Joyriding on T-Pain

Joyriding to T-Pain conjures thoughts of a night ending in paralysis. All of a sudden you loose consciousness so you just swerve right across the lane and slam into the nearest building. After your coma, and if you wake up, you’ll offer reasons. But some people won’t understand. They’ll shake their heads commenting this or that and they’ll end up villianizing T-Pain on the evening news.

I’d only heard "Buy You a Drank" so I had no idea what to expect when Ghostface picked me up that one fateful night. "Sorry we listening to Tyrese but it’s him or T-Pain", he said. I looked at him crazy faced and all. And this my dude who questions my adoration for Southern music? And this the same cat who turned me onto Budden? In defense mode, he assured me it was a bootleg his home girl asked for. "And you felt comfortable obliging her? Shit, might as well just hit over the head with a baseball bat!" We both shared a laugh.

With the windows down, and joyriding through some unknown streets in Minneapolis and St. Paul, it was an experience I highly recommend. As he turned up the volume, the speakers rattling, the feeling was indescribable. You feel ashamed to be in the presence of someone bumping T-Pain but you’re having way too much fun—yeah giddy and all—to turn the Pain off.

An immediate observation: catching on is fast and easy. By the one minute mark on each song, you should feel very comfortable singing along to the songs ("you sing along with it, inside you know its wack"). It resembles a Rafi tape or a Disney sing along album. I started belting the "oohhhs" and "uh-ahh"s like it was second nature. We all know T-Pain can’t sing so it’s not as if my version was any worse.

We damn near listened to whole album, repeating the lines, in unison of course, and even turned back to quite a few. Yet every time we pulled up to a stop light, Ghostface had to turn it down. "Man we look like some chicks belting some T-Pain down the highway with our hair in the wind and shit." What surprised me the most was we shouted out T-Pain verses to would be passers by. Epiphany gets you hyped, amped and ready to throw some bows (well, not the last one). It has to be the funnest album I’ve heard in a long time. Seriously. Even though I have no qualms about listening to Epiphany, and I've gone back to Epiphany many a times after the joyriding event, I have to admit, even if half heartedly, that T-Pain's music is like what Phonte said: "To keep people’s attention, you must have either great music... OR really, really, really, really, really shitty music that’s just so hilarious and niggerish beyond measure that it makes people laugh."

Remember: don't do T-Pain alone.

Just in case you want in... T-Pain's Epiphany.