Back in middle school, the Tallahassee-born-and-bred Faheem Najm, aka T-Pain, (short for Teddy Pain) never imagined he’d be considered so cool. “I didn’t have friends,” he says. “I used to get picked on. Maybe I was fat and skinny at the same time.” Or maybe it was all in his head, but his insecurity is apparent in the way he avoids eye contact when flashing back to his childhood.
At age 10, inspired by his father, a “Kurtis Blow-type rapper,” and his idols, OutKast, T-Pain started building a studio in his bedroom, away from the bullies. He put his precious wooden dinosaur collectibles (one of his quirky hobbies) aside for an 8-track and became obsessed with music.
Eventually, T-Pain joined the local rap group Nappy Headz, which enjoyed moderate success in early 2000 but eventually disbanded. His real break came from “jacking” (as T-Pain will readily admit) Akon’s “Locked Up” beat in 2004 and reworking it into the mixtape phenomenon “Fucked Up.” Intrigued, Akon reached out to T-Pain and signed him to his Konvict Muzic label. “What initially attracted me to him was that he sounded like me,” says Akon. “But then I realized that he writes and produces his own stuff. He would have made it without me — that’s how talented he is.”
The songs on T-Pain’s album, tentatively titled I’m Sprung, all share two things: the Auto-Tune — software that creates special vocal effects much like the Vocoder Roger Troutman popularized in the ’80s — and the based-on-a-true-story theme. The title track is actually dedicated to his wife, while “In Love With a Stripper” talks about an old infatuation with an exotic dancer.
As an aspiring rapstress runs over to give him a hug, it’s obvious T-Pain’s days of unpopularity are over. “That was the reason I started doing music,” he concedes. “One day, I started rapping in school, and it got me friends.” These days, he’s got fans as well.
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