When T-Pain came to Houston a couple weeks ago, I briefly entertained the thought of asking him how he felt about Jay’s attempt to put a nail in Auto-Tune’s coffin on “D.O.A.” but decided against it. I felt it was a weak question at the time. After all, he’s been asked that over and over. Honestly, I was more interested in learning about that big ass chain. Anyone who has the balls to walk around wearing the equivalent of 5 houses on his neck is worth talking to. I ended up asking him how he felt about other artists abusing Auto-Tune and how much longer he thought the device would be around.

He laughed off the first part of my question, “I don’t mind, as long as I’m still the one getting all the Grammys.” But he seemed a bit uncomfortable with the second question. That’s understandable. He perceived that, by asking him to put an expiration date on Auto-Tune’s relevance I was ultimately asking him to put expiration date on his own career. It’s a miracle he didn’t try to bodyslam me.

However, my homeboy Shea Serrano popped the “D.O.A.” question to him. As I expected, T-Pain regurgitated a canned answer. The conversation went a little like this:

Shea: The D.O.A. song, that was dope, right?

T-Pain: Yeah, dope song.

When Shea asked him how he felt about being dissed by Jay on “D.O.A.” (or something to that effect), Teddy P was quick to correct him.

T-Pain: He says, get back to rap, y’all T-Paining too much, so he was talking about other people doing my stuff too much.

Shea: So it’s like a big up to you.

T-Pain: Yeah, pretty much like “Hey rappers, keep rapping. Don’t T-Pain.”

Well, that doesn’t sound like the tone of a man who harbored any resentments. What changed? “D.O.A.” has been out for months. What inspired Teddy’s delayed reaction? Why jump out of the window to defend Auto-Tune when you can eat your cake and have it?

Just days after making headlines for his Auto-Tune iPhone app, a video of T-Pain hauling insults at Jay surfaced on the web.

Jay-Z Responds to T-Pain: “I don’t know why he’s dissing me now”