Review: Rappa Ternt Santa by T-Pain (Written in 2022)
A review I wrote in 2022. It’s about T-Pain but it’s really about music production.
The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer was a commercial failure because it was a bad drum machine.
Before hip-hop had been invented by Black teenagers in the 70s, drum machines were made for non-professional musicians (often organists) as an alternative to finding a drummer for events—this is why many of these devices had presets for styles of ballroom dance. Roland Corporation introduced the TR-808 in 1980 as a professional variant of this tool, offering a full simulated drum kit with programmable drum patterns so that musicians could record demo tapes without hiring drummers.
But instead of using sampled drum recordings—deemed too expensive—Roland used analog synthesis to generate every drum sound.
It was a mistake.
The drums on the TR-808 lack the aural artifacts of things hitting other things. A real kick drum has presence in the middle frequently range from a mallet hitting a drum. A real snare rattles for some time after the drumstick hits the head. A real hi-hat has the warbling ring of a metal dish vibrating, and it has enough mid-range frequencies to fight with a vocalist.
The TR-808 sounds too pure. It’s sparse and tight in a way no actual drum set is, and that means it fades into the background. This is fine if you’re a songwriter recording a sparse sketch before your producer gets in the studio, but pop and dance music depend on the drums. To make the TR-808 audible in, say, a song, you need to either boost the drum volumes to absurd levels (and add reverb to counteract the artificial tightness) or else take out almost everything else in the track, hollowing out your mix to make room for your delicate TR-808.
If you want to hear the kick, you can’t have a rich bass line, because any bass guitar is more impactful than the sine-wave kicks of the TR-808. If you want the snare to pop, you need your guitars and synths to tiptoe around the middle frequencies—and this is the 80’s! Producers wanted to blast the listener with loud guitars, louder singers, and louder snares!
So if you wanted your song to move without a solid bass line or a lively mid-range, you needed the tinny hi-hats of the TR-808 to run wild in the high frequencies where they can’t bother anything else. If you tried to make a rap track like that, you would sound like the Beastie Boys.
After only five years, Roland gave up on synthesized drum sounds. The TR-707 and TR-727 rely on the sampled drum recordings that Roland cheaped out on for the TR-808.
By the time Faheem Najm released his December 2005 debut Rappa Ternt Sanga, he had been a rapper for five-ish years with a group called Nappy Headz, making anonymous Deep South hip-hop. It wasn’t working—Tallahassee Pain knew he needed to change his sound. But he was also an insecure 21-year-old, which is why he starts his debut album with an oddly defensive intro track justifying his decision to start singing. It’s a sloppy start—but it leads into the lead single “I’m Sprung,” which is the real start to the album.
T-Pain made two key innovations when he presumably borrowed a dusty TR-808 for his first solo album. First, he fixed the TR-808’s bass problem. Normally, a song can’t have a TR-808 kick and a bass line at the same time. But, if the producer jacks up the decay on that synthesized kick, records the oddly melodic boom into a sample, and runs that sample through a keyboard, they suddenly have a kick pattern and a bass line—with one sound! Add the rest of the TR-808 drums as-is and sprinkle in a sparse chord progression, and you have a musically interesting R&B beat.
But the backing to “I’m Sprung” is rather cold, which motivates T-Pain’s second innovation: Auto-Tuned harmonies. Auto-Tune, first released in 1996 by Antares Audio Technologies, is a digital pitch correction tool that pulls apart a digital vocal recording sample by sample, measures the approximate note of each sample, and replaces that sample with a copy that exactly matches the measured note. Used as intended, the result is a vocal performance more perfect than a perfect take. T-Pain ignored the manual and twisted the parameters into a digital vocoder, blanketing his songs in lush harmonies that do not fight with the TR-808’s snares and claps.
T-Pain leans further into the 808s and Auto-Tune harmonies with his next album, Epiphany, and Kanye West further polishes the sound (with T-Pain’s help) in the iconic 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak. But in 2005, the sound palette sounds like a raw precursor to what would become Ariana Grande’s pop masterpieces thank u, next and Positions.
No one actually uses the TR-808 anymore—the 808s of today are constructed out of modern digital tools, often from scratch. As a high school music producer, I made a few 808s myself.
The modern 808 kick is often a two-piece sound: the impact is typically a sample of a kick drum or a punchy low-frequency bloop; and the decay is a synth bass (I went for flat square waves) with a short attack and release, a long delay, and a low-level sustain. The impact and decay are triggered together, but very often producers will change the bass note by pitch-bending the decay sound instead of re-triggering the kick. That way, the producer can write a bass line that’s more complex than the kick drum pattern while retaining the booming bass effect of the TR-808 kick.
The impact and delay pieces are glued together with matching (or complementary) post-processing—kick up the gain until the sounds crackle from overloaded audio channels, then layer on a low-pass filter, chopping off the high-pitched distortion and leaving a low-frequency rumble. The result is a singular sound: the deep-fried 808 kick. For an example, witness Dylan Brady’s 2015 album All I Ever Wanted. (Four years later, Brady would become one-half of the hyperpop duo 100 gecs.)
T-Pain’s 808 kick in Rappa Ternt Sanga is already impossible on the TR-808, which couldn’t adjust the kick’s TONE parameter on a per-note basis, but ensuing decades have completely transformed what an 808 drum is.
The modern 808 drum kit features warm kicks with semi-synchronized bass sounds; crunchy snares, cross-sticks, and claps; skittering hi-hats, rides, and cymbals; and melodic tom and cowbell fills. Like the original TR-808, modern 808s typically lack the artifacts of things hitting other things. Instead, they often gain texture from digital clipping, as overboosted signals get crushed by maximum and minimum integer values in digital audio channels. The distortion litters squared-off noise across the frequency range, which can then be shaped by digital frequency filters, giving presence to the kicks and heft to middle- and higher-frequency drums.
Roland now sells a TR-808 sample pack as a digital audio plug-in, but Bauuer’s 2012 “Harlem Shake” was probably the last pop hit using the original TR-808. Since then, 808s have become warm and punchy, with variation from producer to producer, and song to song.
T-Pain’s artistic reputation turned with his October 2014 performance for the NPR Tiny Desk series. His sparse three-song performance shocked listeners who weren’t expecting The Auto-Tune Guy to show up with clear plastic glasses, a practiced croon, and the fidgety demeanor of a shy kid who learned how to be social in his adulthood.
Nowadays, T-Pain is a known turbo-nerd with a booming Twitch presence, a Confused Jackie Chan tattoo, and an entire album about video games—but he has always been like this. The smooth-talking, womanizing party animal depicted in his songs is a character he plays for laughs.
First, T-Pain got married in 2003 and has stayed married (with kids!) since, which suggests limited experience in a strip club (as a patron, anyway). Second, no 21-year-old releases a professional-quality album without spending their adolescence taking music too seriously to be cool. “Nerdcore rapper” is a tautology.
If the listener drops any expectation of authenticity, Rappa Ternt Sanga becomes a pleasantly goofy album. The premises of songs like “Studio Luv” and “Como Estas” are flatly ridiculous, and T-Pain leans into knowingly dorky phrases like describing sex as “doing that night thing” in "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper).” Even “I’m Sprung” leans into comedy, describing a suave Rapper Man cooking and washing dishes for a woman who “ain’t even [his] main lady.”
It’s a dumb fun album—but it would have been better as a ten-song, forty-minute affair with no features outside of Taino’s verse in “Como Estas.”
There’s another history to the TR-808 in hip-hop—a darker sound that emerged from underground clubs in Memphis, Tennessee. For the Memphis scene, the icy artificiality of the stock TR-808 was perfect for a grimy, lo-fi approach to ‘80s and ‘90s shock rap. DJ Spanish Fly pioneered the sound, using both the TR-808 kick and the TR-808 cowbell for melodic effect.
The result is transfixing—the crunchy 808s, the cowbell melodies, the moody samples, and the pitched-shifted vocals add up to what in 2022 would be called “phonk”—a subgenre of hip-hop beatmaking associated with SoundCloud weeaboos, Russian music nerds, and drifting cars.
And it was happening in Memphis clubs more that 30 years earlier.
T-Pain probably didn’t listen to DJ Spanish Fly, and even Memphis icons like Gangsta Pat and Three 6 Mafia didn’t cling to the naked artificiality of 808s. But phonk as it exists today, as hyper-compressed screenshots of Memphis in pre-war Russian-language memes, follows the same playbook of textured 808s, of adding warmth through digital clipping and filtering.
It’s parallel evolution, the consequences of two different music scenes—one poppy, one edgy—trying to breathe life into a quirky ‘80s drum set, crashing together in the glorious cacophony of mid-2010s SoundCloud.
Did Dylan Brady learn his crunchy 808s from Tallahassee or from Memphis?
By 2015, would it have made a difference?
I think the 808 is as impactful for 21st-century pop music as the electric guitar was for the back half of the 20th century. The bold-face artificiality of the 808, the willingness to throw out any semblance of things hitting other things in favor of tastier aural texture, is key to the sound of pop in the Internet era.
And for that reason, I’d argue Rappa Ternt Sanga is one of the most important albums of the 21st century.
Yes, 808s and Heartbreak is a skip-no-songs masterwork. The pop songs of 2022 owe their sound to what Apple Music liner notes describe as Kanye West’s “going electric” moment. But 808s and Heartbreak owes its sound to a chubby gamer boy from Tallahassee.
Without T-Pain, the 808 would remain a niche tool for underground rappers in the American South.
We wouldn’t have Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.a.a.d. city, or Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.
We wouldn’t have Lil Peep’s Come Over When You’re Sober, or BTS’s LOVE YOURSELF 承 'HER', or Charli XCX’s Charli.
We wouldn’t have Flume’s Skin, or Cashmere Cat’s Mirror Maru, or SOPHIE’s Product.
We wouldn’t have the production work of DJ Mustard or Dylan Brady.
And we wouldn’t have Ariana Grande, an artist who refined Faheem Najm’s combo of chill 808s and lush harmonies into two of the most polished musical works in human history.
In 2013, Usher pulled T-Pain aside on a plane trip to tell him that T-Pain’s work had “fucked up music.” It sent T-Pain into a depressive spiral for four years, in part because the opinion of his friend Usher was rather common. Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreak was controversial at its release, in part because of stylistic choices that T-Pain taught to Kanye. In 2009, Jay-Z had released a scathing track called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” telling purportedly effeminate musicians to “get back to rap, you T-Pain-ing too much.” In 2010, TIME Magazine called Auto-Tune one of the worst inventions of all time.
The controversy must have weighed on T-Pain, despite the constant caveats that he was one of the good Auto-Tune users. Remember, he leads the album in which he pioneered the 808s-and-Auto-Tune sound with a stammering plea for listeners to understand why this rapper turned singer.
Sales success doesn’t wash away insecurity that deep.
It took another ten years for the truth to reveal itself: T-Pain didn’t ruin music—he re-invented it by popularizing the lush 808 sound that has since spread and mutated into a panoply of soundscapes.
We owe pop music to T-Pain.