American rapper, singer-songwriter, and music producer T-Pain exposes the use of clickbait in an article about him.
On May 2, he posted on Facebook about how an article has been continuously resurfacing about him. The article is entitled “T-Pain Demands Strip Clubs Turn All TVs to Cartoon Network When He Enters.” The word choice used in the headline may already create an image of T-Pain in the minds of people as being bizarre and demanding.
To counter the article, T-Pain reshared his earlier response to it, which he originally posted on Reddit. In his response he describes how he shells out a lot of money whenever he goes to strip clubs, so he doesn’t really want baseball as his background noise while being entertained. He only has the channels of the TVs around his section changed.
T-Pain clarifies that he does not force everyone to watch kids’ shows in a very much adult setting and that kids’ shows are not even on at the hour that he goes to strip clubs. T-Pain talks about how Cartoon Network is only the channel that he watches, but during the working hours of strip clubs, the late-night and adult-oriented Adult Swim programming block is what is being aired at the time.
With 31k likes and reactions, 1.5k comments, and 15k shares on his Facebook post, it seems like people are enjoying T-Pain’s quirky strip club behavior and response to the article.
The most relevant comment mentions how an accurate title just wouldn’t be catchy enough.
Other people came to his defense, mentioning how it’s not like he’s watching kid’s shows or the news while he’s there.
Some even applauded his channel choice and lifestyle.
A similar thing happened with the same story about T-Pain on Twitter. In 2021, the Twitter account Dexerto posted a clip of T-Pain while he was streaming. They captioned the post “I used to go in the strip club and say ‘You gotta turn it to Cartoon Network right now.’”
"I used to go in the strip club and say "You gotta turn it to Cartoon Network right now" – T-Pain. pic.twitter.com/DrXPJZ6Jd4
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) December 22, 2021
You do hear T-Pain say this line in the video, but if you continue to watch it, this line is literally followed by him explaining that “we can’t do that anymore because it turns into the baby channel now,” referring to the transition of Cartoon Network from Adult Swim back to its children-centered Cartoon Network programming in the daytime.
The article in question that T-Pain refers to on his Facebook post was originally published in May 2020. Most of it actually speaks about T-Pain’s career and extravagant lifestyle in general. Its subheaders include T-Pain’s fame and the rapper’s tastes. It includes a brief bit towards the end, referring to his supposed strip club TV dictatorship.
The article sources YouTube talk show Hot Ones where T-Pain makes his second appearance. In the episode, he talks about how much he loves cartoons, even making a definitive ranking of his top shows.
He also talks about Freaknik: The Musical, which is a cartoon that T-Pain produced and starred in, something he is very proud of. Starring alongside T-Pain are many other famous rappers like Snoop Dogg and Lil’ Wayne.
If you were to check out the Hot Ones episode coming from the article about T-Pain, you would notice that talk show host Sean Evans clearly says the words “in your section” when he asks T-Pain about his changing TV channels when he visits strip clubs.
If the writer of the article fully watched their source, then we may deduce that they (and/or their publisher) purposefully removed this info in the title and/or much of the article to make the story seem all the more outrageous.
When dealing with clickbait, it is always important to know the context of things to understand them better. It’s easy for things to get lost in translation when they are removed from the context in which they were said just to gain clicks and shares. The same can be said about using provocative and misleading language to get people to click on your story – especially when the title only describes a small portion of the article.
Thankfully for T-Pain, he was able to clear the air, explaining everything in a factual and accurate way that still fully showed his personality which his fans just can’t get enough of.
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