![]() On just about every song on Sell Sole, Dej Loaf sounds tough as hell, like someone who’s so tired of having to bust people’s faces. And that contrast can fuel a lot more than just one song. But “Try Me” works because of the contrast between the lightness of her delivery and the darkness of her words. Her self-released 2012 album Just Do It has some Slum Village, perhaps by way of Kendrick Lamar, in its DNA. A few years ago, she was a college dropout working an emotive, disclosure-heavy rap style that connected her, in some ways, to her city’s rich backpack-rap legacy. “Try Me,” it seems, was the moment where Dej Loaf discovered her voice. Instead of focusing on the one song that made her famous, Dej Loaf uses the tape to explore both the sound and the persona that “Try Me” established. (She just signed with Columbia earlier this week.) And anyway, “Try Me” would overwhelm a tape like this. After all, Dej Loaf can sell “Try Me” there’s no reason to give the original version away for free. It’s just the right way to treat the song. A new version of the track, with Ty Dolla $ign and Remy Ma both attempting their own version of Dej Loaf’s singsong flow, comes at the end of the tape. “Try Me” is only on Sell Sole, Dej Loaf’s new mixtape, in remixed form. Over the past few weeks, tons of rappers have cranked out their versions of “Try Me,” but all of them are only proving that they can’t bring the sui generis force that Dej Loaf brought to the original. ![]() It sounds like nothing else, and it sounds like it’s always existed. It’s ugly and pretty in equal measures, a softly melodic take on Chicago’s soul-burnt drill music. But “Try Me” has an instinctive force of its own. Dej Loaf, from Detroit, was absolutely unfamous before “Try Me” came along, and her producer DDS was a relative unknown, too. With Dej Loaf’s “Try Me,” though, the only hook is the hook itself: A murmured murder threat, a burst of dead-eyed gun-talk delivered in a half-asleep singsong over a pretty, twinkling beat with enough low end that it still sounds like the apocalypse coming out of trunk speakers. Those are all good songs, but the simple goodness of a song rarely seems to be enough to cross over. Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga” had the insta-viral dance. People might’ve given “No Flex Zone” a chance because Rae Sremmurd were proteges of the super-producer Mike Will Made-It. ILoveMakonnen’s “Tuesday” didn’t go supernova until Drake jumped on it. When a rap song bubbles up out of nowhere and takes over the world, people try to figure out how it happened, and you can usually retrofit some kind of narrative.
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