Key Takeaways
- Lizzo praised T-Pain’s Auto-Tune legacy during a livestream, telling him "modern rap music would not exist" without him.
- T-Pain credited Kanye West with using Auto-Tune before him, though his own hits helped popularize the sound throughout the 2000s.
- Pharrell Williams recently urged T-Pain to make more R&B his way, and T-Pain hinted that more Auto-Tuned music could follow.
Lizzo has given T-Pain his flowers for the impact he's had on the music industry.
In a clip from a livestream uploaded on Wednesday (October 28), Lizzo talked to the singer about how he’s influenced rap music today with his past use of Auto-Tune.
"Do you realize that modern rap music wouldn't sound like this if you didn’t exist?" Lizzo asked. "Isn’t that so weird? Do you ever think about that sometimes? Do you think about the fact that modern rap music would not exist?"
T-Pain responded afterwards, simply saying he used to think about it. But then he shifted gears slightly, moving away from her suggestion that he was the first person to use the autotune device he popularized in the 2000s by revealing that Kanye West used it before he did.
Though Ye may have used the technology that ultimately stretches back to the late '90s (via early songs like Aphex Twin's "Funny Little Man" in 1997 and Cher's "Believe" in 1998), T-Pain made it popular in the early to late 2000s. After signing to Akon's Konvict Muzik in 2004, he utilized it for a distinctive style that created Hot 100 hits like "I'm Sprung" and "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)" in 2005.
Between 2007 and 2008, he landed 13 top-10 Hot 100 entries, three of them No. 1s: Flo Rida's "Low," Chris Brown's "Kiss Kiss," and his own "Buy U a Drank." He also won a Grammy for "Good Life" with Kanye West.
Then came the backlash. The style got so ubiquitous that its originator became a punchline, a stretch capped by Jay-Z's 2009 single "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)."
Auto-Tune is now widely used across modern hip-hop music, by artists like Travis Scott and Ken Carson.
As it continues to be embraced, one person who wants him to use it to make new R&B music is Pharrell Williams, who challenged the singer to make more music his "way" in August.
During a livestream, Pharrell called T-Pain, sounding flustered. "What the fuck are you doing, man?" he asked. "There’s no one in your way. No one can make R&B that's missing like you."
"I feel like you’re the bridge to bringing back R&B to what I feel like it means to Black people," Pharrell continued. "You are the bridge. Ain't nobody like you, bro. And you got the personality of the youth, where the youth would gravitate towards you."
T-Pain responded by saying that he'll "put my right brain on it," suggesting that there’s more Auto-Tuned music to come.
