T-Pain's journey from strip club bard to NPR favorite started with the release of "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)" on December 13, 2005. What first seemed like a sweetly risqué novelty hit that was too racy for airplay—radio settled for "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Dancer)"—it did quite a bit of work. It directly led to the rise of (and subsequent call for the death of) Auto-Tune, cemented the end of rock's reign over stripper anthems, and heralded a new, rich era of songs about the feelings and activities inspired by looking at naked women dance.
That's a lot to lay on one single, but the reaction it received bears out its impact. "I'm 'n Luv" got an answer cover, an art rock tribute, and received the most indisputable acknowledgement of cultural impact a popular song can get: A "Weird Al" Yankovic parody. Yankovic dresses like Gilligan to sing "I'm in Love With the Skipper" in concert. It's the only stripper anthem to be so honored to date.
Now, there's no percentage in being ahead of one's time, and to imply that T-Pain was plowing new ground would dishonor the work of 2 Live Crew, Three 6 Mafia, and countless others who rapped and sang about poles and booties and table dances. What T-Pain was was perfectly of the time, at the crest of a tidal wave of R&B and hip-hop strip club-set bangers. Every genre has its songs about strippers, from punk to country, but no other genre has been both chronicler and soundtrack of the business like the hip-hop of the last decade, and its ascendance coincided with T-Pain's.
Just five months after "I'm 'n Luv" was released, Billboard ran a cover story on the importance of the strip club to breaking new artists. Another five months later, the wider world was introduced to Fat Joe and Lil Wayne's "Make It Rain". The term itself would remain obscure enough to a general audience that the New York Times found it necessary to run a brief explainer in 2011, prompted by Super Bowl coverage that referred to the extracurricular activities of athletes.
Magic City is now in its 10th year of stories about how it breaks music. The last decade has seen enough strip club imagery in lyrics and videos and television and film that anyone still needing "making it rain" explained to them has a pretty rarefied media intake. What that means for the culture beyond a great popular art and hustle getting its due I will leave to others, save for this: would that if for every song about watching strippers, there was one like Gangsta Boo's classic "Can I Get Paid (Get Your Broke Ass Out)", a fantastic track from the stripper's point of view.
For a song with "stripper" in the name to be a top 40 hit, it had to work as more than a club anthem. Which it really isn't. T-Pain's biggest strip club banger is probably "Up Down (Do This All Day)", a much more uptempo song about throwing money at asses. "I'm 'n Luv" is a ballad. The story goes that it's based on the time he took that one friend to a club for his first time, and he, of course, fell in love with a stripper. So basically, this song is T-Pain busting on his lovestruck buddy, taking that ribbing and turning it into a massive hit in GarageBand in a couple of hours, utilizing a synth flute and Auto-Tune to huge effect. It's so sweet in intent and minimal in instrumentation it's possible to imagine the Flamingos singing it.
The ubiquity of "I'm 'n Luv" made it unlistenable for a while, a victim of overplay and its own catchy simplicity. But it stands up well in the field of slow and sentimental stripper songs, like Wyclef Jean's "Perfect Gentleman" and Usher's "I Don't Mind". "I'm 'n Luv" lacks the condescension in those—"Just cause she dances go-go/ It don't make her a ho, no." "I don't mind if you dance on a pole/ That don't make you a ho." Oh, thanks, that's awfully big of you, fellas. It also lacks the focus on money, booze, and partying in Tyga's "Rack City" or Juicy J's "Bandz a Make Her Dance" or every other song that, as Hannibal Buress puts it, is a variation on "shake that ass while I throw money that I made selling crack."
After 2005, rock radio continued to dwindle into a niche market. The strip club anthems of the 1980s—"Cherry Pie", "Pour Some Sugar on Me", "Girls, Girls, Girls"—and the nu-metal of the '90s were fading memories. The songs that history will record as the last butt rock stripper anthems came forth shortly thereafter in a death rattle of trying-to: Buckcherry's "Crazy Bitch" (2005), Kid Rock's "So Hott" (2007), and Nickelback's "Shakin' Hands" (2008).
Thank goodness that's over.
In addition to being at the edge of a trend in subject matter, T-Pain's use of Auto-Tune marked/caused a huge increase in the program's use and an accompanying backlash against it, uniting Jay Z and Death Cab for Cutie in their public stands against vocal processing. T-Pain is at least partly responsible for both 808s and Heartbreak and The Blueprint 3, one of which used a lot of Auto-Tune and one of which called for its death. T-Pain never used the device to make his voice sound unrealistically perfect. He used it to screw it up and make it do what the human voice technically could not.
When it comes to popular music, an art form whose entire existence depends on the unanticipated applications of new technologies, drawing the line at a particular effect is a mental feat. It resembles nothing so much as a strip club customer who goes on a tirade about how much he dislikes surgically augmented bodies even though he would not for one second stand for a woman who decided to leave her body hair in its authentic state. The creator of Auto-Tune has been quoted as comparing it to cosmetics, appropriately. Sometimes it's just a little concealer, sometimes it's neon pink fake lashes, and if it's going to be noticeable, might as well go big.
Last year, T-Pain recorded the most popular Tiny Desk Concert in NPR history, accompanied by a lone keyboard player and joking that his Auto-Tune had been surgically inserted. "Buy U a Drank" unplugged turned out to be a smash with NPR listeners. This could be due to the instinctive love a certain demographic has for R&B or hip-hop only when it's recontextualized and stripped down, but an audience who'd never heard T-Pain probably just saw an enchanting soul singer. Certainly the novelty was the draw for those who had.
To commemorate the 10-year anniversary of T-Pain's debut album and the one-year anniversary of his appearance, NPR invited him back last week for a command performance. "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)" didn't make the cut either time. Probably even "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Dancer)" couldn't pass muster. There's still a few places that song can't go, because even a decade later, it's ahead of its time.