Boring Friday Storytime: The T-Pain Concert

This is from when I went to the T-Pain concert a few months ago...

When I heard T-Pain was playing at the Patriot Center I thought to myself, "Who cares?" When I heard it only cost $5 I thought to myself, "Still don't care." When I heard that "Tay Dizm and Sophia Fresh will also be on hand to make the party hot!", I thought to myself "Who the hell are they?" But when I heard that I had nothing better to do I excitedly thought to myself "Bah, I guess I'll go."

As the date approached, I tried to think of some T-Pain songs. Sure I knew plenty of songs where T-Pain "sings" the chorus, but did he actually have any songs of his own. I went to YouTube to find out. T Pain featuring Lil' Wayne "I Can't Believe It", T Pain featuring Yung Joc "Buy You A Drank", Jamie Foxx featuring T-Pain "Blame It", T-Pain featuring Akon "Bartender". The list goes on and on. Between him and Akon, they sing chorus on 90% of all rap/R&B songs.

After 6 beers and a few shots we arrived at the Patriot Center an hour and fifteen minutes late. Perfect timing as T-Pain was about to make his entrance. I may have seen T-Pain like 2 times and I understand that his "thing" is to wear a top hat. So you can imagine my surprise when some random dude comes out and says that he is T-Pain. This guy was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and had no top hat. As the crowd went crazy, I looked sternly at "T-Pain". I was on to him.

I tried to explain to others around me that this is not necessarily T-Pain and could be a trick. I asked around and no one gave me good enough reason to believe it was the real T-Pain. My T-Pain conspiracy theory was a big downer to the crowd so I dropped the talking. But that didn't mean I wasn't carefully watching, waiting for the impostor to make a mistake like favoring his left hand instead of his right, or pronouncing his own name wrong.

T-Pain opened with a line that made me feel like throwing up & laughing. "I have 8 singles in the top 100 last year, the last group to do that was the Beatles" Sad, but true. Although I don't' remember any songs from the 60's that could be described as The Beatles sing chorus on a Kanye West song, yet still get credit for a top 100.

The crowd immediately started chanting "Boat! Boat! Boat!" which proved my theory that no one actually knew any T-Pain songs. So T-Pain went through his extensive collection of guest appearances on songs, as the crowd thought "ohhh thats t-pain? i didn't know that". He spent no more than 45 seconds per song and belted them out. Just as the crowd started getting into a song, he would abruptly end it and go on to the next one.

If you have heard T-Pain before, you know he uses some device to change his stupid voice. Autotuner? Makes him sound like Mr. Roboto. Well at this concert he didn't bring his autotuner with him. Instead he brought a DJ to play his recorded voice and a microphone to randomly shout into while his recorded voice sang. He didn't even have much of a stage entourage. Just some weird looking guy who wandered the stage like he was on mushrooms.

T-Pain also showed us that he was not just some guy who sings into a machine that changes his voice. He also knows 3 guitar chords, a scale on keyboard, and how to hit the drums really hard while only messing up and dropping sticks once!

The best part of the concert was when T-Pain played his longest song of the night. A five minute slow song where he sings & plays keyboard. While he did this, the crowd all sat down and grumbled. It was bizarre but interesting.

Sidenote: This was not as bad as the never before heard 3 part 26 minute r&b opera song that Destiny's Child played at their concert where they all wore gowns and changed 5 times and sang about being a woman.

Sidenote 2: Yeah, I went to a Destiny's Child concert. It happened. Lets just move on.

After such hard work, T-Pain was getting sweaty and he went off stage to change clothes. While he was gone, his DJ started a wave in the crowd. Lame. "Boat Boat Boat" wave "Boat Boat Boat" wave. This continued for about 10 minutes and finally T-Pain emerged from the back with a crew.

They all had pool noodles, some girls had inflatable baby swimmies on, and t pain put on a snorkel and goggles. They were all blowing bubbles and the crowd went crazy. But before he played the song everyone was waiting for, he demanded to see our wave, called it terrible, and made us do it about 4 more times. Lame.

40 seconds later, T-Pain was walking off stage. He sang 1 or 2 lines from the song. Then he informed the crowd that they deserved one more. So he sang another 1 or 2 lines of the boat song for 20 seconds. He told us we were lucky to get 2, then he walked off stage and out of my life forever...or until Tigger plays the next song on the radio.