From SUPER DELUXE — Thankfully someone has called out the absurdities of every hip hop, pop and whatever artist synthing their voice instead of singing for real. Granted, if it wasn’t a trend, Blackout wouldn’t have come out. Check out this great parody, after the jump!

T-Pain, Olde English On “Akon Calls T-Pain”

OE has done outdone themselves this time with their new video, Akon Calls T-Pain.

We’re officially premiering it today on the home page, but already, it’s been making the rounds on the Internets to plenty o’ rave reviews. Including T-Pain’s. That’s right. Somehow, we got the Auto-Tuned rapper to sit down and watch Akon Calls T-Pain. And guess what? He loved it.

We love it, too. So much so that we decided to call Olde English and ask them all sorts of unnecessary questions about it. OE’s David Segal happily obliged us.

So, where did the idea come from?

Just listening to these guys’ songs everywhere. There was a point I checked the Billboard charts, and they had, like, 7 out of 10 songs on it that were either theirs or featured them. And they sound pretty similar. And then I found out that T-Pain got signed to Akon’s label because he did an impression of Akon. He did a parody song that Akon heard, who must have been like, “I’ll also have this guy on my label and then I’ll be able to get twice the money from twice the amount of songs.” They’re just funny guys. The [vocal] effect thing is hilarious sounding. And they kind have become charactertures of themselves with all the news stories about Akon throwing people off stages and T-Pain in the videos with his wacky hats. I think people just love them as characters and we thought it would be fun to play with that. Originally, the joke was just going to be that it’s really hard to tell sometimes whether you’re listening to Akon or T-Pain.

You claim the video is based on “actual audio from cellphone conversations between” Akon and T-Pain. If that’s so, how did you obtain it?

We never came up with that part of the story as to how we could have possibly obtained the cell phone audio. I always think there’s something funny about claiming something is real that’s so clearly not. I think people always enjoy at least one moment of “Oh, you had me for a second,” as long as you can follow it up with something worthwhile.

Who in Olde English did the voices for this?

I did T-Pain. One of our good friends who works with us on our musical stuff, Jesse Novak, did Akon. He also did the Auto-Tuning for our voices and made the music for the “butternut reduction” part. He’s the brother of B.J. Novak from The Office. Another friend of ours, Richard Sodik, did the Snoop Dogg voice.

We can’t help but have noticed that T-Pain and Akon agree to meet at 1:15 but then T-Pain shows up at 1:47. Are you implying he’s on R.P.T.?

::pause::

What? No, certainly not. I would never, ever imply that. We just thought that T-Pain is the more fun-loving and relaxed version of Akon. Akon sounds like he’s mad about stuff sometimes. He throws fans off stages. He’s a tough guy. T-Pain is just loving life. And wherever he ends up is fine with him. At least according to the characterture of him in my mind.

How did you hook up with Puny? They did an amazing job with the design and animation.

They were really good to work with. Ben [Popik, Olde English founder] just went through a bunch of different animators and came across their stuff and loved their work. So, we got in touch with them. And they knew of our stuff and liked us. We’re actually working on another thing with them that hopefully will come out soon.

Will it be like this last video?

Don’t want to give anything away but it has to do with Jay-Z recording a new album.

Some are calling this the best Olde English video yet. Do you see a spin-off or a long-term project from this?

We’re open to hearing any offers people come with. I personally love the characters that Puny came up with in terms of the drawings. And I think Akon and T-Pain would be happy to have several more adventures. The problem is, you don’t want to do worse than you did the last time. So, you’d have to have them do some bigger adventures together. Have them solve crimes together…

Auto-tune something together.

Yeah.

Stills courtesy of Puny’s blog.