T-Pain had monumental success in the late ’00s. He racked up hit records and accolades that helped solidified him as one of the most successful songwriters and producers of all time. His work with autotune helped redefine genres, but it did not come without a cost. T-Pain was often criticized for his overuse of the pitch correction tool. Many have even accused him of ruining music and the genres of hip-hop, R&B and pop. In a recent interview with Angie Martinez, T-Pain recalls how he was mistreated by many celebrities and is happy that some of them have been exposed in recent years as jerks by others.
T-Pain and Angie Martinez caught up in an interview titled “T-Pain Tried To Gift Diddy A Ciroc Chain, Reveals The Keys To A Successful Marriage + More.” The convo focuses for a bit on T-Pain being a nice guy and sensitive about his work and how people treat him. When asked by Angie why he is sensitive, he responds “The success doesn’t change that at all. You are able to hide it more with money.” He goes on to say that he is not shy or ashamed to be “sensitive about [his] s***.”
He follows this up saying that the music industry does not favor the sensitive or weak, and that “To be a nice person in this game, you build up a callus as you go along. I want to be nice to everyone, I want everyone to be nice to me.” He acknowledges that this cannot always be the case. “I would never do that to somebody” he said about those mean people he encountered. However, he says that a lot of people that he used to “warn us about” in interviews have finally started to started to show their colors.
“Crazy thing, I love what’s happening right now” he says. “All them years ago I was telling you about all these people that were a–holes to me” he recalls. He then exclaims sarcastically “Holy shit, this person actually an a–hole.”
He goes on to say that there are several stories he’s told over the years about being treated badly, and many of those people are now starting to prove him right. He mumbled under his breath about people being “taken off songs”, something that could only be a reference to Kanye West whose recent beefed with Soulja Boy over a scrapped feature on Donda. Kanye and T-Pain famously collaborated on “Good Life”. T-Pain has accused Kanye West of stealing his sound for 808’s and Heartbreaks.
Some could also assume he might be talking about Nicki Minaj. Nicki famously turned down a feature for T-Pain. According to him she flat out ignored his request at a time where he was a massive star and she was still building her name. Nicki has since apologized and said she was focused on completing her album at the time.
Another famous T-Pain story is the one about Usher approaching him on a flight to Los Angeles and telling him that he ruined music. This was due to his popularization of autotune making it easier for just about anyone to be a singer. He told the story in an interview on the Netflix series This Is Pop.
While Usher has said in interviews that they’ve spoken, T-Pain reveals this is not true. He says he warned Usher’s camp about the interview a few years prior when they’d reached out to work. He then text him following it to clear the air. He says Usher asked him if they could talk instead of text, but that Usher never followed up.
