Today in Hip-Hop: T-Pain Crashes Jay Z’s 2009 Summer Jam Performance

On this day, June 7, in hip-hop history...

2009: Nearly every Jay Z appearance at Summer Jam goes down in rap history. But during Hov's 2009 performance of "D.O.A (Death of Auto-tune)", there turned out to be an awkward moment not even he was prepared for.

With Hov being one of the biggest artists to ever come out of New York, naturally the rapper would have a late headline set time. Riding high off the hype and record sales of his latest album, 2009's The Blueprint 3, Jay performed the single "D.O.A" which takes direct shots at artists who rely on heavy auto-tune for the voices. The song had just made its world premiere days earlier on Hot 97 and the message of the single had hip-hop talking. One artist who was known for using heavy auto-tune at the time was Nappy Boy's T-Pain. During Jay's performance, Pain all of a sudden jumped on stage next to him and stood with his arms crossed. Jay played it cool, finishing up his song and even crossing his arms so the pair looked in unison.

Later talking to Hot 97's Angie Martinez about the incident, Jay Z assured everyone the moment wasn't planned and not even he knew what was going on.

"I look and I see somebody to my right and I swear I thought he was like a fan, I thought he was like coming to hug me. I’m not even lying, I’m not being funny trying to take shots. And I’m like you know that’s some cool rock star stuff.”

Jay also insisted that he thinks T-Pain rushed the stage just to show fans that he was not the target of Jigga’s rhymes. “I guess he was trying to get close and be like ‘not me.’ But it’s really not him.”

Although you can tell from the video above that the moment was a bit awkward, Jay said there was no harm, no foul in Pain embracing the track onstage with him. See the classic footage above.

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