T-Pain

T-Pain says he plans to continue to write country music songs as a ghostwriter. The singer-songwriter-producer recently made headlines when he revealed that he stopped taking credit for the country songs he’s worked on because of the “racism” he dealt with in the genre.  “I wrote a lot of country songs, and the country songs that I get credit on — I wouldn’t say backlash or anything like that — but was a lot of criticism of, ‘Why did they let a Black person be a part of this?’ or things like…

T-Pain was at a karaoke party last year when an R&B-flavored country ballad starting playing over the system. The rapper-turned-singer didn’t recognize it, so he opened up Shazam to listen — and the result came back as “Tennessee Whiskey,” by Chris Stapleton. “I made it a part of my ‘sad playlist,’” T-Pain tells RS. “The lyrics spoke to me.” Songs from decades past are routinely revived or rediscovered, and that’s currently happening in a big way with “Tennessee Whiskey,” a 44-year-old honky-tonk song about…

The introduction and eventual acceptance of MP3s paved the way for possibly the most significant and controversial ‘90smusic innovations: Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing.Over the course of fewer than three years, Napster would rise and fall, acquire millions of curious users, and upend ideas around music ownership and distribution for decades to come. Napter’s founder, a college student named Shawn Fanning, reportedly articulated his idea for the service on an internet message board in 1999. Referred to by many as…