1 Many of the televisual representations in the video appear to be a cinematic rejoinder to the long history of black stereotypes that have historically permeated all media. In this essay I argue that T-Pain uses an optic-sonic insurgency in his music video “Can’t Believe It” to represent the positionality of blacks in American society and to explore black potentiality in the virtual sphere. To any planet in the sky / If we came from To distant lands and climes / And even go Imagination is a magic carpet / Upon which we may soar Crossing bar lines, the semiotics of T-Pain’s trademark Auto-Tune sound, raises questions about what is at stake in the music through the generative force of sonic propulsion and the simultaneously old and novel articulation of a freedom drive propelling black performance. I connect that sonic analysis to signifiers in the video, which are representations that deploy constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they relate to notions of blackness. I analyze T-Pain’s transformation of Auto-Tune into a subversive technology that represents the black voice via machine. T-Pain’s “Can’t Believe It” music video resonates with historical practices of how black bodies are represented in visual media. After an analysis of T-Pain’s use of Auto-Tune as a technology that represents the human voice via machine, I articulate how T-Pain’s earlier radical improvisational work with Auto-Tune and his subsequent cinematic strategies in his widely popular video represent the radical black imagination.
T-Pain’s “Can’t Believe It” music video resonates with wider practices of how black bodies are represented in visual media. T-Pain’s work enacts strategic resistance to these discursive formations. In cinematic history, black bodies have been represented as inhuman, super-human, and sub-human.
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