T-Pain is no stranger to shaking up the music industry and more specifically, the rap game.
Coming onto the scene as the rapper most known for his use of autotune, T-Pain recently revealed that other artists felt he had done a disservice to the music and weren’t shy about letting him know that.
Jay-Z notably wrote and released “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune) but in an episode that triggered a four-year period of depression for the “Buy U a Drank” singer, a flight attendant on the plane taking Pain to the 2013 Bet Awards woke the singer up and told him Usher needed to speak with him. What started as small talk eventually escalated and ended with Usher telling Pain, “You really, like, f**ked up music for real singers.”
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Pain said that the depression that followed resulted from Usher’s comments and the possibility that the “Love in This Club” singer was correct. “Is he right? Did I f**k up music?” Pain said he wondered to himself.
T-Pain, however, made it to the other side and after finally checking those hidden DM requests, has begun fighting for artists, earlier this year lamenting over artists only making a miniscule 12 per cent of the $17B profit record labels bring in and today, Pain hopped on Twitter to air out his thoughts on Lil Nas X and the rest of the hip-hop world.
First writing that there are rappers with “3x the budget that Lil Nas X got and still can’t do what he do because they too cool to be funny,” Pain continued on, saying that other rappers are “too gangsta to make more money,” and capping it with “you ain’t gotta kiss a dude in the mouth but I also don’t need to feel like I’m gonna die watching ur video.”
Lil Nas X, who has been on an incredible run recently, just dropped his debut album Montero, which was preceded by one of the funnier album rollouts in recent history including lapdances for Satan, pink prison uniforms, a mock daytime talk show and the most important part — a two-week pregnancy and the birth of Baby Montero. All of this kept Lil Nas at the top of nearly every conversation and with the exception of those appalled at nearly everything the 22-year-old rapper says or does, it was because the album rollout was grandiose and funny.
T-Pain recognized that and clearly thinks more rappers could benefit from incorporating more comedic elements into their processes. He didn’t say anybody else had to fake a pregnancy or anything like that either, he just said there’s people out there taking themselves too seriously who could make more money just by easing up.
Do you agree? Or is T-Pain way off base here? Let us know in the comments.