On Epiphany, the Florida-born, Tallahassee-repping singer, slightly expands upon his body-part obsessed persona with a strangely-placed AIDS track (“Suicide”) with T-Pain considering suicide after learning he might have contracted HIV by not wearing a rubber. The Slate article wonders aloud why T-Pain is such a popular radio staple and Rosen’s “simplest” answer - that gullible consumers will snatch up any pop novelty record, especially one that “speaks to the zeitgeist” - is downright insulting. What most fail to notice, or admit, is that T-Pain is a consummate, at times quite innovative, producer (Kanye recently said he was the next R. This is what Jody Rosen, supposes in a recent Slate article - that T-Pain is another in a long line of R&B sex-addicts but with a slight vocal-tic twist.

If you’ve only heard T-Pain’s radio hits, you’ll be led to believe he’s a one-trick pony, using this trademark effect as a cheap substitute to actual talent or as a cloying attempt to separate himself from the aforementioned forgottens. His main claim to fame is the ubiquitous vocoder/talk box/Pro Tools effect (henceforth referred to as “talk box”, ‘cuz it sounds the most sexually appropriate). But why T-Pain? Of all the popular artists on the airwaves he initially seems the most prone to novelty - the most likely to fade into the same collected bin of forgotten R&B artists such as Case, Ginuine, Jagged Edge, Joe, Kci & JoJo, Maxwell and Tyrese. Some, like Sean Fennessy understand its silliness, but still deem T-Pain’s sparse, two records worth of material worthy of paragraphical critique.

How seriously should we take this music? By “we” I mean both listeners and critics.

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