T-Pain got brutally honest in a clip from the new Netflix series This Is Pop, admitting he fell into a deep depression after Usher blatantly told him he and Auto-Tune “kinda fucked up music.” Although T-Pain initially thought Usher was making a joke, he quickly realized he was being 100 percent authentic.
“And then he was like, ‘Yeah man you really fucked up music for real singers,’” T-Pain added. “I was like, ‘What did I do? I came out and I used Auto-Tune.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, you fucked it up.’ I’m like, ‘But I used it, I didn’t tell everybody else to start using it.’ That is the very moment, and I don’t even think I realized this for a long time, but that’s the very moment that started a four-year depression for me.”
On Tuesday (June 22), T-Pain addressed the controversy after his fans rallied around him in an effort to get Usher and the music industry as a whole to apologize.
“I still love and respect @Usher,” he tweeted. “telling that story was in no way meant to disrespect that man. Ppl talk shit about me 24/7 but when it comes from someone you truly respect it hits very different. I never said f*ck Ursh it was a drop in the ocean of shit I was already goin through.”
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T-Pain touched on his mental health and his struggles with alcohol in a 2018 interview with HipHopDX. Despite his celebrity status and money, he realized his lifestyle wasn’t working for him. Drinking led to depression and the isolation eventually started to eat him up.
“Most famous people are the loneliest people in the world,” he said at the time. “That just how it goes. That’s everybody. People are always trying different vices. You can’t just go meet people like everybody else. You can’t just go out dancing and just go to hookah bars out here or anything like that. You need people you can actually have a conversation with and somebody you know actually likes having a conversation with you, and they not just talking to you because they can get something out of you.
T-Pain Went Into Depression After Usher Said Auto-Tune ‘Fucked Up Music’
“We can’t go to Target for some reason. I don’t know why we’re not allowed to go to Target. They’re always like, ‘Are you broke? You’re at Target,’ and I’m like, ‘You’re here too! Are you broke?’ [laughs]. People always ask me, ‘What are you doing in here? What are you doing in Home Depot?’ This is where rich people buy hammers at, that’s why I’m in a Home Depot. Show me the rich people hammer store and I’ll go there I guess.”
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The Grammy Award-winning artist has come a long way since then and apparently has his drinking in check. His most recent album, 1UP, arrived in 2019 and he appeared on The Masked Singer that same year. Meanwhile, all eight episodes of This Is Pop are currently available on Netflix.
