This year’s TIME “100” finalist was nominated for eight Grammy’s in the last two years, has had nine different songs chart on Billboard’s Rhythmic Top 10 and two years ago, in November and December, had seven different singles hit the Billboard Hot 100 list. Can you guess who he is?

It’s T-Pain — the man responsible for bringing back the worst type of Auto-Tune.

Are the muses mad at us? Was it something we said (or sung)? It’s as if they saw us getting complacent with our talented Winehouses, alternative Radioheads and soulful LaBelles and thought to themselves, “Hey, you know what would be fun? Let’s turn all the great singers into drug addicts, kill the King of Pop and add Auto-Tune into the mix.”

It all started with Exxon engineer Andy Hildebrand, who took what he learned from an oil-finding science to meet the challenge presented to him at a dinner party. A woman dared him to build her a machine that could allow her to sing in perfect pitch, and thus, Auto-Tune was born.

In simple terms, Auto-Tune works like this: You sing into the microphone, you play a note and your recorded voice will be altered to match the pitch. Conventionally, it’s used merely as a back-up tool for singers who are afraid their voices might crack during a performance or as a speedy cop-out for lazy vocalists who can’t seem to nail that specific note on their new comeback single. Now, thanks to Auto-Tune, less-than-perfect singers can actually have successful careers and when the radio plays Britney Spears’ “3,” mirrors aren’t cracking (and neither is her voice). However, over the last decade, Auto-Tune has taken a whole new role. Over a year after Auto-Tune’s invention, Cher used a variation of the pitch-correcting effect on her multi-platinum “Believe.” The Auto-Tune program has various preferences, including “retune speed” which when set to 0, gets rid of that natural transgression between various notes and instead makes the voice sound digital — as if it were skipping. This is the sound T-Pain-to-My-Ears capitalized on.

He heard the processing used in one of Jennifer Lopez’s songs and thought the effect would sound good with his voice. According to over three million people who bought his “Buy U A Drank” single, he thought right. And since he’s now released “I AM T-PAIN,” an iPhone app that can turn anyone’s voice into something that sounds like a robot’s, the general public now thinks that they too can become rap superstars. Kanye West, Black Eyed Peas, Chris Brown, Akon, Snoop Dogg, Baby Bash and Usher are all doing it, so why not us?

Herein lies the issue with Auto-Tune. When used in meager doses, Auto-Tune can be effective. You barely notice it in Dixie Chicks’ “The Long Way Around,” Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” or Natasha Bedingfield’s “Love Like This,” and when other voice-altering effects are used — like in Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” and a great majority of Daft Punk’s discography — the artistic effect can be admired. But when it’s become a punch line for acts like The Lonely Island’s “I’m On a Boat,” Jimmy Kimmel’s “Obama Auto-Tune” and Taylor Swift’s “Thug Story” (by the way, T-Pain costarred in ALL of those tracks), maybe it’s time to turn the “retune speed” back up from 0.

Fellow rapper Jay-Z is the most famous figure in the anti-Auto-Tune army; his song “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” reads “This is anti-Auto-Tune / Death of the ringtone” and sings in an intentionally off-key pitch “La, la, la / Hey, hey, hey / Good-bye.” Hova agrees with me in that once any trend turns into a gimmick we need to put it to death and let it rest in peace. While Jay-Z has been the most vocal about T-If-I-Hear-One-More-of-His-Songs-I-Might-Go-Insane, other fellow industry peers have also disapproved of Auto-Tune. Death Cab for Cutie showed up at the 51th annual Grammy Awards with blue ribbons pinned on their jackets to protest its use, and Christina Aguilera has been seen roaming the streets of Los Angeles sporting a t-shirt that reads “Auto-Tune is for pussies.” Martina McBride has also rejected the trend; instead, she records a single song up to 50 different times to best convey the most emotion in a particular verse — dedication yet to be achieved by Auto-Tune users.

Anyone else miss when fame wasn’t as tangible, when musicians actually had to have talent instead of relying on technology to cover up their imperfections? Anyone else wonder what happened to the days when flawed voices were a good thing — showing the singer’s insecurities and emotions? Take the side of the aforementioned music industry leaders that are fighting for talent. As Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard said, according to MTV News, “Let’s stop this, let’s bring back the blue note, and let’s try to get music back to its roots of [having] actual people singing and sounding like human beings.”