Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - how tay zonday reunited with adam bahner

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

In our final installment of our Tay Zonday series, Jamie speaks with the one and only Adam "Tay" Bahner about how he navigated his viral fame, and how the internet has changed beyond recognition from the days of "Chocolate Rain." Follow Tay here: https://www.instagram.com/tayzonday/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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her origin story on the show. There's no way I don't already have rabies. This is probably just why my personality is like this. I've been surviving rabies for the past 20 years. New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. time. So make me a start, let's take it too far, and give me one moment.

Let's see you. Sixteen minutes of fame. Sixteen minute of fame. Sixteen minute of fame. Sixteen minute of faith. One more minute of fame. I'm not so bad when you're thinking of my mind. I'm not a character too, so good I am.

Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we talk to the main characters of the internet to see how their moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says about us and the internet. And today we are concluding the world according to Teizan Day, A retrospective on the chocolate rain singer's time in the spotlight, and then some, told by the man himself. And if you're tuning into this episode before listening to the first two parts of this series, grow up. Even if you do remember Tay's major viral moment back in 2007, much of the political context of his work was lost or intentionally ignored in the shuffle at the time of its release. And more about his upbringing, growing up biracial and autistic with very little context. for either that he hasn't shared in previous interviews.

And our second part goes into how Tay formed the leftist politics that spawned Chocolate Rain in the first place. So there's a lot to catch up on. But if you're rejoining us, I don't want to make you wait a moment longer. In the final part of our, I don't know, interview monologue, not sure, but Tay's story of political awakening was already well into progress when he wrote Chocolate Rain as a grad student in Minnesota in his mid-20s. And today, he's going to talk about how that translated into viral fame

and how it helped and hurt him come into his own as a grown man. Plus some weird asides, because it stays on day. Enjoy. The 2017 BET interview where I first spoke about Chocolate Rain being a ballot about institutional racism, that's a good moment to unpack, just like the conversation with my father. I already talked about why I don't like the way political discourse happens online. So as online political discourse became more and more tumultuous from 2007 to 2017, I became more and more averse to the idea of ever entering any sort of political dialogue, partly for economic survival reasons, because I did not ever want to be seen as partisan, which I still don't. I mean, a lot of people like to peg me as a leftist, which I'm not offended, but, you know, the only thing I ever identify as is the truth.

This whole shenanigans where you are invisible unless you pledge your loyalty and virtue signal, your complete devotion to an uncompromising policy caricature that is either puritanically leftist or puritanically right wing is just not useful intellectually. It's like Morse code and we've allowed oligarchs to devolve the internet into an intellectual telegraph. But in that moment in 2017, when the BET expressed interest, I think my dad was helping pay part of my rent at the time. Like, I was just not thriving. And so it felt like whatever fears I had that I would just be disowned by everybody and hated universally and never, ever work again, just seemed like, well, okay, it seems like I'm kind of already in that state. So I might as well just be honest. And it was fine. I mean, BET did a great job.

I still believe that music is a great place to sing about what I can't say about. The way I described Chocolate Rain as a Trojan horse, that's not unique. I mean, that's a history of music. I mean, how many millions of people have played Michael Jackson's, they don't care about it? who would not agree with his position on criminal justice. Part of my autism is that I overestimate the extent to which the world is logical, rational, self-aware, and consistent, and that has often burned me and stunted my success, either by overestimating risks or underestimating benefits.

I didn't even syndicate chocolate rain to digital stores until 2010, and my thinking was, hey, you know, the video says download the free MP3. Why would I ever put it on iTunes or wherever else? And, of course, some viral singers like Liam Kyle Sullivan did okay economically with the better understanding of their music releases and the irrationality of human behavior. I feel like most consequential things are irrational. I've spent a lot of brain cycles just being distressed over the reality that a lot of things are less based on merit and more based on tribalism and clickishness. We're taught to embrace these very sensible ideas of meritocracy and rational individualism to explain, differences in human achievement when just as often it's serendipity and cronyism that animates

human achievement and that shouldn't be a zero-sum conversation. Like both can be contributions that we can speak to openly. But that would presume that human beings are motivated by accuracy when most of us are motivated by self-aggrandizing megalomania and content to deploy virtue signals of charity and humility and humanism as an avatar for our actual selfishness. And I think that's one way that my true self, Adam Bonner, failed the mythos of Tezonday. I never played Tezonday as a superhero avatar, and I never buried my insecurity and my uncertainties. When I described the 2017 BET interview as me being honest about the meeting of Chalkal Rain, and obviously it's a bit more complicated than to say I was dishonest before that. But generally speaking, I am honest to a fault.

I lived in Los Angeles for 12 and a half years, which is famously a place where everybody is bullshitting. is the norm. Everybody is name-dropping. Everybody is grasping for calling cards of maximum prominence that will justify other people giving them the time of day. And believe me, with my lived experience, I could name-drop with the best of them. I just don't do that. I would go to parties, be like, yeah, I'm in debt. I had to ask my dad for money. I never did that thing that people do at parties. It's like, well, you know, when I was working with James Gunn, well, you know, when I was talking to Daniel Tosh, last time I appeared on the Disney Channel, the last time that I was on the BBC, Like, I don't do that.

It nauseates me. I'm not saying the people who do that nauseate me. I'm just saying I'm not that person, and you kind of have to be that person. You have to Kim Jong-un curate yourself as a cult of personality and nonstop highlight reel of recognizable things. And I think anybody who saw me at social events or conventions as Tezande saw me being visibly hesitant and reluctant and uncomfortable on top of the. being autistic and neurologically sensory overwhelmed, just being out in the world, period.

I was never good at being this baritone Kermit the Frog Santa Claus, but that's what people want. They want Santa Claus to go ho, ho, ho, and let them take a picture on Santa Claus's lap, especially if they're a kid. You know, they want Tay Zonday to say, chocolate rain, and, you know, move away for the bike to breathe in and just be happy and gracious and take a picture. Nobody wants to hear that Santa Claus is scheduled for hernia surgery and going through a divorce. I mean, he might be, but that's not really not what the majority people are interested in hearing from him. They expect Santa Claus to excitedly talk about the North Pole and how Rudolph is doing, the same way they might expect a singer to talk about prominent acting credits and recent projects excitedly. And oh my gosh, pageantry and red carpets and bread and circuses and fancieness and cosplay, aristocrats. by poor people. Sorry, I know what that's like. I'm speaking autobiographically. I'm just saying

I will personally never feel more comfortable with pageantry than a squirrel taking a nap on Times Square and New Year's Eve. And don't get me wrong, I am very grateful that anybody has any interest in any version of me. I'm just saying that whatever Tazonde is supposed to be, Adam is an autistic deer caught and headlights everywhere he goes. And Adam is a terrible liar. And also, to be fair, I've just never been likable as a confessional content creator, or maybe it's that I'm too likable, because you really have to be divisive and have lots of hot takes, because obviously there are thousands and thousands of influencers who are successful, just being vulnerable, being themselves, sharing their truths and their sorrows and their difficulties.

I love pretending that this actually has some order and structure to it and is not just some slow motion neurodiversion train wreck, and I just diabolically sprinkling random callbacks to fake continuity and make it hard to edit any part out. I'm shooting for two episodes like William Hung. To be fair, a lot of popular nonfiction books are like that. Just a vomitous thought spaghetti with chapters and subsections applied as an afterthought, like the manuscript is an acid trip that got sent to a post-production house. I know I just glossed over calling my entertainment career not successful,

and that does not mean that I'm not grateful. It just means I have never been rich, and there may be some years where I just tiptoed into maybe it would be called middle-middle-class, But many more years, my net worth has technically been negative, and I've been very grateful to have a family that's able to support me when they can. As I mentioned earlier, I turned 43 this year, and one of my biggest fears of my parents dying is that, I mean, I'll obviously be sad and devastated. And, you know, there's that whole grief journey that one goes through. But it sounds like, I'm not sure I've ever actually, for a sustained period of, like, a decade lived as a financially independent adult. Like, I look at older transients who have nothing.

And I'm like, oh, I hope I don't end up there. But it's just, I don't know. There's no guarantees that Billy Club of Life can beat you up any moment. They're like, oh, there's a car wreck. Oh, there's cancer. Oh, there's, you know, whatever. It's all downhill after this podcast. This is the Swan song.

Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney. And every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new announcements. anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant,

but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Our IHeart Radio Music Festival, Presented by Capital One is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas. September 19th and 20th. On your feet. Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen.

Brian Adams. Ed Sheeran. Fade. Glorilla. Jelly Roll. John Fogarty. Lil Wayne. L.L. Cool J.

Mariah Carey. Maroon 5. Sammy Hagar. Tate McCray. The offspring. Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today.

AXS.com. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life,

emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. I've said it in many interviews. The best life for me would have been just pick a boring job at something like the Social Security Administration that has stability, that has routine, that has a pension. I think that when I was young, and I was thinking, oh, you know, one day I might just be like an actor

like the people on Star Trek or I might be a game show host. and I didn't appreciate my level of disability when I was young, partly because of what I talked about earlier, the ethos I grew up with that triggers your sensitivity or disability. Well, isolate yourself. Like I said, everybody meant well. Hollywood in particular does not know how to work with people who have psychiatric disabilities, at least not mine.

Sometimes I forget that psychiatric disability has such a stigma. You can't just like use it because people like, oh, what does that mean? Is that person going to stab me? As if people with no diagnosed disabilities have some immaculate record, when it comes to public safety, or for that matter, private safety, if you look at stats on things like domestic violence, but I digress. A more politic term that's used for neurodivergent and autistic people by organizations like Culture City, K-U-L-T-U-R-E, is sensory inclusion. There have been a number of cases where I book a gig and I get the job, and I think the client or the director, the producer, are just a little bit surprised that I actually needed the accommodations that I tried to communicate and request, or I'll be the one who's surprised.

I'll actually be in the moment, which I go, I'm on the set and the camera's rolling and the crew's being paid and, oh, shit, I can't do this. I am completely sensory overwhelmed and this medication cocktail is not helping. I've been miscast. That actually happened when I appeared on Jimmy Kimball in 2007. And by the way, this is not tea. They're all wonderful people for all I know then and now. But I was really adamant before that segment that I wanted to perform the first third of chocolate rain that I ended up performing on the show with just a microphone and no keyboard. And being the passionate segment producers that they are, they really really wanted to curate a viral video aesthetic, and they wanted me to be playing the keyboard, as I sang. They were very insistent. And at the time, I knew that I probably could not perform Chocolate Rain live playing the keyboard on Jimmy Kimmel. I knew that I would just be sensory overwhelmed, then it wouldn't work. I didn't have a lot of terminology to explain why, other than that I'd be too nervous, because obviously I could play it live by myself my living room, but I just knew that it wouldn't work in Jimmy Kimmel. The compromise is that I would have the keyboard in front of me, but I would be singing to a backing track,

meaning the keyboard would not actually be playing any notes. I'd be pretending to play the keyboard while actually singing. They recorded one tech rehearsal of me singing Chocolate Rain the way I wanted to sing it, which was just with the microphone of the backing track. The moment comes, Jimmy Kimmel hipes me up, the crowd is screaming, the curtain goes up, and I cannot feel my arms. Like, literally, my hands felt like jello. I was so disoriented and sensory overwhelmed.

I missed the first four lines of the song. You know, Chocolate Rain, Some stage, right now this feel of pain. Chocolate Rain, a baby born with I Before the Sin. I did not sing those words. Luckily, Jimmy Kimmel Live is not actually live. It's Jimmy Kimmel almost live. They have an hour or two before it goes live. So in that time, they took the audio from the tech rehearsal that they had recorded earlier,

spliced it in with my actual performance. And they started with a very, very, very wide shot, like above the heads of the audience. in the last row. You couldn't see me not singing. And God bless the cue card employee who had years of experience writing cue cards. Because in addition to not feeling my arms, I knew I would not be able to remember the words to my song. I missed the entire first verse and the cue card changed on time. It's funny to think this was almost 18 years ago. I think there are a few shows that still use handwritten cue cards and human operators, but it's a lost art. Today, I know that my psychiatric experiences that contributed to my minor Jimmy Kimmel disaster have a name. In addition to sensitivity

to sound light and touch, which earlier on, if you're quizzing yourself, I described as hyperacus, misophonia, photophobia, and haphophobia, dyspraxia, which is basically muddled signaling between your brain and muscle movement also played a role. My dyspraxia doesn't just make it harder to move my arms and legs and be coordinated. It makes it harder for me to move my mouth to speak. One interesting aside about psychiatric meds is that stimulants like ADHD amphetamines will help majorly improve my dyspraxia, but they will also worsen my sensitivities like misophonia, haphobia, hyperacusus, etc. And all of these are autistic comorbidities, meaning they just occur more in autistic people. I should bring up alexothymia too, because

alexothymia is not having words for your feelings. And in my case, it's kind of just like not having words at all because the more sensory overwhelmed I become in terms of sound and touch and light, the less able I am to think or speak, particularly about my feelings. It's a good baseline to just assume I'm sensory overwhelmed everywhere in society, which means I'm kind of limited in how verbal I am, depending on how many spoons I have left. Oh, wow, we're talking about spoon theory now. We're just doing like this crash course in autistic psychiatry. Now, I started just by talking about trauma dumping. And it goes back to the theme I touched on earlier, which is this, we've got to be very careful when pathologizing individuals for misdeeds that systemic actors are most

guilty of. I also raise the topic of trauma dumping because it's a pathology that can be experienced by a person who is disabled, including a person who is invisibly disabled, I happen to think I'm pretty visibly autistic, but these people call it an invisible disability. Because if I am a talent, whether that talent means I'm an employee in an office or an on-camera talent, like the Jimmy Kimmel experience I described, where is the safe context to assert my desire for accommodations or awareness and not have that regarded as, oh, he's trauma dumping. I was in Los Angeles for a project last year. Actually, multiple projects. This is one that you will not see. The project involved the song where I could hypothetically play the keyboard and sing as on-camera talent.

Actually, not that different than the situation I described with Jimmy Kimmel. And I tried to communicate that I might not be comfortable doing that, partly because I'm autistic and experienced autistic dyspraxia. And it was the type of thing that if it was mission critical to get that footage of my singing and playing the keyboard, I could have made adjustments and planned to bring my own accommodations and adhere to my own processes that would allow that to take place. The understanding I received is that singing and playing simultaneously was not going to be mission-critical. I showed up for the shoot.

It ended up being a big part of the vision, and I simply was not prepared to deliver, and it just ended up being awkward because it was not a low-budget shoot for a client and attached talent that you've heard of. And by the way, everybody involved was wonderful, professional, was a delight. It was just a regrettably awkward sequence. event because when I'm in that type of moment and people are asking me to do something that I know in my own cognitive disability, it's not able to happen. It feels like I am someone with a physical disability being asked to, for example, shoot basketball hoops. But I don't have crutches to

I don't have a prosthetic leg. I don't have a wheelchair. All I have with dozens of talented crew members on set and X, X, X, X, X, X, a amount of money being spent. Are words coming out of my mouth describing limitations that are invisible to everybody else? And I know that it's plight and deference and professional as everybody else is. None of them understand. We'll be back with the grand conclusion to the world according to Tayzon Day. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.

On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines.

Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Our I Heart Radio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas. September 19th and 20th. On your feet. Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen.

Brian Adams. Ed Sheeran. Fade. Glorilla. Jelly Roll. John Fogarty. Lil Wayne. L.L. Cool J.

Mariah Carey. Maroon 5. Sammy Hagar. Tate McCray. The offspring. Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today.

Sometimes it's hard to remember, but... Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Tretate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we weighed through transformation to peel back. healing and reveal what it actually looks like and sounds like in real time. Each week I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance,

and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space, so let's walk in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented. correctional programs that mimic military basic training.

These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to 16th minute. Imagine you're me and after nine months, you've gotten your interview with Tazan Day. You send questions back late because you're struggling with depression. He checks in a moment. month after getting the questions to say he's getting close to being done, recording the answers to the questions, but he still has a little more to say. You say, sure, that's fine. And then... The day arrives. Teizonday replies with a single audio file. But when you open that audio file, it is two and a half hours long. Within the audio file are thoughts insightful, thoughts deep,

He maybe answers, at most, three of your questions. And it's the most amazing look into someone's life anyone has shared with me on this show. So without further ado, here are Tayson Day's parting thoughts. So on the grand scale of things, me feeling particularly autistic during a shoot that happened to not be released, potentially for many reasons unrelated to myself, it's not that big of a deal. although as talent you also become aware very quickly that Los Angeles is indeed a small town. You are never more than one or rarely two degrees of friendship separation from anybody else you work with professionally. So there is a justified fear in any vocation, including on camera, since so much of Los Angeles just happens by word of mouth,

that the grapevine gossip about you will start to indicate that you are difficult to work with. And here I'll invoke a little bit of sociological marginalization theory. It has always felt to me like the grapevine reviews of a person tend to be harsher, the less they are like the aesthetics of dominant power, and that includes people with invisible disabilities. My life is very much a jack of all trades, master of none mess of partially attempted things that didn't really value stack or get executed in a foundational way, including being Tay's on day as an entertainer. That's a topic we could unpack. Firstly, I have never been a super frequent uploader. I feel like nothing you do on social media matters if it's not uploaded

two or three times per week now. That feeling that one has to run on this hamster wheel of recency bias when creating content is, of course, contrived. But unfortunately, it is also normative. Like if you own a plumbing company, you're like, hey, check out my company's Instagram. And nothing has been posted for two months. It reflects poorly on you. Or people assume it is an unsurious endeavor and you are an unsurious person. Like it would almost be better to just not have an Instagram at that point. And I can list a hundred different ways that rigging a content economy where evergreen content, infrequently uploaded content, never has organic reach and is not able to thrive, is grotesquely ablest and unfair towards people who

struggle to speak, people who struggle to move. I have never been prolific and my success peaked on an internet where you did not have to be. Like on my internet, I don't just say my internet. I'm saying like an old man. On my internet, every piece of content got a fair shot. Upload once a day, upload once a year. It was the land of opportunity. Although it's not even accurate to describe what we experience in 2025 as the internet. Every social network that you might seek to build an audience on

algorithmically demotes external links. You can't link to outside content. That's definitionally an intranet, like the early dial-up services in the 80s and 90s, Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, they were closed networks. Those are intranets, not the internet. We're being hoodwinked into using these glorified Bloomberg terminals for social internet content, but instead of charging a high monthly fee for a proprietary operating system, they have us exhausting our bodies, our time, and our lives chasing the tail of manufactured recency. We are toiling on oligarchic algorithmic feed plantations, and because the 10%

of the population who make the best algorithmic kuntikintes. Yes, I went there, yet 90% of the engagement on these platforms as they destroy their bodies, destroy their mental health, destroy their personal relationships, desperately tossing pearls, hoping to get pennies out of these sick algorithms. We're living in a culture that glorifies that grind as noble. It's like the social platforms of drug cartels who ever sing in Noriko Canciones. And I love today's influence. as many are amazingly talented and very hardworking. But we cannot get to a point as a civilization where that is the anticipated redemption arc for capitalism sucking.

And that's what I fear it becomes, this thing where young people go, well, I can't afford a house, I can't afford college, I can't afford to pay off these predatory health care bills where I look at the invoice and it's $450 for a bandage, but it's okay because I'm going to be on the influencer grind and I can blow up any day. No, it's not okay. You better start listening to some boots. Riley starts singing, we got the guillotine. Sometimes I swear that mode just kind of takes over. I don't even know where it comes from. It only happens when I'm by myself in complete isolation and hit record. Maybe that's what Teizonday is. And Adam is just this noise that, but yeah, I should release more music. I don't even know what to do with music releasing now, which is kind of frustrating because I am making and recording the best music I have ever made. It's just hoping it can find some way to get out before I die. Every independent artist has to go through digital music distributors and that ecosystem of middlemen, many of the legal terms and independent artists has to sign are not fair. All of these distributors that I know of are reserving AI rights to any new music they syndicate. They want unlimited rights to license

artists' tracks to train third-party AI models or to train their own AI models. This is of course completely unrelated to getting your artist tracks onto Spotify, iTunes, etc. At least unrelated to fans playing those tracks back, but most of these intermediaries do not offer these services a la carte. It's a take it or leave it quid pro quo. Distributors also face some pressure from platforms like Spotify to secure derivative and AI rights because Spotify wants a future where there can be unlimited remixing by DJs and mashups that don't pay the original artist. So that is my independent music ecosystem grievance number one. A.I. and derivative rights with terrible economics that are impossible for independent artists to opt out of

My grievance number two is bad deals with syndicating music tracks to social platforms. Because syndicating to social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, Facebook stories, it's different than syndicating to retail storefronts like Spotify, iTunes. It really does not need to be, but the distributors saw an opportunity a few years back to call it something different and then take a percentage of the ad revenue. There is a small amount of content management involved with these shorts platforms because music tracks are being integrated with video, but the percentages being paid to distributors are awfully high

relative to my understanding of that actual cost. Grievance number three amounts to YouTube in 2025 being a product design hot mess for independent musicians. Short history lesson, I believe there was a time in 2009 when major music label music videos were approximately 80% of YouTube's monetized advertising traffic. That's one reason major music labels had leveraged to force YouTube to create Vavo, which is a separate re-skinned for their videos where they get a better ad revenue split.

Viacom's unresolved billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube also affected sentiments at the time, but that's a separate story. Now, since the viral video era, which coincided with major music label artists like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga getting to three billion views regularly on their Vavo music videos, we've seen the rising domination of mobile viewing and algorithmic feeds that prioritize watching. time, session time, click-through rates, etc. That's one reason you see content creators who make longer gameplay videos like Markiplier and Dashie blow up as soon as algorithmic feeds come out. Music videos just don't compete well with other content at keeping people on YouTube. As a content genre, music just tends to not be as targetable for advertisers who want to bid on keywords as technology, family vlogs, basically any other content category.

The fact that music videos were among YouTube's highest earning content categories by sheer view volume in 2009, with thousands of content creators making entire businesses out of parroting popular music videos, and after 2012, they just became one of the lowest earning content categories, is important context for YouTube's product design afterwards. The problem YouTube is trying to solve is that music is tremendously disadvantaged at creating the user behavior and advertiser behavior, that is most profitable for its business. That means my grievance one and grievance two,

make the artists give up their AI rights, their derivative work rights, and submit to unfavorable social platform distribution terms. Most distributors are asking for that before they'll anoint your own YouTube channel, your official artist channel, which causes the channel subscribers to merge if you have one that was auto-generated,

which I do right now. My main YouTube channel is 18 years old. It does not need a third-party music distributor operating as a multi-channel network taking a portion of the ad revenue on music video assets. As an independent music artist on YouTube, I am left to ask, why am I being forced by these mandatory third-party music distributors to opt into terrible, unfavorable music track distribution terms with every major music playback platform on the planet in order to activate my control of an essential YouTube

product feature for my own music, just because you, YouTube is an absent parent, and music as a category is its runt child in terms of alphabet shareholder value. Although, to be fair, it is in Google's longer-term interest to tacitly support a music ecosystem where AI derivatives and mashups are free to be created and proliferate with zero restrictions because that expands targetable metadata that is the lifeblood of Google's advertising business. It goes back to what I said earlier. Capitalism forces fixed assets. Fixed meaning, fixed context, fixed relation, fixed behavior. When do we wake up as a species and say, we are not broken? We do not need these oligarchs fixing us. We need fixed behavior in terms of do not drive into trees. We do not need fixed behavior in terms of I control what you see. You can tell I'm getting prophetic when the mother goose rhymes come out, the Dr. Seuss. The parts of this where my speaking gets faster and less government.

are when my ADHD medication is hitting and I'm just not fighting it. Doing this actually had me go down from 60 milligrams to 40 milligrams of IVANs because on 60 I was like, I can record on a lower dose and be a bit more in control of that energizer bunny aspect. I talked earlier about how amphetamines make it neurologically easier for me to speak. But it's also interesting that a lot of the stylistic affect with which chocolate rain was sung where I'm dropping my larynx very deliberately and moving my lips in big formations, that is actually a muscular effort compensation for the reduced neurological control that dyspraxia creates.

There are parts of me the question, am I better off knowing that? Because Tézonte was just doing what came naturally in the moment. It was Tazonte blowing up as an entertainer and being forced into contact with society, me being put into constant realization that I am not like others, must somehow remake myself in that likeness and eventually realizing that was a ridiculous aspiration for me to have. It was not because of childhood trauma that I was different. It was not because of structural oppression that I was deterministically different. As Lady Gaga says, I was just born that way. T.S. Eliot's cliche aphorism is that the end of all you're exploring

will be to come back to where you started and know yourself for the first time. The future kind of terrifies me. I'm terrified of getting old, which, past a certain age, you kind of start to resign yourself to the idea that it's likely to happen alone. I'm this weird casserole of transcendent capability fused with profound disability. I'm both borderline savant in my information aggregation and retention speed, while measuring as learning disabled in some cognitive battery tests because my brain sucks at translating the parallelism with which it experiences truth into the dogmatic serial declarative that majoritarian neurology chains humankind to its likeness with.

And as that last sentence shows, it's a struggle that often comes out in hyphenated adjectives, hyphenated nouns, and subordinate clauses. Some people in the academy would just tell me that John Quincy Adams' like prose meant I was stupid that the job of his scholar was to clarify that you don't really understand something

if you're not clarifying it. If you can't explain it to a five-year-old, I'm like, well, okay, fine, explaining everything to a five-year-old, bad people took the ice cream. We won our ice cream back. So, yeah, As I've said throughout this, I feel quite uncertain about my future. I mean, anybody could have the wrong place, wrong time, get hit by a bus,

get hit by a recreational homicide, get hit by falling SpaceX debris. But I think I had hoped at this point in my life that outside of random misfortunes, I would have reason to be confident in a safe and provided future. Some people have that, then they'll post vlog saying, I feel so empty. For me, it's like, nope, not me. That's the life I should have picked. But I'm in the life that I'm in now. I suspect that a lot of people with similar neurology to me have not been as lucky.

And if not for myself, me making it over any hurdle, no matter how many hurdles I have ahead, comes with an obligation to keep running. The viral video era in which Chocolate Rain achieved prominence was for autistic neurology like mine, what reconstruction after the American Civil War was for Black Rights. It was this exceptional eye of the storm before ferocious backlash. People who had to live under Jim Crow for 70 years looked back at Reconstruction and marveled and said, yeah, Mississippi had a black senator. It actually happened.

People look back at the viral video era now and go, yeah, you could be weird, you could be niche, and you would be syndicated all over the world by platforms that did not spy on user behavior. The viral video era where platforms did not act like gated communities and forbid you to link to other platforms. The viral video era where platforms trusted you that if you followed or friended or subscribed, you actually wanted to see the content. The viral video era where you did not have to consent to your data, your soul, your life, your voice being used unpaid for somebody else's artificial intelligence business. The viral video era where everybody who Googled something saw the same results because truth is not a business decision, it is the life or death of our species. And you know what? Today's search and social media that disrespects you that somehow manages to target you with an advertisement about something you were talking to a friend about two hours ago and you were wondering how the heck did it get that information? We do not need to live like that for 70 years.

We do not need to live with private interfaces owned by faceless oligarchs invading our homes and dictating what we see, when we see it, and then lying to us that we are the ones choosing when they know the only options they are surfacing for us are profit, profit, profit when we deserve power, power, power. We can pick a different history to be crashing through our veins. We can remake how we got to where we are. and we can keep our privacy. We can keep our data. We can keep our mental health. And we do not need machines to be the means for meeting on our screens, where nothing seems to hear them me if I say no to make me free. There goes Mother Goose again.

I should end this. But it's been interesting, for sure. Thank you so much to the wonderful Tazon Day for his time, his thoughtfulness, and just being himself. You can follow him at the links in the description. It's hard for me to say anything here that Tay or Adam hasn't said himself with far more eloquence. But I really loved hearing the experiences of someone who went viral in the earlier days of the internet. Sure, because it's nostalgic to some degree.

And it's really frustrating to hear that people as talented as Tay or Liam Kyle Sullivan really struggled to be taken seriously in the mainstream in their day, but it's comforting in some ways to see well-adjusted people on the other side of a very weird experience. To be fair, at least in part because they were adults when they went viral, and both after dealing with quite a bit of mental health struggles and grappling with themselves along the way, just like anyone would have to do. But they had to do it while this unprecedented thing was happening. And I do think stories like this are not just interesting,

but important because whether we like to think about the depressing march of time or not, with any luck, the main characters of today are going to have a similar road ahead of them. And depending on how you feel about it, either with some luck or a curse, you might have to deal with it too. And this brings me to a little announcement, wow, bonus for people who listen to the end of the episode. The announcement is, in the next few weeks, we are going to be switching up the format of 16th minute away from our character of the week format and take more time between series so I can take a closer look at the missing history of the internet and what we lose by not tracking or considering it more carefully. Because at this point, whether you like it or use

the internet frequently or not, it does have a big influence over your daily life and has a significant guiding hand at who is heard and who isn't. And I want to look at how this is developed more closely, because stories like Tayes almost serve as a canary and a coal mine for where we were headed in letting the grand audience of the internet completely reshape someone's life. What I can be grateful for here is that unlike so many people who are dragged into internet fame or any kind of fame unwittingly,

or rooted in mockery, Teizonday invented himself to be an entertainer and occasionally a commodity. And Adam Bonner seems comfortable after many years of navigating public prominence in separating this public and this private self. And it shouldn't have had to be hard won,

but there's a lot to learn from that experience. And so, with that, Tays on Day, your 16th minute ends now. But hold your little ponies, dear listener. There are still a few more characters that I have to share with you. Next week, we check in with the main character of 2024, Haley Welch, aka Hawk Tool Girl,

who has, I don't know if you've heard, but been excused for a couple of crimes and is getting back into the podcast game. game, very 2025 of her. And that's next week. But as a send-off to our Tay series, here is the man himself, honoring my people, the Irish, with O' Danny Boy. We'll see you next week. Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling from glen to glen and down the mountain inside The summer's gone

And all the roses falling It's you, it's you Must go and I must hide But come ye back When summer's in the meadow Or in the meadow

Or in the The Valleys hushed and white with snow. 16th Minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and IHard Worldcaps. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Laughness. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. voice acting is from Grant Crater

And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson My Cats Flea and Casper And my pet Rockbird who will outlive us all Bye It's Black Business Month And Black Tech Green Money is tapping in I'm Will Lucas spotlighting black founders Investors and innovators

Building the future one idea at a time Let's talk legacy, tech and generational wealth I had the skill and I had the talent I didn't have the opportunity. Yeah. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not.

To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama. Folks find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people and, you know people. You're sitting in their kitchen tables, and they're talking like we're talking. You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up, and you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama.

To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app. Search all the smoke and listen now. The U.S. Open is here and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure. And, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Hey, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Bananas, the podcast where we share the weirdest, funniest, real news stories from all around the world. and sometimes from our guest personal lives too. Like when Whitney Cummings recently revealed her origin story on the show.

There's no way I don't already have rabies. This is probably just why my personality is like this. I've been surviving rabies for the past 20 years. New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.