ARTICLE: T-Pain Vs Creativity - Jaspers Hot Takes
My Confession:
I must confess, growing up, I was the epitome of a classic rock nerd. If it wasn't from 20 years before I was born and didn’t involve screaming electric guitars or 10 piece drum sets, I promptly stuck up my nose and never gave it a chance. Looking back, it seems this had stemmed from a place of jealousy or resentment for the technology. I had been put in music lessons from the age of 3, and my ego could not cope with the lack of performativity from these electronic drums and synths of the 2010s. On the outside, it looks as though it takes no effort to learn or play these instruments and all the pop stars my friends were listening to seemed ‘undeserving’ to me.
The truth is, I was too young and ignorant to understand the amount of work that went into these pieces. I never stopped to realise that my resentment for the new technologies almost mirrored the feelings my grandparents generation had towards my favourite music back then. (80s hair metal). But ego and performativity aside, why is it that I thought the music was ‘bad’? It can’t have been the cool synth bass sounds or the infectious beats, on paper that should make this music good right? It must have been something deeper...
Dishonesty in Music:
T-Pain started his career as a Rapper/Singer in the early 2000s. Like many artists though, he was struggling to find a unique sound that would set him apart. Que, autotune.
T-Pain wasn’t the first artist to use this tool, and he also wasn’t the first to abuse it. Most notably, Cher used it considerably in their 90s hit ‘Believe’. T-Pain however, spent a lot of his career defending his sound rather than promoting it. In quoting Usher, T-Pain was largely credited for having “F**ked up music for real singers.” (This is Pop 2.30) This resentment divided the music business strongly and was seen very publicly with the likes of D.O.A (Death of Autotune) Jay Z, a diss track directed at T-Pain.
But is it entirely fair to Blame T-Pain? Since the advent of the microphone in the early 20th century, the style of singers has been shaped through this medium. Just like autotune, the microphone was met with a combination of excitement and fear. For a lot of people, the microphone represented a disconnect from the listener and artist. Even Sinatra himself agreed that “singing ability is one of the least essential qualifications for success in this new pop form" (Simon Firth, Art Vs Technology (271) Having a soft quiet voice accompanied by comparatively loud instruments (double bass, saxophone, piano and drums) was seen as unnatural and synthetic. "For the crooners' critics, technical dishonesty meant emotional dishonesty." (Simon Firth, Art Vs Technology (264). T-Pain had a similar narrative to defend through his career. Often the heavily autotuned tracks he released were received as dishonest, fake, or unremarkable in the sense that anyone can just put autotune on their voice and sound this way. This sentiment is echoed through generations and seems to me a strange hill for critics to die on. Technology is, was, and will always be the medium of expressing our emotions through music. So long as it is a conscious thought to turn the auto tune up to 11, there is no dishonesty in it.
A Good Singer with a Bad Hand:
After a decade of releasing music, T-Pain had made a reputation for himself with his heavily produced singing style. This came as a blessing and a curse. While he sold many records and was propelled to stardom, he was also pigeonholed into a realm of music that became a popular punching bag for highbrow critics going after easy shots and low hanging fruit. The popular narrative seems to be that a real musician doesn’t need these tools or they are a shortcut for undeserving users. This is also argued by Yanto Browning who says that, "The biggest problem with correction tools such Auto-Tune is that they breed mediocrity and laziness in a new generation of singers and musicians." One of the outlying flaws in this mindset is that the singer was bad to begin with. It lies on the assumption that this tool can and will only be used to cover up mistakes and not as an artistic choice.
T-Pain would never have been in a position to discover his niche if it were not for a certain level of undoubted talent.
A Hollow Redemption:
Regardless of the stardom, the countless records sold, and all the money and power T-pain has earned over the course of his career, he seems to have spent the last few years seeking redemption and validation. Most recently having won the ‘Masked Voice’, T also famously displayed the smooth and practised characteristics of his voice on NPRs Tiny Desk Concert in 2014. For the first time, he put away his autotune box and sang directly to the room with just a jazz keyboard for accompaniment. Admittedly, this is when I started having serious questions over my own feelings for his music. The usual digs had fallen through and "T-Pain’s acoustic performance... redeemed him in the eyes of many listeners." (Catherine Provenzano (159). (T-Pain on NPRs Tiny Desk Concert).
There’s a sadness in the fact that he felt this needed to be done in the first place. It changed my perspective on pop music but it only proved something T-Pain never had to be sorry for in the first place. His records were never sold on the basis of honesty or prowess, however this was the only basis they seemed to be judged on.
Food For Thought:
My biggest takeaway from this research has been to be introspective when judging art. Every person comes with a preconditioned bias and only once this is set aside can one truly objectively assess music. Whenever you put on new music or judge a song your friend is trying to show you, remember this:
"The question is not who is good and who isn’t, it’s what makes the music we consider to be good, actually good." (Colton Dewberry)
Bibliography:
2021.
Browning, Yanto. "Auto-Tune, And Why We Shouldn't Be Surprised Britney Can't Sing". The
Conversation, 2021,
https://theconversation.com/auto-tune-and-why-we-shouldnt-be-surprised-britney-cant-sing-29167.
Accessed 26 Aug 2021.
Dewberry, Colton. "What Makes Good Music Good?". Medium, 2021,
https://medium.com/@ColtonDewberry/what-makes-good-music-good-f27e9e4b6e9c. Accessed 27 Aug
Firth, Simon. "Art Versus Technology: The Strange Case Of Popular Music - Simon Frith, 1986". SAGE
Journals, 2021, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/016344386008003002. Accessed 26 Aug 2021.
Provenzano, Catherine. "Auto-Tune, Labor, And The Pop-Music Voice (159)".
Oxford.Universitypressscholarship.Com, 2021,
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/oso/9780199985227.001.0001/oso-97
80199985227-chapter-8. Accessed 26 Aug 2021.
Raab, Jarad, and Chelsea McMullan. This Is Pop Ep.2. Netflix, 2021.