T-Pain- “Default Picture”
From his album rEVOLVEr

T-Pain is no stranger to meta-narratives. In his Epiphany skit “I Got It,” one of his own songs is his ringtone. And of course he has made more than one love-making rap song about making love to love-making rap songs. Suffice it to say that the speaker in T-Pain songs is never really anyone other than T-Pain.

But what’s really intriguing about Pain’s songwriting is its timeless quality. I don’t mean that his songs will sound just as good fifty years from now as they do today, or that they could have existed in other times and cultures. What I mean is that he disregards time. While other artists are making their processes more explicit, he’s pulling up a curtain behind the journey from writing to producing to recording to releasing. In “Studio Luv,” for example, we’re to believe that he’s singing directly to a paramour in a stream-of-consciousness ramble, rather than shaping a song over a series of hours.

More notably, in “Long Lap Dance,” a standout of Thr33 Ringz, he is consciously creating a longer version of a lap dance song—extra-diegetically—so that he can have more of a connection with the stripper entertaining him inter-diegetically. He is somehow crafting a song in his studio and enjoying a lap dance at the same time, present and future serving each other until they become indistinguishable. He’s Jack screaming, “We have to go back!” to a musky Kate. He’s a hornier Marty McFly piling on AutoTune before he disappears from the photograph in his hand.

In that way, “Default Picture” is a perfect entry in the Teddy Pain canon. Here he is defiantly present tense, shuffling through updates on twitter* until he comes across a picture he likes. Thus begins a disconnected plea of “Girl, I’m just tryin’ to see if you feel just a little like me” to a person who should not be able to physically hear him.

But that distance doesn’t stop him from taking on an increasing directness: “So DM me, babe…I wanna see your pretty ass in person.” Although he gives lip service to their physical distance, he is so insistent that we halfway expect for her to pick up a phone by the time the song is over, space and time be damned. The partitions that normally exist between desire and attainment, not to mention composition and performance, have been demolished.

Sometimes the voice @ing groupies is desperate, like when he muses, “You be acting like that dude in your picture is your boyfriend.” (That dude in her picture is definitely her boyfriend.) Sometimes it’s bone-headed, as evidenced by the fact that he doesn’t seem to know what “default picture” means. (He’s falling in love with the little icon of an egg?) But it’s always immediate and tossed-off in the best possible way.

With its pointed, air-quotes mentions of timelines and mentions, “Default Picture” sounds as if it would have been a number one song five years ago, which is beginning to be an apt description of Teddy Penderazz himself. But five years ago, today—it’s all the same to him.

*- On his “iPhone 5.” Either T-Pain fell for the Apple announcement like everyone else, or he actually is one generation ahead of technology. Neither would surprise me.