What Happend To T-Pain (2020 Diverse Mentality MiniDocumentary) Rappers are supposed to be immune to hate. Even Drake, who is famously unafraid to appear sensitive and vulnerable in his songs, never wavers on this: haters are losers who do not deserve his attention. “Got one reply for all of your comments: fuck what you think,” as he put it on last year’s “Tuscan Leather.”T-Pain was never very good at being a rapper. He tried to be, when he was just starting out. But, as he told me in a recent interview, he ultimately decided to break into hip-hop as a singer instead. The move worked: T-Pain’s first album, the aptly named “Rappa Ternt Sanga,” released in 2005, made the chubby twenty-year-old from Tallahassee a star. Before long, he was generating one hit single after another, both on his own and as a featured guest alongside heavyweights like Kanye West, R. Kelly, and E-40. Even at the height of his celebrity, he never acted tough or particularly cool; his trademark accessories were a giant top hat and Oakley sunglasses that made him look like a snowboarder. Lately, T-Pain has been doing something even more unorthodox in hip-hop: telling sad stories, in public, about what it felt like when everyone, including some of his fellow-artists, started treating him like a joke.The songs that made T-Pain a household name in the mid-aughts were mostly about having fun at night clubs and hanging out with pretty girls, but the most important thing they shared was a signature studio effect called Auto-Tune. Traditionally seen as nothing more than a pitch-correcting technology used in secret to patch up flawed vocal takes, Auto-Tune became something else in T-Pain’s hands, turning the human voice into a new and bewitching instrument, and giving his in particular a vaguely alien and a computerized quality that sounded at once triumphant and melancholy.Though most pop-music fans still remember T-Pain’s big hits, most notably the slinky and infectious “Buy U a Drank,” by his fourth album, “Revolver,” in 2011, he had come to be seen as an uncool novelty act—a goofy-looking dork who rode to fame with a production gimmick that not only sounded corny but concealed his true lack of singing ability. In 2009, Jay Z released a hit single called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” intended to draw a line between so-called “real” hip-hop and poppy soft stuff; it inspired fans to chant “Fuck T-Pain!” during live performances. That same year, Christina Aguilera, of all people, was photographed wearing a T-shirt that said “auto tune is for pussies.” The comedy rap group The Lonely Island featured T-Pain on their song “I’m on a Boat,” performing more or less as a parody of himself. The song was nominated for a Grammy; when asked about the honor on the red carpet, T-Pain admitted it was kind of weird that his music didn’t get nominated, but a “mockery of the art” did.The apparent collapse of his career sent T-Pain, now twenty-eight years old, into a depression that left him unmotivated to make any more music. Only recently has he emerged from this dark period: he has started work on a comeback album, landed the tense and pretty single “Up Down (Do This All Day)” on the charts, and today embarks on a tour called “I Am T-Pain.” To promote all that activity, T-Pain has also been giving interviews, in which he has candidly discussed the experience of turning from one of pop’s hit-makers into a walking punch line.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.There’s an argument to be made that T-Pain should have just stopped using Auto-Tune and figured out some other way to stand out—that, sometimes, it’s worth listening to the haters.
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