Credit: Will Olfsom

T-Pain has collaborated with Kanye West on songs like ‘Good Life’ from 2007’s Graduation album and a remix of ‘Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin)’ from the deluxe version of his Epiphany that same year. However, that didn’t stop Ye from allegedly stealing some of his lyrics.

The Florida singer hosted a Twitch live stream in 2021 and claimed that Kanye snatched a line from him that appeared on ‘Dark Fantasy’, the intro to his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album in 2010. Referencing the ’90s sitcom Family Matters, he rapped, “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.” Apparently, Ye called the bars “corny” and then used them for his own song.

“Bro, Kanye stole one of my corny lines,” T-Pain said. “I couldn’t believe it. Kanye stole one of my corny lines after he told me it was corny. I don’t think he said it better. I don’t think anything happened that his was better than mine.”

T-Pain alleged that he played him ‘Danger’, which appeared on prEVOLVEr: The Mixtape, and was excited to hear his opinion after challenging himself to rapping. “I was working on Watch the Throne and I was so proud of my new mixtape that I had coming, and it was mostly rap,” he said. “There was a lot of rap on my shit. And I was showing Kanye my shit to be like, ‘Is this good rap?’ I really wanted his fucking opinion. I was dying. It’s fucking Kanye, bro, you know what I’m saying? I got a chance to show Kanye my fucking raps?”

He continued, “On one of the songs, I said, ‘I got beef like two burgers, you n*ggas win slow, and I’m smarter than Steve Urkel.’ Now, keep in mind the Winslow family, right. Corny as fuck. I knew it was corny when I said it. Kanye confirmed it. He was like, ‘Don’t ever say anything like that.’”

But there was something to it: “Then, after that, one of his bars was, ‘Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.’ And I was like, ‘Did this n*gga try to get me to not say my shit so he could say it?’ … I was like, ‘Bro, that’s my bar.’ He looked at me and he was literally bobbing his head, grabbing his chin, and when I said that line he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t say that.’”

Kanye reportedly brought in T-Pain to help him use auto-tune when he was finishing up 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak album, having used 2005’s Rappa Ternt Sanga as inspiration. However, T-Pain once claimed that Ye doesn’t use the technology in the “correct” way.

“He makes great music with it, but the way that I use it and the way that I’ve shown Chris [Brown] and Jamie [Foxx] to use it, he doesn’t use it that way,” he told HuffPost. “He sings without it first and then he puts it on after he’s done with the vocals. You don’t know how it’s going to come out. You can’t catch your mistakes before they happen, so sometimes it gets a little bit wobbly and things like that.”