T-Pain

T-Pain (short for Tallahassee Pain), born Faheem Rasheed Najm in 1985, is an American singer, rapper and record producer. He began his career as a rapper in the group Nappy Headz in 2004. In 2005, he released his debut album Rappa Ternt Sanga which reached number 33 on the Billboard top 200. He won a Grammy in 2008 with Kanye West for the single "Good Life" and another in 2010 for the single "Blame It" with Jamie Foxx. He is most known for his extensive use of Auto-Tune, and also for being in every song on the radio. At one point in late 2007, he was featured on four top ten singles on the Billboard Top 100 chart.


 * Auto-Tune: Probably one of the Trope Codifiers of it with current rappers. Actually used well, since he deliberately overuses it to make his vocals sound metallic, rather than just to cover his mistakes.
 * To T-Pain's credit, he does sing quite well sans Auto-Tune, contrary to what his detractors might think. The NPR performance of "Buy U A Drank" and his rendition of "Star-Spangled Banner" show this.
 * Iconic Item: T-Pain is always seen with sunglasses, usually huge white-rimmed ones, though he will have different ones sometimes. This led to jokes that he was secretly crosseyed or something like that.
 * Wolverine Publicity: The artists he has worked with include R. Kelly, Kanye West, T.I., Bow Wow, Fabolous, Chris Brown, Pitbull, Lily Allen, Wiz Khalifa, Lil Wayne, Tech N9ne, Ludacris, Jesse McCartney, Ciara, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Taylor Swift (in a parody song, "Thug Story"), and was even in "We Are the World 25 for Haiti".