She didn’t speak much and when she did she was tense and her voice was rarely louder than a whisper. Even with all signs pointing to superstardom, DeJ has remained remarkably low-key about her successes and kept her cards close about what comes next.īorn and raised in Detroit and daughter to a beautician mother and an unemployed father who dealt drugs to pay the bills, DeJ was quiet, insular and withdrawn. She opened for Nicki Minaj on her Pinkprint Tour and plans to release her first full-length studio album – this one produced by the Grammy-winning musical genius Detail - later this year. She put out three mixtapes in as many years, collaborated with rap royalty like Eminem, Future, and Lil Wayne and contributed to material from a laundry list of heavyweights including Rich Homie Quan, The Game, E-40, Kid Ink and The Neighbourhood.

In the four years since, Dej has wasted no time capitalizing. All of a sudden, everyone wanted a piece.

Detroit’s Deja Trimble, a reclusive rising star who performs under the moniker DeJ Loaf (a nod to her footwear of choice), is well on her way to doing just that.Īfter a few years of relative obscurity, a 22-year-old DeJ announced herself with 2014’s Try Me, which attracted Drake’s attention and was subsequently posted on his Instagram, caught fire and peaked at #8 on the US Rap charts, going gold. Establishing yourself as a female rapper, even in open-minded 2018, is a still few steps short of impossible. Making a name for yourself as an artist has never never easy.
