T-Pain Delivers Nostalgia, Celebration

Live music is a strange thing on this campus. One can never be quite certain of what will hit or miss, whether people will show up, stick around or ditch a show for the weekend party rounds. There was an undercurrent of excitement, confidence and yes, palpable irony that surrounded the announcement of the Middlebury College Activity Board (MCAB)’s spring show, featuring none other than the man best known for featuring on other people’s songs, T-Pain.

Cue early high school nostalgia, when Akon was a thing and pool parties were inevitably sound-tracked by “I’m on a Boat,” which, incidentally, T-Pain didn’t perform (much to everyone’s dismay). The quiet, uncharacteristic calm on Friday night seemed to signify that the student body had retreated from public view in order to best prepare themselves for what was to be a weird, sweaty and ultimately impressive turnout in Kenyon Arena the next evening.

With T-Pain, MCAB was successful in achieving exactly what it set out to do: throw a massive party. Close to two thousand tickets were sold, and it was admittedly heartening to see a show that seemed to bring together not only students but also members of the larger community from the University of Vermont, Middlebury and Middlebury High School on such a large scale. The performance itself proved to be a spectacle of pounding bass, loud beats, blinding lights and writhing, jumping masses; maybe that’s what Ultra Music Festival on a hockey rink would look like.

T-Pain was supported on stage by a cast of close to ten musicians and dancers, including a drummer who was absolutely relentless behind the kit, filling every song with tight explosive energy. The accompanying vocalist and MC often appeared to spend more time on the microphone than T-Pain himself, tirelessly playing hype-man to the sea of perspiring people, backing up T-Pain on the higher notes and even singing the larger part of some songs.

This is not to take away from T-Pain’s performance in any way, as there were moments when he owned the crowd with his now characteristic blend of silky auto-tune mastery and flashes of tight verses. Nostalgia flooded through the waves of pink and blue light as he announced to much elation, “We’re gonna go way back. Are you ready?” before launching into fan favourites like “Good Life” and “Bartender.”

Even the most cynical of concertgoers couldn’t help but give in to the smooth bouncing allure of “Buy U a Drank” and “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)”; indeed, T-Pain demonstrated his sharp acumen for massaging the guilty pleasure hits we have all loved and grown up on at some point. In many ways, his whole performance seemed perfectly curated for something out of a classic college movie, which maybe explains his current exhaustive run of university shows.

Is this then perhaps T-Pain’s grand return to the music scene after what was a pretty unnoticeable hiatus away? About six months ago, he made an appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series, an online platform for independent artists to perform intimate acoustic sets. T-Pain surprised the Internet with some phenomenal vocal flexing, doing soulful slow-jam renditions of his popular tunes, all the while joking with the audience, “I know everybody’s wondering where the auto-tune is gonna come from, it’s totally fine, I got it right here surgically inserted.” On March 27, T-Pain released his first mix tape in over two years, The Iron Way, in which he seems to asks, as one music website puts it, “If everyone else is getting emotional in the club, why not the guy who arguably started the trend over a decade ago?”

Club Midd was definitely alive and well on Saturday night, and proved an intimate, involved audience to an artist that definitely put on a show. Intimate, not so much in the lighter-in-the-air-swaying-side-to-side kind of way as much as in the dancing-drunk-in-the-back-of-an-Atwater-Suite sense. There were definitely moments when the concert felt more like a party playlist DJ set rather than a live musical performance, including one minute cuts and covers of college no-brainers like “Get Low” by Flo Rida and a slightly awkward version of “Royals” by Lorde.

The supporting act, Color Wars, seemed to be a caricature of this college act mentality, hurling an unnecessary amount of over-programmed bass drops and loud synths at the audience. Performing before this group, however, were impressive student openers Ola Fadairo ’15 and Dwayne Scott ’17, who played a powerful set of original solo and collaborative material to a small audience that was growing rapidly as people filed through the doors. Although most of their rhymes were lost to echoes of the huge cavernous space of Kenyon Arena, Scott and Fadairo showed no signs of nerves, feeding off each other extremely well, and continuously pumping up the crowd. Their brightest moments came when they brought on other student performers like urban dance group Evolution and fellow musician and beat-maker Innocent Tswamuno ’15.

While the show was well organized and had an incredible turnout — credit to concerts committee co-chairs Matt Butler ’15, Katherine Kucharczyk ’16 and the MCAB team — the money question inevitably looms large. Was this a show worth the staggering $30,000 plus, when quickly emerging relevant artists like Chance the Rapper cost MCAB only $15,000 last year? Could the money have been put to more efficient use by building a more diversified bill of artists? The answer is complicated, and relates back to the tricky challenge of putting on concerts on this campus that inspire students to come out in support of live music culture. This show achieved that in sheer numbers, and T-Pain’s generous set definitely got the crowd dancing and the shawties snappin’.