Auto-tune was the best and worst thing to ever happen to T-Pain. There may be no pop singer who is more associated with the auto-tuner than the singer of “Buy U A Drank” and “Up Down” and his auto-tuned sound would become a staple in his music and it would influence a generation of artists from pop musicians to basically every rapper who wanted to expand their scope into R&B.
The auto-tune has been very good to T-Pain.
Unfortunately, tt’s also led to people forgetting that T-Pain can, you know, sing. Really sing. Sing like a bartender-loving angel. The idea of auto-tune being used to mask vocal deficiencies is well practiced within pop music but with T-Pain, it was clearly an artistic choice rather than a crutch. Just watch the video above which T-Pain did for NPR Music. The dude has pipes for days.
T-Pain apparently has a greatest hits album coming out soon but I’d pay good money for an album that’s like this; where T-Pain sings his anthems on drinking and sleeping around sans auto-tune. It would be just as good as the original hits.
