The Internet Rallies Around T-Pain After Shocking Usher Story

T-Pain recently traced a “four-year depression” to a conversation with Usher.

A clip from the forthcoming Netflix series This is Pop featuring T-Pain sparked backlash on social media on Monday. In the video, he reveals his discovery of a conversation with Usher in 2013 that began what he called a four-year depression. Watch the full clip below.

T-Pain’s story begins on an airplane, on the way to the BET Awards. As he sat in first class, a flight attendant alerted him that Usher wanted to speak to him in the back of the plane.

“Usher was my friend,” T-Pain revealed. “I really respect Usher. And he said, ‘I’m gonna tell you something, man. You kinda fucked up music.'” He thought the comment was a joke, but Usher doubled down. “And then he was like, ‘Yeah man you really fucked up music for real singers,’” T-Pain continued to say. “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 social media, hundreds of users came to Pain’s defense. Many called these comments hypocritical, given his experiments with auto-tune, as early as 2010’s “OMG” featuring Will.I.Am.

“Usher hated T-Pain for successfully reintroducing and popularizing autotune in the early 2000s,” one user wrote, “instead of supporting it, only to rely on it after his career went on the decline once the 2010s hit.”

Others noted Pain’s ability to sing with or without Auto-Tune. He recently turned heads on an episode of The Masked Singer without using the technique.

Usher has yet to publicly comment. But after the clip spread, T-Pain went to Twitter to clear the comment up. More specifically, he downplayed any tension between himself and Usher.

This is Pop arrives on Netflix on June 22nd.