Burnout can make anyone vehemently hate their job. It’s the risk you take making your passion your career. You come into it with pure intentions and wanting to create something beautiful and meaningful.
But once it becomes an obligation, you might lose sight of why you loved doing it in the first place. Then you’re doing it so that you can cash your checks. Even artists like T-Pain reached a point in their lives where the love they had for music was drained from them once the label was dictating matters.
In a 2015 profile with journalist Jeff Weiss and The Fader, the hip-hop and R&B legend recalled the many eras in his career. In his prime, he tinkered with street and skateboard aesthetics alike, to the point where people endlessly teased him.
T-Pain dropped his debut album, ‘Rappa Ternt Sanga’, in 2005
After watching people on the internet call him a clown, he embraced it with Thr33 Ringz. “Not only am I going to make hits, I’m going to dress like an idiot the whole time, and you’re still going to love me. I’d just try to do the most outlandish s***,” T-Pain recalled.
Ultimately, all he wanted was for people to take the music he loved seriously. Eventually, by 2010, he shrugged that he didn’t care if anyone liked his music anymore. Then, years flew by as his love for the craft waned. When that became evident, and Pain wasn’t the hit-making juggernaut he was in the 2000s, the label got involved and made matters worse.
“In 2010, I said, ‘F**k it, I don’t care if people like this.’ I didn’t care if people didn’t know about the album. I just lost the passion. Through 2013, I was depressed. The industry turned it from a passion into a job,” Pain admitted.
T-Pain Reached a Deep Depression Due to The Music Industry
“I had stopped making decisions for myself,” he continued, “When I released ‘Take Your Shirt Off’, and that didn’t do well, the label was like, ‘You were wrong this time. Now we’re going to take over.’ That’s when shit started to go downhill.”
This mindset infected T-Pain for years. He didn’t want to spend money; his label shut down, and he was shifted over to another ecosystem entirely. Everything he made felt terrible, and he never released it accordingly.
By 2013, he decided to take action into his hands again, spawning the music video for “Up Down“, from T-Pain Presents Happy Hour: The Greatest Hits. “It re-animated me and got me out of the depression,” T-Pain said. “It showed me that I just needed to trust myself again.”
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