Pain's World

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T-Pain decides to goof off some more: “That Jew,” he mutters, shaking his head. “I’m surrounded by Jews.”

Nervous laughter crisscrosses the room. Abrams beams like a Miss America contestant with fire ants in her swimsuit: His frame stiffens; his face twists into an anguished smile. A few minutes later, he approaches me and says, “Pain’s a funny guy, isn’t he? Yeah. He likes to joke around. So, you gotta understand, he doesn’t mean anything against Jews. Ha! I’m Jewish. My partner’s Jewish.”

T-Pain smiles, enjoying the sight of his manager running damage control. “It’s why I only ever had one job,” T-Pain says later on. “I got a real problem with authority.”

T-Pain’s real name is Faheem Najm; he was born to Muslim parents in Tallahassee, Florida. (“I don’t really agree with religion,” he notes. “It’s just another form of separation.”) He inherited his authority issues from his father, Shaheed Najm, a retired electric-company employee. A onetime ’60s radical, the elder Najm “was real into, like, Black Panther shit,” T-Pain says. “He was always cussin’ out the police.”

T-Pain was the middle child, with two brothers and two sisters. In his late teens, with the money he scrounged hawking seafood, he invested in recording equipment and started writing hard-edged raps as part of the group Nappy Headz, who enjoyed glancing local success. His breakthrough moment—memorialized in the title of his 2005 solo debut, Rappa Ternt Sanga—came when he put rapping on hold and sang a parody version of Akon’s “Locked Up” from the perspective of a broke, no-car-havin’-ass scrub, titling the song “Fucked Up.” DJs took to the track, Akon heard it and by the time T-Pain was 19, he had signed to the Senegalese singer’s Konvict Muzik label.

T-Pain’s masterstroke was to never lose sight of the loser who’d bitched about his bad credit on “Fucked Up.” “I make music for the average person,” he says. “Take this mix tape I just made. When we finished, we listened to it in a Honda Civic. Most artists, they’re going to go in their SUV filled with speakers. But the people you’re selling to aren’t gonna have no SUV filled with speakers!”

In his songs, T-Pain inhabits an unlikely role: He’s an R&B schlub. No chiseled, Usher-like Adonis here, no baby-face, Chris Brown–like plaything. T-Pain is pudgy, and he wears sunglasses out of insecurity—thanks to a car that struck him in third grade, his left eye droops slightly. Schlubbitude animates his biggest hits, from “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)” to “Bartender,” where he favors the point of view of a pitiable/lovable guy who can’t crack the VIP section, whose best prospects in a nightclub are the women paid to be there. “Out of the 200 dudes in any club,” T-Pain says, “only six are macks. I talk to the other 194!”

“He’s real average,” Akon says. “Like, I’m getting him into Lamborghinis, but he’d rather buy Mini Coopers, Smart cars, Scions—it’s funny!”

Taken in this light, T-Pain’s sonic signature—his cyborgish singing, which he achieves via drastic manipulation of the pitch-correction software Auto-Tune—is a prosthetic, granting him an edge he wasn’t born with: T-Pain puts on Auto-Tune the way a short guy puts on platform shoes. “I wanted to sound different,” he says. “Auto-Tune was my way of being André 3000.”