T-Pain
“Stoicville”
Stoicville: The Phoenix (out in 2015 on Nappy Boy)

It’s pretty depressing that it took an auto-tune free NPR performance for America to show a modicum respect to one of the finest hit-makers of the last decade, but these are depressing times. If you argued that Eddie Van Halen and Tom Morello’s usage of distortion pedals them frauds, you would rightly be called an atavistic, unreasonable dipshit. However, few would say the same if you slated T-Pain for running his (very good) voice through a vocal processor. In fact, most people would probably agree that this devalues his standing as a musician.

This faulty logic has been used (by dipshits) as a stick to beat the ATLien for most of his 10-year career. To them, I present some facts. At just 29 years of age, T-Pain has already sang on and co-wrote fifteen (15!!!!) US Top 10 Singles, including at least seven pieces of musical WD-40 that will set any dancefloor/club on the planet ablaze. He’s also consistently put younger artists over, providing them with the kind of anthemic, gold dust choruses necessary to introduce rising talent to the masses. More than anything, he’s just an affable, super talented dude who has spent his entire career soundtracking good nights out with friends and long nights in between the sheets. And, the vocal processing he’s used makes him no less of an artist than your favorite guitar-wielding rawker.

All those aforementioned facts are why we should be celebrating T-Pain’s 10 years in the game. Fuck a Tiny Desk Concert. Fuck your Twitter approval. Hell, fuck this exquisite, acerbic slab of lyrical majesty that puts his ridiculously versatile skill set on blast. More than anything, fuck the fact that if this was a Kendrick Lamar track, all those dipshits would be fawning all over it.