I Love This Bar: T-Pain Just Wants Everyone to Turn Up

All photos by Tara Jaggers

Chicago's Double Door is a roughly 500-person capacity venue in the city's Wicker Park neighborhood. It mostly books relatively obscure bands, while also occasionally bringing in slightly larger acts; for example, Pete Yorn is playing a sold out show at the Double Door on Wednesday, October 8. This past Wednesday night when two-time Grammy winner and 11-time Grammy nominee T-Pain played the Double Door, it did not sell out.

When I casually mentioned the day before that I was going to a T-Pain concert, everyone within earshot reacted as if they'd misheard me. Some thought I'd said Sean Kingston. All around, there was one question: "Why?"

I suggested that young people 15 years from now will discover "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')" the way that people my age discover the great pop songs that were written before they were born, but no one entertained this idea for a second. Really, it seems like the two weeks in 2007 when T-Pain had four songs in the Hot 100 top 10 have been not just forgotten, but willfully banished from memory. Sure, he hasn't really had a solid hit in four years (to be fair, he took a four-year break from music, but, really, even the pretty good "Up Down" is a modest hit at best). But it's as if the lion's share of the goodwill T-Pain generated when he was at the top of the charts has shawty snapped far away, somewhere over the top hat.

I was curious, then, about my fellow concertgoers; after I scoped out the venue I saw no discernible demographic pattern that would separate the crowd at the Double Door from, say, a group of people waiting for the train. The crowd was younger and seemed a little dude heavy, but I deduced that the latter was because a solid chunk of the audience was there to support one of the three, forgettable, local openers.

But of course, that's not everyone. After the second struggle rapper of the three we're due got off stage, the very drunk man next to me asked "Where the fuck is T-Pain? Fuck this other shit." The cynic in me wondered if the scheduling was calculated because by the time that the third lackluster opener was done, I was legitimately thrilled at the prospect of seeing T-Pain, who would sing songs that I know, get on stage.

Any anticipation I felt was definitely amplified when I noticed that there was a bar on stage. Yes, a bar. An actual bar. There it was, stocked with moscato and other ingredients to make drinks and manned by an actual bartender. Even the most spirits-loving performer usually contents him or herself with a drink on a stool to the side, but not T-Pain. In order for T-Pain to give us his all, to properly guide us through the night, he needed this, and who were we to argue?

When T-Pain took the stage singing John Legend's "Tonight (Best You Ever Had)" he wasn't singing about sex, he was telling us that our night, watching T-Pain, was going to be the best we've ever had. Of course, such a bold promise wasn't exactly true, but, even with such high expectations laid out, the show was far from disappointing. It was in fact, so consistently entertaining that the couple hundred or so unsold tickets for the night's show stopped seeming predictable and started to seem bizarre. After his intro T-Pain moved straight into "Booty Werk," which has got to be T-Pain's worst single. Still, it was clear that T-Pain is more than anything else, a pretty great performer.

He did all of his hits, and flirted with an astounding number of hits that weren't his including "Clique," "No Hands," "Ain't Worried About Nothin," "Party Rock Anthem," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Party Rock Anthem," and that song from Beetlejuice. He had the sensibilities to pull off cool, lounge-y versions of "Buy You a Drank" and "Bartender," which he obviously started off singing to the onstage bartender. He also went the extra mile to spruce up his lesser known tracks; at one point T-Pain came onstage dressed as a pastor and after a very heartfelt prologue, launched into his single "Church," which he performed as if it had stayed at the top of the charts for a month. Later, he hilariously played around on an MPC-controller in a manner that seemed purposefully reminiscent of Kanye in "Runaway." Instead of playing "Power," though, he was firing off the titular lyric of his song with Chris Brown, "Kiss."

As if T-Pain was hedging his bets, his set was actually interrupted twice for short sets from lesser known artists. The first was Bando Jonez out of Atlanta, who managed to get his shirt off in the 15 or so minutes that he was onstage and was proof that the legacy of Pretty Ricky is still alive in 2014. The second was Snootie Wild, who flooded the stage with laconic hype men and valiantly attempted to transform the T-Pain concert into a trap show for about 20 minutes. It was cool to hear "Yayo," but it probably would've been better for the T-Pain train (the T-Rain?) to run uninterrupted.

For his entire show T-Pain was flanked by a hype man who kind of looked like Kid Cudi and two very athletic, very descriptively named dancers referred to only as "Thick" and "Thin." The dancers provided most of the physical text for the show, but T-Pain tried his best to keep up, with dance moves that looked like they'd been ripped straight from Homer Simpson's stint as the Springfield Isotopes' mascot. That's not to knock him. T-Pain is a great performer for the same reason Homer made a great mascot: his live show isn't so much about playing his hits as it's about showing everyone a good time. And on that count, T-Pain succeeded. Obviously.

Despite all the discussion about Auto-Tune and the role it plays in T-Pain's music, the spirit T-Pain embodies goes far beyond a single digital effect. When Jamie Foxx performed his single "Blame It" on the 2010 Grammy Awards, the easy highlight of the performance was when the conductor of the the faux orchestra onstage tore off his big floppy wig and revealed himself to be, yes, T-Pain. He then proceeded to galoot all around the stage with Staples Center-sized confidence, probably because "Blame It" is the best T-Pain song that is also somehow not a T-Pain song. And that's because his appeal has to do, above all, with the way he offers the experience of being out drinking and looking for a good time. T-Pain brings a bar to everyone’s personal stage, in a way, and he appeals to a broad swath of fans because of it. Everyone likes a bar. The people who showed up at Double Door on a Wednesday night remember this. The rest of the world would be wise to as well.

Matthew Richardson is a writer living in Chicago. He's on Twitter - @matthewreads.

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