I Am T-Pain

by Sonic Mule




Category: Music
Price: $2.99


What it is: Pandora's Box for music lovers, blasted open with dynamite.

Y'all know what Auto-Tune is, right? It's that sound that's all over the radio these days. Now the very same technology that's turned every gun-toting rapper in the world into a singer of cheesy love songs is available on your iPhone with this app from developer Sonic Mule and some black leprechaun named T-Pain, who seems to be wearing 3D glasses in every photo I've seen of him. Presumably because he's a terrible singer, Mr. Pain's had to borrow Cher's decade-old vocal tricks to establish his own signature sound. Turns out the kids love it.

After having recorded no less than 103 flawless, radio-ready examples of pop stupidity myself with this app over the last three weeks, I can only conclude that T-Pain is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. Still, it's an experiment that will reveal the future of the world we live in. If this app makes money (it will) and T-Pain's own singing career shows no signs of slowing down, then one can only deduce that Apple is days away from releasing Snow Leopard for Dell & Compaq PCs, giant pharmaceutical companies are loading up helicopters to confetti poor African towns with free AIDS medications, and the US and Russia plan to upload their nuclear firing codes onto Wikipedia.

One noteworthy feature: you can choose to have the app lock your vocals down to a specific harmonic scale, OR you can flip a T-Pain switch and "let Pain choose settings for you" (says the website). The latter option always appropriately sounds the worst.

Pain Factor: 4/5

----

Buy I Am T-Pain on the iTunes App Store.

----