Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

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Consumer Guide Album

DeJ Loaf: Sell Sole [self-released, 2014]
DeJ rhymes with "beige" and is short for Deja; Loaf signals style and is short for her shoes. Although the girlish Detroit rapper's second mixtape was sparked by her fuck-you earworm "Try Me," which used to cap it off but isn't on the one I bought two years late, I found her hammer-to-your-head manifesto for her "unborn creations" so irresistible that I never much missed it. It's the voice only that's girlish, clear and fluting although also calm and composed. The persona is more "I'm gonna shit on all these bitches and their daughters," in that particular case echoed by a crew I bet she enlisted at a middle-school playground. What's irresistible is the form-content disparity--a rapper who brags so un-macho, a rapper whose greed is so explicitly for her family, a rapper who's "Grindin'" at music. Plus her flow is a brook, her producer respects her space, and her two sex rhymes are into it and into it more. A-