The music of Dej Loaf, whose “Try Me” is one of the year’s most surreal and unanticipated rap hits, is consistently resonant and surprising. Photograph by Roger Kisby / Getty

This June, Nicki Minaj took the stage at the 2015 BET Awards to accept her trophy for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist. She invited her mother up to accept the award with her—an unexpected gesture from the larger-than-life star. “To BET, thank you for always supporting women in hip-hop,” she said, and then broke her pageant poise with a furrowed brow and a few slow-rolling, carefully chosen words. “Shout out to all the girls nominated. And a special shout out to Dej Loaf.” Applause swelled from the audience. “You’ve been very, very interesting to me. And super forward.” A camera quickly found Dej in her seat, beaming, her own mother at her side.

Minaj’s plug was noteworthy. In the five years since she débuted, with the album “Pink Friday_,_” we’ve seen a handful of female hopefuls score modest hits or Internet accolades, but Minaj hadn’t offered such praise to a young peer before. What was different about Dej? At twenty-four years old, Dej, who is from Detroit, had produced one of the most surreal and unanticipated rap hits of the year with “Try Me,” which was self-released to the Web and soon championed by the likes of Drake and Wiz Khalifa.

The sparkling track was just as captivating both because of its earworm melody and because of the cognitive dissonance evoked by Dej’s high-pitched, childlike voice making boastful, intrepid threats with such sincerity: “Bitch I got the tommy, no Hilfiger/ Lil Dej ain’t bout it? Bitch, how you figure?” The video for “Try Me” pushed her further, revealing a baby face and an ambidextrous style: Dej wakes up in lingerie and fuzzy slippers but is soon sporting a W.W.E. jersey and jeans. She looked and sounded like nothing else in music, and her pull was evident: the single spent eight consecutive weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, the video quickly gained thirty-three million views on YouTube, and Colombia Records signed Dej to an album deal. Perhaps, in Dej, Minaj finally saw a counterpart, a female rapper who could upend traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, rap and pop, hard and soft, as she herself had done before. There wasn’t going to be another Nicki Minaj any time soon, but there also probably won’t be another Dej Loaf.

Dej returned to BET this October for the Hip-Hop Awards to perform her second proper single, “Back Up,” which features the Kanye West protégé and fellow Detroit native Big Sean. More ambitious than “Try Me” in concept and execution, it’s built on a sample of DJ Clent’s 2004 house track “Back Up Off Me,” and weaves jagged Detroit jit bounce through the glistening keys and sticky bass lines that dominate today’s urban pop nationwide. Like “Try Me,” the song’s narrative is all subversive id: Dej brushing off an obsessed male suitor who doesn’t realize that she’d rather take his necklace than his phone number. The single has enjoyed a three-week rise on the Hot 100—it’s oddly addictive, if even just because it contains so many knots to untie. On repeated listens, the track lands as a deft tribute to Dej’s native city and is a disruptive radio presence unique enough in sound to garner fevered praise and passive scorn in equal measure.

Dej’s raps are often unconcerned with neatness and density—like her street-rap peers, such as Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan, she makes up for the looseness with inventive melody and immediate style. You don’t get regarded as “interesting” and “forward” by taking the road well travelled, and, even to a well-versed ear, “Back Up” is anything but familiar.

A lukewarm reaction might have been anticipated from BET’s viewers that night. Many were hearing the wily single for the first time, and soundstage speakers and censors almost always neuter televised music numbers. But, surprisingly, as the performance transitioned into “Be Real,” Dej’s pop-primed collaboration with the radio mainstay Kid Ink, throngs of viewers bypassed Dej’s music altogether and took to social media to remark on her appearance—mainly, as characterized by a headline that aggregated the reactions the next day, that she looked “like a little boy.”

Vanessa Grigoriadis, in her recent profile of Nicki Minaj for the Times magazine, leads with the declaration that “Pop music is dominated almost exclusively by the female star—Beyoncé, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and, as always, Madonna.” She continues, “These women are_ _the pop business now. And they’re not feeling particularly shy about telling us that.” Several of those women enjoyed consecutive, extensive features and profiles in major outlets this year, discussing their place in music, fashion, and culture; quite naturally, critical engagement with these artists extends beyond their songs. The female pop star can be a lens through which to examine issues of hegemony, equality, sexuality, power, image, representation, and control.

In this context, after Dej’s performance, it would be easy to imagine that a galvanized swell of supporters, invested in maintaining this momentum of conversations about image, gender, and music, might come to the defense of a young female artist enduring a torrent of shaming and cyber-bullying for little more than her tomboyish appearance. But this did not happen. Jokes rolled on, and, soon after, blogs turned to speculation about Dej’s alleged relationship with the Chicago rapper Lil Durk and questioning her sexual orientation.

The entire scene was a step backward in a year marked by forward-thinking considerations of gender, including widespread uproar against everyday street harassment and close considerations of inequality in several professional fields. “Young people are identifying and exploring formerly unknown, or at least unlabeled, frontiers of sexuality and gender,” Grigoriadis wrote in her Minaj profile. Dej Loaf, with her unclassifiable style, her defiant composite sound, and her distinct youthfulness, is a fitting emblem of this cultural momentum. Imagine if, instead of asking yet more questions about Drake or Meek Mill, a journalist had followed up with Nicki Minaj about her thoughts on Dej.

Beyond the cut of her clothes or height of her endorsements, Dej’s music is consistently resonant and surprising. “#AndSeeThatsTheThing,” the Columbia-supported EP that houses “Back Up,” is rife with rich observations from Dej’s singular perspective. “Look what they did to my dad,” she raps on the excellent opener, “Desire,” about her late father (he was murdered in Detroit when Dej was just a toddler), before tightening up: “Niggas be feeling themselves, I’d rather feel on myself than let you feel on my ass.” On “Been On My Grind,” she considers her overnight role as the breadwinner and protector of her family, including a brother just released from prison: “Just imagine all that pressure on me,” she vents. Later on, the track “Butterflies” steps into an abstract narrative about a forbidden relationship too complicated to articulate in full: “You’ve got a family of your own,” she sings, “and you know my situation.”

Throughout the project, Dej is fixated with the idea of perseverance. She is by no means flawless, but she swaggers with an unflinching certainty in the fact that one doesn’t have to be perfect to win. In a pop climate where iTunes sales and Instagram likes have nearly equal market values, Dej is a tough, but vital, sell to the masses. As marginalized perspectives grow more valuable to the cultural discourse than ever, it’s certainly worth a try.