Last summer, T-Pain made it very profitable/cool to sing like a robot. Ever since, everybody seems to be trying their hand at it, using autotune or some sort of vocal modulation to emulate a sound that is both infectious and patently insincere.

Lil’ Wayne’s hit single “Lollipop” is the most recent and notable instance of T-Pain’s influence, and it’s also the most dramatic deconstruction of that sound to date. T-Pain makes Windex’d, pristine pop music, songs you can check your hair in or snort drugs off of or, most importantly, cut into little squares and stick on a Styrofoam sphere to be hung in the middle of a dance floor. The vocal fx, the pedestrian lyrics, the chintzy beats - it’s all low-to-no risk, simple, easy, breezy, beautiful, Christie Brinkley.

“Lollipop” is the complete inverse. It keeps the structural elements of a T-Pain song – the processed vocals, the sleek, over-synthesized production – but tosses out the approach. There seems to be no effort put into making “Lollipop” accessible or crafting a particularly strong chorus or building Wayne’s cult of personality, as T-Pain’s string of hits no doubt did. Wayne, instead, looks to complicate and confound the formula, to muck it up. Yes it’s a song about sex (and candy). But it’s really a song about drugs (as used by Lil' Wayne during recording) and Wayne's constant desire to stretch the limits of his voice; he hides in the mix, mumbling and purring free-associations and loose interpolations between more cohesive, x-rated verse. If T-Pain’s number one goal is to sing to the listener, Wayne’s is to Tom Waits his way into their skull.

As these things go, remixes of “Lollipop” are quite popular, and generally very easy to dismiss. Gabriel Antonio and Puppet Mastar’s remix with is worth a listen, if only because Antonio's codeine-Frampton is even murkier and more desperate than Wayne's. But the only version that really sticks with me is Chalie Boy's “Body Rock” (currently featured on his MySpace). It popped up on the Texas Relays 2K8 mixtape and will anchor the Calvert/Hearne rapper’s forthcoming Return of the Versatyle Child project, helmed by Austin DJ Rapid Ric.

Chalie’s chief trademark is his range, often taking the form of an insistent crescendo. Blessed with a muscular baritone, he gruffly half-croons his raps, ever pushing his voice into higher registers or letting his growl boil steadily until the end of each verse. At his best – “Bumpa Grill” and his “I’m A G” flow, to name just a couple – Chalie takes the whole song with him.

The “Lollipop” beat seems primed for Chalie’s usual show of force, especially since Lil’ Wayne merely slithered around it. Yet his strong-arming is amiss on "Body Rock"; in fact, of all his recent undertakings, Chalie’s approach to “Body Rock” is the least intrepid. He sings the song and that is all; no real vocal bench-pressing or careening up scales.

So it speaks volumes about Chalie’s talent that “Body Rock” is at least as good, if not better, than his aforementioned hits. Without his usual acrobatics, Chalie’s flow is still anything but droll. Rather, he sounds measured, patient, artful, and – dare anyone say this about a rap artist, especially one espousing garish automobiles – mature. While Lil' Wayne layers and crowds the beat to achieve his vision, Chalie lets the percolating synthesizer carry the track, riding the beat instead of pushing it forward.

For all of these reasons, “Body Rock” is masterful. However, it’s most remarkable because of how it responds to "Buy You A Drank" et al. On “Lollipop,” Wayne tests the T-Pain era’s boundaries. At best, he satirizes that sound, eating it up from inside until it collapses.

But Chalie Boy – as strong a pure voice as hip-hop will see – does him one better. He just cuts away all the autotuning and the gloss of the paper-thin T-Pain sound, as if the words "Konvict muuuuusic" were never uttered back in '04 and the movement they represented never got into gear. “Body Rock” might not be an all-out protest against the dominant hit-maker of hip-pop radio, but it’s certainly a big statement, a “look-mom-no-hands” bit of showmanship and a reminder that some voices can still carry a hit with just their timbre.

Chalie Boy MySpace