Dej, though, is also a magnetic personality who doesn’t need to sound cool.
Its sound is anesthetizing, with big, dreamy beats that seem to swallow up feelings and that lesser rappers could easily get lost in trying to sound cool. But Sell Sole is the project that connected with me more than any other this year. She’ll probably make a better album at some point in the near future.
It doesn’t even contain the best song she released this year (that would be the hit single “Try Me”). Is Dej Loaf’s mixtape an unimpeachable classic that we’ll remember for years to come as a indispensable addition to the rap canon? No, probably not. Who doesn’t want to do that? Add Andre 3000 showing up for his annual blockbuster guest appearance to rap about how his memory sucks and that’s a landmark song. Future rapped circles around your favorite rapper this year on the basis of the line “let’s have a heart to heart, drink wine, make art” alone. The important thing is that “Honest” still sounds like Future drank from some heavenly fountain that grants people the perfect falsetto, and, true to its title, captures everything about Future in one perfectly succinct lyric: “Real street n-a ain't get nothing but some pain from it.” “I Be U” is the prettiest love song of the year and a clear evolution from Future’s previous heart-on-sleeve high points of “Turn on the Lights” and “Real and True.” “Benz Friendz” is the best Outkast song to come out in a decade. I will acknowledge that it’s not the seamless front-to-back listen that Pluto was. I assume people overlooked this album because, unlike Pluto, it didn’t really have any successful singles other than “Honest,” which came out in 2013 (why “Covered N Money” never took off and “Benz Friendz” never got a single push at all I’ll never understand), although maybe it’s because Future lost a lot of goodwill by separating from Ciara. Fortunately, now is my chance to set history right with this year-end list. I don’t know how it became consensus opinion in the hip-hop world that somehow Honest sucked or was lame or even didn’t really live up to expectations, but somehow that happened, and everyone chose to ignore that Future put out a pretty much flawless album in 2014.
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