As an ex-rapper, T-Pain’s most evident debt is to Ludacris. As a rappa ternt sanga, however, T-Pain was first- (if never best-) in-class; a true weirdo who, throughout the mid-’00s, pioneered new heights of strip club addiction and new uses of Auto-Tune, and thereby set the style for a decade of hip-hop and R&B to come. The last three Kanye albums don’t happen without him. Future doesn’t happen without him. Weezy’s “Lollipop,” Future’s “Turn on the Lights,” Dej Loaf’s “Try Me”—none of these songs pop off without T-Pain as the creative precedent. He runs shit here; we just live here.
Given the recent fawning over T-Pain for his impressive live performance of his biggest hits for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, an important correction to pop cultural revision of homeboy’s career is the simple fact that, yes, T-Pain can sing. He’s been ~singing~ since his Rappa Ternt Sanga debut in 2005, though radio host Charlamagne tha God shamed T-Pain into additional vocal coaching after the singer croaked a few notes on Charlamagne’s old Concrete Jungle show in Charleston, S.C. In any case, below, here’s T-Pain on his third album, Thr33 Ringz, sounding rather like Chris Brown backed by Adele’s tender piano.
(In case you’re curious: Thr33 Ringz is T-Pain’s best album, with the best features, and an abundance of personality yet to be fleshed from the entirety of Future’s career—but I digress.)
There was certain daring implicit in T-Pain’s converting to R&B in the first place, given that it’s a feat he achieved entirely by the strength of electronic voice modification. Imperfection is T-Pain’s selling point; he’s American karaoke. In 2007, “Buy Me a Drink” was a singular achievement, a song that’s somehow more appealing as an Auto-Tune experiment than it would be to hear as pure, conventionally powerful crooning.
Yacht-hopping and shark-jumping aside, the general truth is that hip-hop ca. 2014 is molded in T-Pain’s image and vocal signature. T-Pain’s still the second-most interesting personality (other than Kanye West) to fashion Auto-Tune as his artistic crutch. Future, T-Pain's ostensible rival, too cool for the sort of grotesque vulnerability by which T-Pain will sing to you about weeping in a stripper’s lap.
“I’m on a Boat” was, lowkey, the lamest decision of his career. The viral parody collaboration with SNL white boy duo Lonely Island made T-Pain a literal punchline of fraternity listservs and LOL emails from your mother. ("I fucked a mermaid!" he sings.) Soon enough, Jay Z was supposedly clowning T-Pain on “Death of Auto-Tune,” the hilariously ahistorical first single from Hov's Blueprint 3. Months before the "I'm on a Boat" video dropped, Kanye had released 808s & Heartbreak, claiming the true, tortured artiste-ry of Auto-Tune for himself.
This past March, the New Yorker profiled T-Pain and thus summarized his decline:
What started the backlash, as T-Pain sees it, wasn’t the Jay Z diss but, rather, so many relentlessly lame performers (Ke$ha, the Black Eyed Peas) being moved to give Auto-Tune a whirl after Rappa Ternt Sanga came out. Soon, everyone was using Auto-Tune; listeners simply got sick of it, and he became a martyr for having influenced the trend.
Even T-Pain’s most heavily modified, radio-oriented hits (“Buy U a Drank,” “Chopped and Screwed,” “Bartender”) are hardly more “improved” by Auto-Tune than modern Chris Brown or Tinashe. At this point, maybe T-Pain can outsing them both. I'm happy to hear him try. “Up Down (Do This All Day)” ain’t exactly a vanity cut, but as a lead, comeback single, it’s a confident appeal from an artist who famously, suddenly lacked as much. Now, where’s that second single? Come on, T. You can do it. Two-step. You can do it all by yourself.
