In Praise of the Music of T-Pain

I'm as surprised as you are that this is also an article about KarXT.

It’s Saturday. I have (literally) hundreds of health-themed articles in various stages of readiness, and I don’t want to finish any of them. I do, however, want to share my newfound love for the unbelievable gift that is T-Pain's actual voice.

Yes, Faheem Rashad Najm, professionally known as “T-Pain.” The artist, songwriter, and producer who both ruined music with his wildly influential intentional misuse of Antares’ Autotune plug-in. You may know T-Pain from prior articles here, in the newsletter, like my explanation of Auvelity—a combination of dextromethorphan and bupropion for depression. We have a new combo drug out—this time, it’s the novel schizophrenia drug Cobenfy. All previous antipsychotic drugs blocked the dopamine D2-receptor. I’ve written about those drugs before in Inessential Pharmacology. (amazon link).

Cobenfy, skillfully named to suggest the combination of xanomeline and trospium is beneficial, but with an -fy ending, previously featured on Abilify, the previously best-selling psych drug on earth. You need to put them together because without trospium, the xanomeline is intolerable:

researchers have shown that xanomeline is a CNS-penetrant M1/M4-preferring agonist that provides an antipsychotic benefit, whereas trospium is a peripherally restricted pan-mAChR antagonist that helps to limit the gastrointestinal side effects of this class.

Similarly, T-Pain proved that autotune, even if overused, makes all R+B vocals more tolerable. Just listen to his way-to-perfect vocals on a similarly psychoactive compound influencer marketing play, “Buy U A Drank:”

Now, there can, of course, be too much of a good thing. Much like the role of antipsychotic overprescribing in leading to Tardive Dyskinesia, Obesity, and massive profits, the music industry was taken by storm by T-Pain’s pitch-perfect vocal innovation.

Here is what I learned this weekend. Just like deprescribing medicines might be an appropriate response to overprescribing medicines, so, too, is taking the auto-tune the hell off of T-Pain able to reveal something remarkable. He’s a fantastic singer. Like, amazingly good.

And also so, so good at covers from a broad range of musical styles. His war pigs cover? Epic.

Now you know. T-pain has a beautiful voice.

If you’d like to learn more about deprescribing antidepressants, check out my colleagues at Outro Health.

If you’d like to learn more about screening for Tardive Dyskinesia in your patients, iRxReminder and Videra Health present our now commercial Tardive Dyskinesia Risk Assessment tool. Health professionals can go to tdscreen.ai to sign up.