Kelly, T-Pain relishes in that fine line between in-on-the-joke ridiculousness and the borderline criminal (like the date-rape-ish “I know you ain’t feelin’ me / I promise that you take a sip of this you’ll be right here hearin’ me”). Important context: before this he’s trying to get a chick just a little bit inebriated, ‘cause, in his words: “I know you wouldn’t do what you do unless your tipsy.” After that he’s channeling his Bang Bus fantasies by taking his girl onto the highway to have sex (“I done cleared out the backseat”, he assures). On Epiphany, the Florida-born, Tallahassee-repping singer, slightly expands upon his body-part obsessed persona with a strangely-placed AIDS track (“Suicide”) with T-Pain considering suicide after learning he might have contracted HIV by not wearing a rubber. The Slate article wonders aloud why T-Pain is such a popular radio staple and Rosen’s “simplest” answer - that gullible consumers will snatch up any pop novelty record, especially one that “speaks to the zeitgeist” - is downright insulting. What most fail to notice, or admit, is that T-Pain is a consummate, at times quite innovative, producer (Kanye recently said he was the next R. This is what Jody Rosen, supposes in a recent Slate article - that T-Pain is another in a long line of R&B sex-addicts but with a slight vocal-tic twist. If you’ve only heard T-Pain’s radio hits, you’ll be led to believe he’s a one-trick pony, using this trademark effect as a cheap substitute to actual talent or as a cloying attempt to separate himself from the aforementioned forgottens. His main claim to fame is the ubiquitous vocoder/talk box/Pro Tools effect (henceforth referred to as “talk box”, ‘cuz it sounds the most sexually appropriate). But why T-Pain? Of all the popular artists on the airwaves he initially seems the most prone to novelty - the most likely to fade into the same collected bin of forgotten R&B artists such as Case, Ginuine, Jagged Edge, Joe, Kci & JoJo, Maxwell and Tyrese. Some, like Sean Fennessy understand its silliness, but still deem T-Pain’s sparse, two records worth of material worthy of paragraphical critique. How seriously should we take this music? By “we” I mean both listeners and critics.
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