JUST OUT / MUSIC
T-Pain stays a step ahead of imitators
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
HIP-HOP
“Thr33 Ringz”
T-Pain. Nappy Boy/Konvict/Jive. 17 tracks.
Grade: B
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In the year and change since his last album, “Epiphany,” was released, T-Pain has gone from outlier to insider, laughingstock to innovator. Thanks to high-profile imitators like Kanye West and Lil Wayne and up-and-comers like Ron Browz, his once-signature cyborgesque Auto-Tune-enhanced vocals have become something of the norm. As a result, T-Pain has made an additional transformation: eager salesman to indignant complainer.
He has a point, though, and on “Thr33 Ringz,” his third album, he makes the case for his misunderstood genius — “This is my circus I’m working/I can flip this whole game with one hand” — by reasserting that no one has a better idea of how to make a T-Pain song than T-Pain. He even breaks the fourth wall, talking process on “Long Lap Dance,” about how a private dance in a strip club, a fixed-price commodity, is a better bargain the longer the song that accompanies it is. “Don’t you feel dumb/when shorty comes over to you/and starts getting it on,” he commiserates. “Then the song is over/ that’s so wrong/so I made a long lap-dance song.”
This song has all the T-Pain hallmarks — the robotic vocals, the mild raunch, the humor — but is far gentler than his previous work. So is the rest of this album, one of the softest soul records in recent memory. “Blowing Up,” which recalls the ecstatic dance-soul records of the mid-1980s, is flirty but not lascivious. The tender, brightly chiming hit single “Can’t Believe It” preaches fidelity. “Put you in a mansion/somewhere in Wisconsin,” he sings, in an impressive feat of contrived rhyme. “Like I said, it ain’t nothing to the Pain/we can change the last name/What’s happening?”
It’s a genuine shift for T-Pain, who has long flirted with lewdness (as he does here on the bass-music-influenced “Superstar Lady”). But on most of these songs he recalls no one so much as Missy Elliott, who also works the eccentric edges of hip-hop, using dashes of sexual whimsy and a keen gift for rhythmically savvy melodies.
Like Elliott, T-Pain is a style maverick operating from just outside the hip-hop mainstream. Unlike her, he wants more. On “Karaoke” he returns to his roots as a rapper to dress down the copycats: “Why it’s cool for you but it’s not for me?” But most jarring is “Keep Going,” a shockingly straightforward ode to his family. The raw emotion surprises, but so does the delivery mode: Gone are the robotic vocals. Instead, T-Pain sings unadorned and well. Maybe after months of having rappers imitate his every move, T-Pain just wanted something that couldn’t be copied.
— JON CARAMANICA, New York Times
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— Sonia Murray
