After a conversation with Usher on a plane in 2013, when the “Burn” singer spoke bluntly and caught him by surprise, T-Pain says he dealt with a four-year depression.
In a new clip from the Netflix series This Is Pop, the singer talks about a 2013 flight he took around the BET Awards. While he was sleeping, a flight attendant woke him up and explain that Usher wanted to speak with him.
“Usher was my friend,” T-Pain said. “I really respect Usher. And he said, ‘I’m gonna tell you something, man. You kinda fucked up music.’”
The comment took T-Pain by surprise, and he initially thought it could’ve been a joke, but Usher then repeated himself. He said that Usher then added, “‘Yeah man you really fucked up music for real singers.’ I was like, ‘What did I do? I came out and I used Auto-Tune.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, you fucked it up.’ I’m like, ‘But I used it, I didn’t tell everybody else to start using it.’”
For the Auto-Tune titan, as he explains in the preview clip of the show, that conversation was the “very moment that started a four-year depression for me.” Of course, the conversation came a few years after Jay-Z publicly slammed Auto-Tune in Blueprint 3 single “DOA,” but the singer says the Usher moment was the one that did it—despite not realizing so until years later.
