Revolver

The T in T-Pain must stand for “The” as in the “The Pain” listening to his latest effort, rEVOLVEr, has caused me. Just look at the title. It’s written to emphasize the “evolve” as in he has progressed or changed as an artist. It’s kinda neat, except that no one can agree how to write it. On the album, the Rs are in gray while the EVOLVE is in white, allowing them to all be capital letters with the second R in reverse. Of course, not everyone can have that level of typographical control, so some places call it rEVOLVEr and others RevolveR, and others still just go with Revolver, deciding that the emphasis isn’t worth the effort, and I agree, because if this is evolution, it should be stopped at all costs.

Faheem Rasheed Najm, also known as T-Pain, is also also known as the guy who does everything with Auto-Tune. You know, that software/effect that makes it sound like you are a machine because it is correcting your terrible pitch? I admit, it’s interesting to heard that effect sometimes, and funny when people take regular speech and turn it into a song on YouTube, but T-Pain does everything with Auto-Tune, and eventually it just becomes grating. It isn’t anywhere near as bad as the growling and screaming of -core bands, but it still makes me want to turn the music off. At least Ke$ha is attractive, so you can forgive her overuse of Auto-Tune, plus, she’s proven a time or two that she can sing. I’m pretty sure if I met T-Pain on the street he’d be using Auto-Tune to hail cabs, ask for directions and everything else.

Now, I’m going to admit, I probably didn’t listen very closely to this album as I went through it. But every now and then a song would grab me and I’d pay attention to a line or two, and mostly I was sorry I’d paid attention. Every time I stopped to listen, all I heard were the dulcet tones of misogyny. Stuff about “bitches” and “gettin’ up on dat ass” and much much more. As I began to write this review I decided to go see if I could find all the lyrics of all the songs, and I did, and some of them were better, but some of them were also worse. But clearly people no longer care about that sort of thing when there is money to be made. I mean, T-Pain has a line of Auto-Tune microphone toys recommended for kids 7 and up:

Ah, role models.

For being annoying and having terrible lyrics and being an overall bad musical experience, I give T-Pain’s rEVOLVEr an F. Maybe next time he’ll actually try evolving into a better musician, a better singer, and a better human being.