This Is Pop (2021) s01e02 Episode Script

[suspenseful music playing]
Apparently there was
a time in this country
when in order to become a singer,
you had to know how to sing.
- And, uh Weird, right?
- [crowd laughing]
That's not the case anymore,
thanks to Auto-Tune.
Baby girl, what's your name? ♪
Let me talk to you
Let me buy you a drink ♪
You're telling me a singer can
sing into a microphone a bad note,
and out the speakers comes a good note?
- Yes.
- Now, that's evil.
Music is being destroyed
because the human element
is being edited out.
[auto-tuned meows]
Jen Lopez needs Auto-Tune,
and Janet needs Auto-Tune,
[crowd booing]
and Beyoncé needs Auto-Tune
[crowd] Whoa!
[auto-tuned] Shorty, yeah ♪
Sounds exactly like T-Pain, right?
T-Pain is the popular music star
It's your boy T-Pain,
aka Teddy Pend-her-ass-down.
[man 1] People defend him saying,
"Oh, but Cher used it first."
Well, T-Pain used it
about a million fucking times.
[man 2] This is making music
bland, stale, and boring.
[man 3] T-Pain is horrible.
He is the worst rapper
probably of all time.
[chuckling]
- [director] No, looks good.
- Yes. Solid.
[director] All right.
[producer] Okay. T-Pain, uh, take one.
[director] I heard a story about
you and Usher on an airplane.
[sighs]
We were actually
going to the 2013 BET Awards.
We were all in first class.
And, uh, I went to sleep.
I was awakened by the flight attendant.
She said, "Usher would
like to talk to you in the back."
So I got up and went back,
and it was like, "How's everything going?"
Quick small talk. No big deal.
And, um he was like,
"Man, I want to tell you something, man."
I was like, "What's good?"
Thought he was about tell me something
He sounded real concerned.
He was like, "Man, you kind of
you kind of fucked up music."
[clicks tongue]
I didn't understand.
Usher was my friend.
He was like, "Nah, man, you really
fucked up music for real singers."
Literally at that point,
I couldn't listen.
Is he right?
Did I fuck this up? Did I fuck up music?
And I and that is the very moment
And I don't even think
I realized this for a long time,
that's the very moment that started,
like, a four-year depression for me.
I don't understand it.
I came out and I used Auto-Tune,
but I wasn't the person that created it.
That was Dr. Andy.
Oh. He's so rich now.
[laughs]
Damn it!
[static buzzing]
[calypso music playing]
My name is Andy Hildebrand,
and I'm the inventor of Auto-Tune.
[sanding sound]
[Hildebrand] There were
other attempts to do what I did,
but those efforts were doomed
because the practitioners
didn't understand the issues.
[director] So then, how is it that you
were able to figure it out?
It's so remarkably abstract,
it's extremely difficult
to explain coherently.
[laughs]
[explosion]
[Hildebrand] Okay, so my background
is seismic data processing,
which is used to locate oil in the ground.
What you do is detonate some dynamite
in the ground, that's always fun,
and then you listen to the reverberations
that come back using geophones.
Mathematically, it's like going out
in the rain, during a thunderstorm,
closing your eyes, and because of
the rolling sound of the thunder,
figure out the shape of the clouds.
The seismic data is sound.
It's an understanding of these systems
that lets me manipulate this stuff.
[birds chirping]
So with Auto-Tune, we were at a luncheon
with my distributor and his wife,
she was a singer.
And she said, "Andy, why don't you make me
a box that would have me sing in tune."
And I knew pretty much
how to do it right away, technically,
because a lot of the work I had done
related to those issues.
[keyboard clacking]
So after the luncheon I went straight
to my desk and wrote a lot of equations
and solved some gnarly mathematical
problems to make the computing feasible.
I had the software running perfectly.
I said, I think I'll call it Auto-Tune.
And that's exactly what came out
four months later.
There is a huge need
in the recording industry
for singers to be in tune.
Before Auto-Tune, the singers would
have to spend a lot of time in the studio
and the only technology means they had
were very difficult to use.
To get a good vocal take back then,
you had a good vocalist.
That's what it's all down to.
The technology we had was very simple.
It was excellent, but it was very simple.
We had to pull rabbits
out of hats at times.
My name is Ken Scott.
I have worked in the music business
for the last 55 years.
First time ever sitting behind
a recording console,
it was to record
the biggest band in the world.
I was suddenly pulled in
on Magical Mystery Tour
to record The Beatles.
I carried on,
I did the White Album with them.
Lennon was brilliant.
Sometimes, it would take him a while
to get a vocal, sometimes not.
McCartney was great.
But then, I was blessed
to work with someone I consider
to be the best performer in the studio
I've certainly ever come across,
and that's David Bowie.
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy ♪
Oh, man, wonder if he'll ever know ♪
[Scott] Of the four albums
that I co-produced with him,
ninety-five percent of the vocals
were first take, beginning to end.
Is there life on Mars? ♪
No cutting and pasting, no dropping-in.
It's a performance.
But very, very few people have that skill.
Most singers need pitch corrections.
Before Auto-Tune, the singer would
be in the studio for a week.
Auto-Tune cut that week
down to half a day.
I had producers grabbing it from my hand.
[Tyson] Electrical engineer and inventor,
Andy Hildebrand
designs pitch correction software.
He calls it Auto-Tune.
"Pitch correction." Is that a euphemism
for fixing bad singers?
Yes, we fix bad singers. [chuckles]
Everybody heard through word of mouth
about this new software.
A few months later,
we had Auto-Tune distributed
in virtually every major studio
in the United States.
I had a very famous producer stop me,
and he said,
"Andy, you've changed my life."
He said, "My job used to find people
who could sing really well."
"And now, I just have
to find good-looking people."
[laughs]
But producers
kept the use of Auto-Tune quiet.
They didn't want any controversy
over that this isn't really
the singer's voice anymore.
["Believe" by Cher playing]
[Hildebrand] What brought it out
to the public's awareness
is the use of a certain dial.
There's a dial on the software
that slows down the pitch change.
So you can go from
a faster song to, say, a ballad,
and it all sounds like it should.
You can turn that dial the other way
and go to a faster song,
get faster pitch correction.
Just for fun,
I let the dial go all the way to zero,
which gave you
instantaneous pitch changes.
After love, after love
After love, after love ♪
That people could hear.
Did you plan for people
to use it that way?
- No.
- Oh okay!
I didn't think anybody in their right mind
would ever use it that way.
No matter how hard I try ♪
You keep pushing me aside ♪
And I can't break through ♪
There's no talking to you ♪
It's so sad that you're leaving ♪
It takes time to believe it ♪
But after all is said and done ♪
You're gonna be the lonely one
Oh ♪
Do you believe in life after love? ♪
[Julianne Escobedo Shepherd]
Most people encountered Auto-Tune in 1998
with Cher's "Believe."
It was the first entry
in mainstream pop culture
of this odd sound
that we had never heard before.
She sounds alien.
Well, I can't do that ♪
There's no turning back ♪
[Shepherd]
The producer of "Believe," Mark Taylor,
did not want people to know
that he used Auto-Tune on "Believe."
He lied about the use of Auto-Tune.
He said that it was a vocoder pedal.
He really wanted to guard the secret
that they had to use a thing
that was automatically tuning,
quote-unquote, you know, her vocals.
It was still not known to the public
that it even existed.
The idea that you could tune a pitch,
I think wasn't even fathomable.
My name's Robin A. Smith.
I was part of the team
that were making Cher's album.
When "Believe" was released,
the public loved it
because it was so novel,
but the public didn't really know
what they were hearing.
The industry, however, was really
hammering into Cher and this record,
going, "How could you do this?"
[director] Do you feel that the industry
had something to hide?
[laughs] The industry's always
got something to hide.
The whole idea of Auto-Tune
coming into the industry
was anybody can
come out with a really good vocal,
even if they're completely tone deaf.
[big band music playing]
[Smith] Before Auto-Tune,
we allowed more character in the voices.
Nobody had a problem with the fact
that some of the greatest singers
sang everything flat!
But you never noticed it
because it was a whole performance.
You know, the drums
were a bit wobbly with the bass,
but the overall effect was incredible.
But once you have
the synthesizer involved, you go voom.
That's that's the key.
- [synth chord plays]
Everything else suddenly had to be totally
in with that with that tonality.
The vocals, you know,
needed to sound perfect.
Fortunately, Auto-Tune came along
and sorted it all out.
I don't need you anymore ♪
No, I don't need you anymore ♪
Later, when Auto-Tune sort of became more
of a commonly used device in the industry,
Mark Taylor eventually came out
and said that he was using Auto-Tune.
[Taylor] I was kind of playing around
with the Auto-Tune, as it's called.
- [Cher singing]
- With this, um, you can shift the vocal
[auto-tuned] No ♪
go to the nearest note,
and all it does is
if you bend a note when you're singing,
all this does is it goes along,
it doesn't bend the note
until a certain point
and then it flicks
to the nearest note.
So you end up
with these very steppy sounds.
[Cher singing]
I can feel something inside me say ♪
[auto-tuned Cher] I really don't think
you're strong enough, no ♪
It just so happens that with Cher
it sounds brilliant.
Do you believe in life after love? ♪
Even after "Believe" came out in 1998,
it was so closely guarded,
Auto-Tune didn't even
come back in the mainstream
until the early 2000s with T-Pain.
Pain, man, what's been going on with you?
I know, of course, everybody
knows you for The Nappy Headz,
but lately you got this new phenomenon
[static buzzing]
[intense hip-hop beat playing]
[T-Pain] If you come out of Tallahassee
and want to do music,
you gotta be a gangster rapper.
I started out as a rapper
in a whole rap group and everything.
I would sing all the hooks.
Then I decided to make my own album,
but it was just my voice,
and I was like, "This is not
making me different from anybody else."
I wanted to sound different.
[indistinct rap music playing]
I stumbled upon Auto-Tune in 2001.
I was in the back seat
of my brother's car,
we was going to his baby mama's house.
You know, I started playing the radio
and I heard this one
goddamn commercial they used to play.
I can't remember what it was,
but it was one of those compilation CDs.
[radio announcer] Are you ready for
Today's Essential Hits, Volume Four?
All of the biggest names in pop
on one incredible CD.
[T-Pain] And one of the songs was,
"If You Had My Love" by Jennifer Lopez,
and, oh, my God,
they played that commercial so much.
And I heard that one part
where she used Auto-Tune on
I think, like, on two parts of the song.
You know, when I heard Cher's "Believe,"
you don't understand what's happening.
You know something's different.
But with Jennifer Lopez,
I heard her normal vocals
and then she used Auto-Tune,
I'm like, "Wait, what was that?"
The second I heard it, man,
I was just like, "That's different."
"I gotta find out what this is."
I just knew that it was something
that I'd never seen before
and it's going to
drive me crazy until I find it.
And I set out
on a fucking year-long mission
[chuckles] to find that damn thing.
I went to everybody I knew
that had cracked versions of everything.
I was like,
"Give me everything you got."
I didn't know the name of the effect,
I just wanted to find it.
Anything that had the word "vocal,"
or anything that had
the word "vox" on it, I was buying it.
I was getting a hacker to fucking get
a cracked version of it or something.
And one day, I got three DVDs.
I went through every single one,
not only did I go through every plug-in,
I went through every preset
of each plug-in.
So that took a long time.
And I had one piece of vocal
going that whole time,
just had it on a loop,
just kept changing it.
"That's not it.
That's not it. That's not it."
[vocal sample repeating]
I'm sprung, I'm sprung, I'm sprung ♪
Oh, boy, when I found that Auto-Tune
I cried a little bit
Do, do, do, do, do, do, do ♪
because I had finally found the thing
that was gonna make me different.
Ooh, she got me doin' the dishes ♪
Anything she want for some kisses ♪
I'm cookin' for her
When she gets hungry ♪
All she doin' is
Actin' like she want me ♪
She cuttin' off all my homies ♪
Even all of my other ronis ♪
She ain't even my main lady ♪
See I been thinkin' 'bout it lately ♪
Man, she really don't deserve me ♪
All she wanna do is hurt me ♪
So I gotta get away from her ♪
But now I'm leaving quickly ♪
Before she come and try to get me ♪
And I'm takin' everything with me ♪
Well, it all come down to her ♪
I'm sprung
Dawg, she got me ♪
In the beginning,
when I started using Auto-Tune,
everybody was saying,
"Well, you know, maybe don't do that?"
I'm sprung
Dawg, she got me ♪
Maybe it was just new at the time
and they didn't like it because
it was a change, it was different.
If you ain't been I'm tellin' you
You do ♪
You do, you do ♪
People were saying,
"Well, who needs to sound like this?"
"This is fucking weird."
[auto-tuned harmonizing]
But people forget about the vocoder,
the whole vocoder era, that was fire.
Damn, holy shit!
["I Can Make You Dance" by Zapp playing]
Like that was that was magical to me.
Now I've got a thing
That's sure to make you wanna move ♪
I can make you dance
If you want me to ♪
It's controlled by Roger
And it's right here in this tube ♪
I can make you dance
If you want me to ♪
When Roger Troutman picked it up,
man, he was already such a great artist
and he saw something
in vocoder that was like,
"Man, this'll change,
I can change things with this."
And every time I used the voice box,
people would be dancing until I used it,
and when I started using it
they would look up like
And it would seem
to hypnotize them in a way.
- I can make ya dance if you want me to ♪
- Oh, yeah ♪
To come up with something
so vastly different
that is gonna
it's gonna shake people up.
It's just going to be something
that shakes your soul so much,
it's going to get backlash.
Don't you worry that when it is a gimmicky
kind of sound like that,
that people may get tired of it?
I don't know. People started saying,
"You can't sing,
you're trying to prove [grumbles]
It's a gimmick, blah, blah, blah"
[laughing]
[woman] It's always been, with technology,
at what point is it a crutch,
and at what point is it an enhancement
that has its own right to be?
Because it gives you something
that you can't get otherwise.
- [birds chirping]
- [waves breaking]
[static buzzing]
My name is Suzanne Ciani.
I am a pioneer in electronic music.
[electronic music playing]
When I started using musical technology,
nobody understood it then.
When a technology is new,
sometimes, you know, there's a backlash,
because it's no longer
tethered to a reality.
Ladies and gentlemen,
this woman standing next to me is, uh
[voice echoing]
an electronic wizard.
She's won award after award.
This is Suzanne Ciani, and
[applause]
[Ciani] I remember
when the vocoder came in
and I was on Letterman.
It was so unknown to him what I was doing.
This is an arrangement of electronic gear
that I call the voice box.
It has in it a vocoder,
a frequency follower,
an Eventide harmonizer.
I had everything in there.
Of course, David Letterman
wasn't interested in what was in there.
[laughs]
That means nothing
to anybody but you. Uh
[Ciani] The biggest issue
was that the public
didn't understand that this was,
in fact, a new instrument.
Why do you have it? What you do with it?
You don't go door to door saying,
"I'll make you sound goofy."
We know what we're familiar with,
we try to make sense of the universe
based on what we already know.
This was something
that honestly we didn't know.
It really was a new instrument.
I could use my voice
to shape the electronic sound.
[modulating] You can
take out my direct voice on this.
For me, the vocoder was a tool.
It was like, "Oh, what kind of
incredible new things can I do with this?"
A couple hundred thousand dollars
so you can sound stupid
in your own language.
- Unbelievable breakthrough in electronics.
- [audience laughing]
Any time any time I've seen someone
be the first in something,
it's never appreciated. We know this.
Anybody that's the first
in doing something,
"That was the first person to"
It's never appreciated.
It's always somebody that comes
after them that has more respect.
[static buzzing]
In the mid-2000s,
T-Pain was deemed as super corny
by some of the old-school
rap establishment,
for both using Auto-Tune,
and, you know, the subtext was,
"Oh, you're corny because
you're showing your softness."
But at the same time,
like all these rappers are like,
"Oh, shit, he's using this Auto-Tune,
everyone loves it,
he's a hit maker.
Let's get him to do a hook."
Rappers didn't themselves
use Auto-Tune at this point,
they were just getting T-Pain
to do their hooks.
So they were reaping
the benefits of Auto-Tune,
but not having to put themselves
in the position to be criticized.
Then Kanye comes along
and he uses Auto-Tune, makes this album
[auto-tuned Kanye]
How could you be so heartless? ♪
[Shepherd]
He's already seen as a creative genius,
then suddenly,
Auto-Tune is this respectable apex
of of creative invention.
[T-Pain] Kanye knew
that when he dropped 808s,
it was gonna be accepted.
He knew it.
He told me in the studio.
He knew it.
He He [laughs]
He said that he loved Rappa Ternt Sanga.
He realized
that Rappa Ternt Sanga was, uh
a bunch of love songs
with a ton of bass in them,
Uh
Ergo, 808s & Heartbreaks.
[laughs]
Once Kanye came out with Auto-Tune,
that paved the way
for lots and lots of rappers
to use it after that.
Suddenly everyone
was on that Auto-Tune tip. [chuckles]
[trap music playing]
Stay with that beat all day
Because I'm fired up ♪
No bricks, all swish ♪
This is all everybody's talking about.
Now I'm seeing it on cartoons,
I'm seeing it on movies everywhere,
it's everywhere.
[beat builds]
You know we're poppin' like ♪
[Shepherd] And obviously
there was backlash to it.
After a while people hated hearing it.
There were boycotts.
Death Cab for Cutie wanted to boycott it,
which is like,
"Well, no one is trying to hear you
sing with Auto-Tune anyway, dudes."
[laughs]
Jay-Z, like, came out
with "Death of Auto-Tune" as a sort of
as a T-Pain/Kanye diss.
It became sort of a joke.
- What?
- Needs Auto-Tune in it.
- Auto-Tune?
- Sort of like T-Pain.
[sings with Auto-Tune]
And ironically, people really
just started to hate T-Pain.
[T-Pain] It was a sucky fucking moment.
And it felt like everybody just hated me.
Every time I saw,
uh, a troll having his day
or somebody just fucking with me,
I always think back to
when Usher said I fucked up everything.
And I'm like, "Maybe I am a big fuck-up."
Just, in that whole four-year span,
it was so many times
I can't count on my hands
how many times I told my wife,
"I don't want to do this anymore."
But the way the Internet
was working at the time,
the sound spread a lot faster
than the criticism did,
because, you know [chuckling]
virality.
investment in advanced battery technology
- [yawning]
- for electric drive automobiles
We're losing men out there.
Permission to use the secret weapon, sir.
The Federal Commission of T-Pain approves.
- Hey! ♪
- [upbeat music plays]
[auto-tuned] Shawty, ooh, oh ♪
[auto-tuned]
Imagine with me for a moment ♪
Imagine America ♪
- Imagine a world ♪
- A world ♪
Where people pop
The hood of their cars ♪
And they see stamped on
Electronic motor the words ♪
'Made in America' ♪
- Made in America ♪
- Imagine, imagine ♪
I'm Michael Gregory
from The Gregory Brothers.
We make videos
on the channel Schmoyoho on YouTube,
with series like Auto-Tune the News,
and Songify This.
The first time I heard Auto-Tune
was probably with T-Pain.
Talk to me, I talk back ♪
Let's talk money, I talk that ♪
Crunk juice bombs
Oakley shades ♪
Shawty's got class
Oh, behave ♪
Let's get gone ♪
- Walk it out ♪
- Now walk it out ♪
Just like that
That's what I'm talkin' 'bout ♪
[Michael] I was like, "What is this?"
It's just such an interesting sound.
It satisfies an urge to hear,
like, something robotic and perfect.
Whoa ♪
[Michael] It just planted a seed,
so later, when we were making
these comedy videos on Schmoyoho,
Uh, we were just like,
"Let's use Auto-Tune
and satirize cable news
and pop music at the same time."
- [ringing]
- Hey ♪
- Hey ♪
- Hey ♪
Tell Katie Coo stop screening my calls ♪
♪ Or else she gonna be on
Very thin ice ♪
- Very thin ice ♪
- Very thin ice ♪
♪ Very thin ice ♪
Sing it, T-Pain
Geese are on ♪
[Michael] On Auto-Tune the News #8,
T-Pain, he was doing
the "very thin ice" hook
with, uh, Katie Couric
and one of our characters.
The North Pole. New satellite photos
Show Arctic ice is melting so fast ♪
Oh, snap, how fast? ♪
Many scientists now predict
It will be gone within 30 years ♪
Surely, you jest
I'm under cardiac arrest, shawty! ♪
Katie Couric, she was like
the Beyoncé of unintentional singing.
She just spoke with this breathy tone
that was just incredible,
and it it gave you a blank canvas
that you could totally Bob Ross
and, like,
make something beautiful out of.
- Very thin ice ♪
- Very thin ice ♪
Tell 'em, Katie
We'll be on ♪
Very thin ice
Where temperatures rise ♪
[Michael] The Internet loves satire.
The Internet also loves
things happening by accident,
so that kind of makes Auto-Tune,
like, really fit into its ethos.
Like, this thing happened
for this intention
[chuckles]and now suddenly this person
is accidentally singing,
and they sound great.
Tell 'em, Katie
We'll be on ♪
Very thin ice ♪
Where temperatures rise ♪
We have to solve this crisis ♪
Of very thin ice ♪
You can write the history
of electronic music
as the history of creative misuse
of available tools.
[record scratching]
[hip-hop beat]
DJing starts off because people say,
"A turntable doesn't only
have to be playback,
we can scratch it, we can layer it,
we can turn it
into a performance machine."
And so, with Auto-Tune,
it becomes creative
precisely at the moment when producers
stop using it the way it was intended.
That's the seed of creativity.
[electronic music playing]
My name is Jace Clayton,
I'm a musician and a writer.
The Internet both spread the sound,
but then it also allowed people
all over the world to access the tools
at more or less the same time.
And that's why
it was suddenly in many places
and many different contexts at once.
The first time I really heard Auto-Tune
and said,
"What in this earth is going on?"
it was in Morocco.
Auto-Tune's so popular
throughout the Arab world,
and I think that has a lot to do,
actually, with the call to prayer.
[call to prayer on loudspeaker]
Five times a day for the past 1,300 years,
all over Muslim lands,
people are gonna hear the call to prayer.
And that has these beautiful
vocal up and downs, this pitching.
Beautiful sonorizations.
It's a technique called melisma.
[call to prayer continues]
So melisma,
basically, it's a singing style.
And it happens when a singer
is on one syllable
but instead of holding that note steady,
they push it around and change the pitch.
So they sing a little fragment of a word.
It's very strong
in a lot of Black American traditions
and, of course, it ends up in R&B.
[Whitney Houston singing] If I ♪
Should stay ♪
I would only be in ♪
Your way ♪
So I'll go ♪
[Clayton]
Whitney Houston's melisma in full effect.
And it's something
you get throughout this song,
but, in the beginning,
it's the "I" and the "way."
[Houston singing] The way ♪
And I ♪
Will always love you ♪
Will always love you ♪
We're keyed into melisma, you know.
And so, one of the
You can tell it's a diva
if, you know, she can hit those notes
and move the pitches around like that,
and do these runs.
That's one of the reasons
why Whitney was so iconic.
[song fades]
Auto-Tune is doing a version of this
with a layer of algorithms.
["I'm Sprung" by T-Pain playing]
[voices harmonizing]
You do, you do ♪
You do, you do ♪
You do ♪
Do, do, do, do
Do, do, do, do, do, do ♪
Do, do, do, do
Do, do, do, do, do ♪
[fast-forwards]
- [Clayton] Somewhere
- [T-Pain] Ooh ♪
Here we go, it's an "ooh."
You know? So it's a typical R&B,
erotic grunt of sorts.
Listen to what happens
when it's going through Auto-Tune.
Ooh, she got me doin' the dishes
Anything she want for some kisses ♪
How a singer performs,
that's going to change the amount,
to what extent the Auto-Tune is enacting,
and so, it's very much
kind of an active interplay.
Throughout this performance of T-Pain,
you get to hear his dance
with the machinery.
She ain't even my main lady
See I been thinkin' 'bout it lately ♪
[Clayton] He's saying, this is my voice
in this moment, on this song.
Um, this electronic modulation
that's passing through me is me.
But now I'm leaving quickly
Before she come and try to get me ♪
[T-Pain] When I started using Auto-Tune,
I kept going to people
and not trusting myself.
I even I even went to Snoop.
Everybody said the same thing,
"You gotta find something else to do,
'cause it's just gonna be
annoying at some point."
That's the craziest thing
in the world to me.
[director] What was it in you that knew
that that was part of your identity?
My wife. My wife told me it was fine.
My wife was like, "I like it."
And, you know, I was having sex with her,
so I didn't care what anybody else said.
[laughs]
I always know when he's stressed,
and I know why he's stressed,
but the motto of our relationship
has always been "no matter what."
I was like,
"Don't not do it because of them."
[T-Pain] Yeah.
[Najm] "Do what you do.
Don't change what you're doing."
I just think I went through a lot
growing up, being mixed,
- of dealing with stereotypes
- Yeah.
that I knew you were going to
[T-Pain] 'Cause you had to deal with
the Black side and the White side.
- [Najm] Mm-hmm. And shit from both sides.
- Mm.
So I had gotten so used to it,
so once you got there I was like
And people were, you know, criticizing you
about you not fitting the stereotype
- Did that help you?
- Yeah.
Me putting out "Sprung" helped you?
Yeah. It did.
- With your Blackness and Whiteness?
- Yes. [laughs]
- It did.
- How? What?
Because everybody finally got to see
that you don't have to
fit into this cookie-cutter idea
of what an R&B singer
is supposed to sound like.
Fire.
I was always told,
when I was growing up,
"You should do this, or you should"
From one side it was,
"You should be this way,"
and the other, "You should be this way."
And I'm like, "Why do I
have to be any kind of way?"
Like, I'm just me.
I'm just like, "Fuck everybody."
Hello.
Fire.
[laughs]
Love you too.
[both laughing]
[Shepherd] Even after
he'd established himself as an artist,
selling millions of albums,
he still isn't kind of getting
the respect that he deserves
as a songwriter,
as an innovator, as a producer
until 2014,
when he goes on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts.
[melodic keyboard playing]
How's everybody doing?
[crowd cheers]
That's pretty good sizable applause there,
that was pretty good. Um
Thank you, everybody,
for coming out again. Um
This is weird as hell for me.
- Um
- [crowd laughs]
Never done anything like this.
I got up there, it was this little set-up,
looked like a library,
but it was just this one cubicle
that looked like a library,
and behind that camera,
there was like 300 cubicles.
And all the employees were
standing on their desks
staring at me the whole time.
It was a big fucking crowd.
- Oh ♪
- [keyboard playing softly]
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ♪
Oh, oh ♪
Baby girl, what's your name? ♪
Let me talk to you
Let me buy you a drink ♪
I'm T-Pain, you know me ♪
Konvict Muzik, Nappy Boy, ooh-wee ♪
I know the club close at three ♪
What's the chances
Of you rollin' with me? ♪
Back to the crib
Show you how I live ♪
Let's get drunk
And forget what we did ♪
I'm gonna buy you a drink ♪
I am devilishly awkward.
If you look closely,
I didn't look at them at all,
not the entire time.
I stayed looking at the floor,
I was looking off to the side,
looking at something else.
I couldn't even look at them people
because I felt I was doing a bad job.
We in the bed like ♪
Oh ♪
Talk to me, I talk back ♪
Let's talk money, I talk that ♪
Crunk juice bombs
Oakley shades ♪
[Shepherd]
T-Pain obviously is really vulnerable
without the Auto-Tune in that situation.
Dropping your signature sound
to show people who you really are
must be really just disarming
and probably a little terrifying.
We in the bed like ♪
[vocalizing]
[T-Pain] It was just a lot of thinking,
and sometimes I would try to hit a run,
and I was like,
"Wait, wait, wait, calm down."
It was a lot going on in my mind!
- Is that what you want?
- [woman] Oh, my God, that was amazing.
[all laughing]
[cheering and applause]
[T-Pain] And I never knew how good I did.
Everybody clapped.
I mean, you gotta clap
after somebody tries that hard.
Buy you a drink ♪
[crowd cheers]
Ah! Weird as hell!
[laughing]
All right!
I didn't think I did a good job,
then I saw the Internet react.
I mean, shit went crazy.
It's just so unfortunate
that he had to, like, drop it
to show people that he is
an amazing songwriter and a creative.
Yeah, the whole entire audience
was sort of like,
"Whoa, like, holy shit, he can sing!"
There wasn't a vindication
or anything like that,
but there was a point
I don't know how,
but somehow I got more mad.
I just got more angry.
Because it was such a surprise
to everybody
that T-Pain has an actual human voice.
And it's like, "What the fuck, guys?"
Like, really? Did y'all think
my whole success
was based off of software?
Like, what?
You still gotta write good songs.
You still gotta produce good beats.
You still gotta
you still gotta do all these things.
And y'all are paying attention
to this one plug-in.
And it's so weird that,
you know, it it made me so angry
that people are like,
"Oh, my God, T-Pain can sing."
It In one light, it showed
how much people respected me more.
In another light, it showed how much
people didn't respect me before.
So my philosophy at this point
is to make myself happy.
I just want to make music
that makes me feel good,
and if you don't like it,
I didn't make it for you.
If you do like it, welcome to the club.
[gentle music playing]
[sanding sound]
People have this huge disparity in in,
"Is Auto-Tune good?"
or, "Is Auto-Tune bad?"
"It's ruined audio,
destroyed the world of sound."
Let them have their opinions.
That's not why I was in it,
I was in it
because I enjoyed the arithmetic.
[Ciani] I've never thought
of technology as a substitute.
It's its own language, its own world,
and we can connect it
to our musical knowledge and heritage,
but you have to respect it
for being something unique.
[Clayton] Auto-Tune, I call it
the most important musical tool
of the 21st Century
because it's an active and, um
and complicated engagement with a machine
at the level of the human voice,
it's using us as a carrier.
Here's a pop tool which is helping us to
rethink what it means to be human today.
That's a lot, you know.
You can't just shake it off
as a sound that's goofy.
[Michael] I don't think of it
as good or bad.
I mean, it's it's bad if people
expect everybody to constantly be perfect.
But it's just a tool.
Like any tool,
it can be used for good or evil.
Like, if you build a giant laser beam
you could use the laser beam
to destroy the Earth,
or you could use it
to, like, power all your lights.
It's just what you do with it.
[Shepherd] I do think that
really, really creative artists,
um, who have longevity
and who are constantly innovating
are open to new things,
are open to trying new things,
are really open to the culture
and how culture changes.
Every time somebody heard "I'm Sprung,"
they always said, "Yo, this dude is
doing something really different."
But then, on the other hand,
they also said,
"I'm pretty sure he's only gonna
be able to do this for one song."
[laughs]
"This is gonna be fun exactly once."
And that's what everybody thought.
And, uh what year is it now?
[laughs]
It's, uh It's
Whoo, boy, they're still going.
[chuckles]
Mm-mm-mm.
[electronic beat playing]