T-Pain has a rare distinction in music: When you think of one musical instrument, tool, or innovation, his name is the one that immediately comes to mind. Of course, this is due to him popularizing Auto-Tune in mainstream music.
But, if you ask him, he doesn’t believe he’s actually the person who made it “cool.” That honor goes to Snoop Dogg.
On a recent episode of Shaquille O’Neal and Adam Lefkoe’s The Big Podcast, Shaq asked if there was any “resistance” to T-Pain’s use of Auto-Tune initially, and he responded:
“Oh, that’s all it was. It was only resistance, until somebody cool did it. Who did that? Who made it cool? Snoop. Snoop did it, and it was totally fine. Everybody was like, you know, ‘OK, I guess we can listen to it’ [laughs].”
T-Pain didn’t mention a specific song, but he’s likely referring to Snoop’s 2007 single “Sensual Seduction.”
In 2021, T-Pain spoke about how some of that Auto-Tune resistance came from Usher, saying, “He was like, ‘Man, I want to tell you something, man.’ I was like, ‘What’s good?’ I thought he was about to tell me something real. He sounded real concerned. He was like, ‘Man, you kind of… you kind of f*cked up music.’ I didn’t understand. Usher was my friend. He was like, ‘Yeah man, you really f*cked up music for real singers.'”
Check out the full The Big Podcast episode above.
