Just because hip-hop/R&B star T-Pain single-handedly - albeit accidentally - transformed the US pop chart with his retro-futuristic sound, don't expect him to strangle the goose that laid the golden egg.
That is to say, he isn't going to stop using a voice-distorting computer program called Auto-Tune any time soon. Not after employing the technology to create two hit albums and land a whopping 27 songs on the US pop chart since 2005, most of them in collaboration with the multiplatinum-selling likes of R. Kelly, T. I., Rick Ross and Akon.
Nor is T-Pain troubled by the fact that a constellation of rap stars - including Snoop Dogg on Sensual Seduction, G-Unit on Rider Pt. 2 and Lil Wayne on his No. 1 hit Lollipop - have also used the effect, which manipulates vocal pitch to "correct" a note in a scale, resulting in a heavily processed sound perhaps best described as robot lust.
As the rapper-turned-singer sees it, if continuing fealty to computer vocal tweaking means he has to suffer the occasional sling or arrow from his record label, Konvict/Jive, so be it. To the chagrin of some label artist-and-repertoire honchos, about half the songs on his new album Thr33 Ringz use the Auto-Tune vocal effect.
"Recently, I got some [flak] for it," T-Pain said by phone from Atlanta, where he was in the middle of moving into a new house.
"They said I should stop doing [Auto-Tune] because too many other people are using it now. They figured that people would get tired of it. What I explained to them is, there's no-one better than the originator."
The top-hat-loving Grammy winner places his innovation within a larger continuum of musical FX technicians who inspired him. He pointed out that Teddy Riley, one of the fathers of New Jack Swing, and Roger Troutman, a '70s funk-R&B legend, used an earlier funky-voice technology called the Vocoder to distinguish themselves and achieve chart success. (In 1998, Cher recorded the electro-tinged romantic paean Believe, which is widely credited with injecting Auto-Tune's mechanical modulations into pop consciousness.)
"Teddy Riley can't do it better than Roger Troutman," T-Pain said. "I can't do it better than Teddy Riley. And can't nobody do it better than me. So whoever come after me have to bring it!"
A former member of the Tallahassee rap group Nappy Headz whose solo output largely has cohered around temporal pleasures - as evidenced by songs such as Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin'), I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper) and Bartender - T-Pain (23) said he first heard Auto-Tune on a song by Jennifer Lopez, though he can't recall the title, and used the effect for his contribution to a 2003 mix tape.
Around that time, he had been experimenting with other pitch-shifting technologies he remembered as "a bunch of weird stuff where people would have thought I was an alien".
"As I was ending my rap career, I was thinking about switching to singing full time," T-Pain said. "If I was going to sing, I didn't want to sound like everybody else . . . I just wanted something to make me different. Auto-Tune was the one. So I just stuck with that effect."
Ironically, T-Pain's efforts to stand out from the pack have resulted in hip-hop's new normal. Earlier this year the singer-producer travelled to Hawaii to give Kanye West a crash course in using Auto-Tune. And now the effect turns up on every song on the Louis Vuitton Don's upcoming album 808s & Heartbreak - a paradigm shift for a performer known for his clear, enunciative rap style.
"Auto-Tune. That's like the new word that represents wack," West said at a listening party for his album last month. "But it's the funnest thing to use."
He added of his collaborator: "When T-Pain came to Hawaii, his energy was just so pure, so untampered with. His light was so bright".
