T-Pain revealed in a new Netflix show that an off-hand remark from his friend Usher had a profound effect on his mental health.
In an exclusive Entertainment Weekly clip from the forthcoming docuseries This Is Pop, the prolific musician recalled a casual conversation he had with Usher in 2013 on a flight to the BET Awards that wound up changing the course of his life. The visibly uncomfortable singer recalls that he was sleeping when a flight attendant woke up up to tell him that Usher wanted to speak with him. “So I got up and went back. He was like ‘Oh, how’s everything going?’ Quick small talk, no big deal,” he explained. “And he was like, ‘Man, I wanna tell you something.’ I thought he was about to tell me something real—he sounded real concerned. Then he was like ‘man, you kinda fucked up music.’ I didn’t understand.”
“Usher was my friend. I really respect Usher,” he continued. “And he said, ‘I’m gonna tell you something, man. You kinda fucked up music.’” At first, T-Pain said he laughed, albeit nervously, because he thought the singer was joking with him. He continued, “And then he was like, ‘Nah, man, you really fucked up music for real singers.’ I was like, ‘Oh, you’re serious,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah man, look what you did. Look what you’re doing.’ I was like, ‘What did I do? I came out and I used Auto-Tune.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, you fucked it up.’ I’m like, ‘But I used it, I didn’t tell everybody else to start using it.’” While he let the comment slide at the time, he said, “That is the very moment, and I don’t even think I realized this for a long time, but that’s the very moment that started a four-year depression for me.”
While T-Pain may be responsible for creating some of the most popular examples of Auto-Tune in the 21st century, he’s certainly not the first musician to employ the technique. In fact, the singer said the first time he ever heard it was on a remix of Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 hit “If You Had My Love.” Eighties funk artist Roger Troutman is actually considered to be the father of Auto-Tune, using a “talk box” to create various vocal effects on hugely popular tracks such as “I Wanna Be Your Man” and “Computer Love.” Usher would also go on to revise his stance on Auto-Tune technology being the death knell of music as, since insulting T-Pain’s music catalog, he’s gone on to collaborate with a number of artists known for their heavily-distorted vocals.
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