Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - the world according to tay zonday

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

There are few internet videos more iconic than Tay Zonday’s ‘Chocolate Rain,’ but it took over a decade for the song to be recognized for the politically charged ballad it is. How did we miss it? In part one of our Tay Zonday series, Jamie gets into the history of political music, the naïveté of the early Internet and the ‘post racial Internet,’ and Tay shares more about how he grew up and into one of the most misunderstood cultural figures of his generation. VOTE FOR WE THE UNHOUSED IN THE WEBBYS BEFORE 4/17! Webby Awards People’s Voice Follow Tay Zonday: https://www.instagram.com/tayzondaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. 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 anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It's Black Business Month and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving.

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Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of family secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. Hello, 16th minute listeners. It's Jamie. Just saying really quick at the top that a show that is my honor to produce on the IHeart Radio Network, Wee the Unhoused, has been nominated for a Webby, and we need your help. If you haven't listened to the show before, first of all, I highly. recommend you do, but it is a show that began in 2019. It's created, hosted, and reported by the

wonderful Theo Henderson. He began the podcast while living on the streets of L.A., and it's grown significantly during that time, but remains the only podcast that tells stories that affect the unhoused and tells the stories of the unhoused while continuing to center their own perspectives and experiences. We've been nominated in a Webby category and we need your help. If you click the link in the description, it goes directly to our category. It's literally two clicks. It's a tight race. So I would really appreciate it. If you both gave us a vote and also checked out the show, you can do both at the link in the description. I want to ask what your favorite protest song is, but I don't know if you're

prepared for that question. Because protest songs over time haven't always been celebrated for their original intention. Okay, I'll tell you mine. It's from a pretty political artist who I grew up listening to. It's called Waiting for the Great Leap Forward by English singer Billy Bragg from 1988. My dad loved Billy Bragg.

He's a punk dad staple. And Mr. Bragg, who's still with us, built his career on leftist politics that some fans will debate whether he remained completely consistent with many such punks. But regardless, I love this song, and it's unflinchingly political. Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is.

I offer him embarrassment of my usual excuses. While looking down the corridor out to where the van is whiting, I'm looking for the rightly for world. So there's already a lot coming up here. The title references Mao Zedong's disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in China, which promised progress but resulted in the death of millions by starvation. And its lyrics reference everything from the false promise of the Kennedy administration in the 1960s to Oppenheimer's optimism, leading to, again, the death of hundreds of thousands to Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, the list of references goes on. But what I love about this song, is how it addresses Billy Bragg's insecurities around being a political artist. In the verse I just shared, he says that he's embarrassed to be a political musician

in an age where it didn't feel like his work was moving the needle very much, even when that music was successful for him personally. And maybe the most famous line from the song is this. The revolution is just a t-shirt away. Come on, that's so good. He's cooking here, folks. Billy Bragg is talking about something that is still very present in today's culture. The tendency for protest to be quickly commoditized in some ways to make it more acceptable.

Aside, any of the. feminist protest from the first Trump administration. And he wrote this song, as so many of these political songs have been written in the past, in conversation with a song from a previous generation that he admired. That song being, Sam Cook's A Change is Gonna Come from the 1960s. Here's Billy Bragg talking about the song in an interview saying that waiting for the great leap forward was, my way of owning up to the ambiguity of being a political pop star while stating clearly that I still believe

and Sam Cooke's promise that a change was going to come. And that song is one you absolutely know. I was born by the river in a little tent. Oh, and just like the river I've been running every since. It's been a long. A long time coming, but I know a change's going to come.

Oh, yes, it will. A Change Is Going to Come was originally released in 1964 in the midst of the civil rights movement and was inspired by Sam Cook and his entourage being refused rooms at a holiday inn because of their race. And, fun fact, the song, was also inspired by Sam Cook's love of the Bob Dylan song Blowing in the Wind from the previous year. I don't even like Bob Dylan, but music is so cool. Protest music is a genre so vast that it's easier to break it down into subcategories, whether that be by musical genre or just subject. There's Against Me's Transgender Dysphoria Blues about lead singer Laura Jane

Grace's transition. There's Lorettairend's There's Loretta Lins The Pill that scandalized country music For being overtly pro-birth control Turn down your brooder house Because now I've got the pill There was Peter Tosh's legalize it

About, well, you know There was Woody Guthrie's all you fascists are bound to lose. Put it there, boy, and we'll show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do. And there's my man, Billy Bragg again, with... There's power in a union. Which he performs at rallies to this day. But one of the largest subcategories under the protest music umbrella is black American protest music,

which has produced some of the greatest songs of all time. Swing Low Sweet Chariot. was not just an anti-slavery folk spiritual, it was actually used as a political signal. The sweet chariot in question was the Underground Railroad, and the song being played meant that it was time to begin the dangerous process of escape. And while throughout history,

white music executives have done everything they possibly can to erase the fact that black Americans invented both jazz and rock and roll in the 20th century, Politically charged hits kept coming. It would be impossible to mention them all, but some of the highlights, the late 1930s brought Billy Holliday's Strange Fruit, a song about public lynching of Black Americans

during the Jim Crow era. Southern trees bear a strange fruit. And while a change is going to come is probably the most famous example of a 1960s civil rights protest song, there are so many urgently politically charged classics from this stretch of years. And you know them all. Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddamn. James Browns, say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud.

Edwin Starr's Aritha Franklin's Respect, my personal favorite Marvin Gay's What's Going On? Which was a Motown release that protested the Vietnam War and then Governor Ronald Reagan's violent reprisal on student

protesters. Pick it lines and pick it sides don't punish me with brutality talk to me so you can And I'm skipping around in history a bit here, but there's also a legacy of protest in reggae music.

The Whalers get-up stand-up is probably the most famous mainstream example, but a lot of Bob Marley's catalog stands out as having these revolutionary themes. And protest was critical to early rap music all the way to the present. In the earlier days, you have NWA's Fuck the Police, a song that Ice Cube said was 400 years in the making. There's Public Enemies Fight the Power, which shared a title and pulled a sample from an Isley Brothers, protest song of the same name from the 70s,

and soon after would become the iconic intro to do the right thing from Spike Lee. There's Tupac's Changes, Lauren Hill's Black Rage, all the way up to Kendrick Lamar's most famous works before recently pivoting to Bruin Drake's life. songs like, all right, stay woke, and on and on. But music, particularly music so successful that virtually everyone knows it, is a business. And plenty of protest songs are either misunderstood in their day or later have their meaning capitalized upon to sell something unrelated to its original message.

Sam Cook's A Change Is Gonna Come is actually a pretty decent example of this. Back in 2017, Alicia Keys covered that song for a Nike commercial. Nike being a company that's been credibly accused of their product being produced in sweatshops in East Asia. In the last couple of months, there have been criticisms lobbed against Kendrick Lamar for headlining the Super Bowl, due to, among other things, the NFL not being an institution known for supporting Black Lives. There's a great episode of Code Switch on NPR on this topic of the commercialization of hip-hop and rap throughout time from a couple months ago that I'm going to link in the description for more on that topic. But the point is that protest music is both in the DNA of music history, but that music's message is often sanitized in order to be monetized. But everything we've talked about here so far has had to make its way through traditional music hubs.

Record labels, promotional machines, even if those labels are independent or pretty small. Because for a long time, that was really the only way to get your work out there. Until... Until... You've got mail. The Internet was a new world when it came to music distribution, with so many of today's biggest acts getting their start by making music in their bedroom

and uploading it to band camp or SoundCloud. Billy Elish and Lil Nasax come straight to mind. Before that, there was MySpace, which can take credit for basically every 2000s emo band that initially lacked studio backing. I had to check, but the most famous example is in fact Panic at the Disco. And of course, there was early YouTube.

As we've discussed on this show before, Justin Bieber is probably still YouTube's most successful pop star output, but there are plenty of songs that went viral in the 2000s on that platform that failed to catapult its singer-songwriter to international blasting fame. March, room, march, room. Because I got to cry. I'm not going to wait till 2008. I thought about playing Rebecca Black's Friday,

but she actually has become a pop diva. It just took a little while. Love Rebecca Black, but there was one song that went viral on YouTube. To this day, probably the song that defines the platform that everyone knew, but very few initially realized, was indeed a protest song. It's peanut butter jelly time. Peanut butter jelly time. Peanut butter jelly time.

Sorry I had to. No, I am talking about a YouTube video with the contrast levels set so high that the artist and his single microphone are flooded in light. A video that begins with an automated piano sample looping with the artist just out of frame. As many would parody later, you can see the top. of his head in the lower left corner of the video before he springs into frame and starts singing. Some stay dry and others feel the pain.

Chocolate rain. A baby born will die before this in chocolate rain. Adam Bonner, aka Tay Zonday, your 16th minute starts now. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, but no, well, can be perfect all of the time. Don't make me a start, let's take it too far, then give me one moment. Let's see you. Sixteen a minute of fame. Sixteen minute of fame.

Sixteen minute of fame. One more minute of fame. Please. Welcome back to 16th minute, the podcast where we talk to the main spotlight affected them and what that says and the internet. And what that says about us and the internet. this week and Thursday and next week because boy is this a dense topic. We are talking with one of the greats, the one and only Tay's on day. Tay's, as you might expect, is easily one of the most popular requests for this show and has been from Moment 1, and I can promise you that this was worth the wait. This is a story that needs to be told in multiple parts, and in a way that

we've never done on this show before. What we're airing is less of an interview with Tay than Tay, aka Adam, telling you his story directly. Okay, let me explain. I first reached out to Teizan Day almost a year ago now to see if he would ever be interested in coming on the show, and over the course of that year, we figured out what the best way to get deep into his history, not just with the internet, but with any number of things he wanted to touch on, from race to neurodivergents to forming friendships with fellow internet stars. And eventually, Tate decided it would be best if I sent him my questions, and he would then record his answers in response. But what neither of us expected, I don't think, is not just TAY's story, but the way that his politics

have evolved and changed over time. A journey that I think is well, worth your time. So here's what we're going to do. Today, I'm going to give you the broad strokes of Tay's moment of massive viral fame. And then for the remainder of the series, I'm going to let him take it away. And whether he leans away from the mic to take a breath is up to him. But I'll say, if he doesn't, I'm going to freak out. Because if you know anything about Tay's on day, you will know he is a really smart and insightful guy. And not for nothing, his voice is way more fun to listen to than mine. But before we can get there, we have to go back to April 2007.

A mass shooting at Virginia Tech leaves 33 dead and 29 injured. To this day, the most deadly school shooting in American history. Talk radio host Don Imans. says one of the most cruelly out-of-pocket, casually racist and misogynistic comments about black women basketball players at Rutgers, which gets him fired. Don't worry, though, he got a redemption arc for some reason. And on April 23rd, 2007, a YouTube user going by Tay Zonday uploads what he says was his 12th video ever, a video that would go down in history.

Chocolate Rain. A complete unknown, Tay or Adam, was a graduate student in Minnesota who was performing his original work at open mics around the city, before realizing that uploading the songs to YouTube wasn't just more time efficient, it also stood to net him a much larger audience. Since entering college and going into grad school, Tay, and I'm going to call him Tay throughout the series, Tay had taken an increased interest in studying institutional racism, something he wouldn't talk about for years in the press. He's biracial, he was raised by a black mother and white father, and is autistic, another facet of his life that he wasn't initially open to sharing about outside of performing at a fundraiser or two. All that to say, Tay's interest in the themes of discrimination that are explored in chocolate rain come from a very sincere place. and were initially intended to make people think more than laugh.

But he's rolled with it and continues to roll with it to this day. But believe it or not, Chocolate Rain wasn't even the first time that Taysan Day was noticed by the YouTube staff. His second video ever, which I'm just reading the title here, Love Original Song by Kuby featuring Tazond Day, was also featured. by the website on its front page after being hand-picked by an employee. Here's a taste.

Oh, shit, Tay, Teh. Keep going. Give me kiss here, give me style. Take my heart and run the mile. Never knew another you. Okay, so we've talked about You're here We got laid over under here Sick it out and never doubt

As well as we can turn the world around I love you Okay, so we've talked about how YouTube curation has changed significantly In past episodes of this show Our series on Lena Morris The Overly Attached Girlfriend As well as Liam Kyle Sullivan

A.K.A. Kelly from Shoes But to refresh your memory, The YouTube of 2007 had 20 million monthly visitors to their now 2.7 billion monthly visitors, and the recommendation pages were curated by staff members, not algorithms as they are today. And that doesn't mean that the site was a total meritocracy, but it was certainly much closer, and there was far less competition from other users. So, as Tay explains in our interview and in many others he's done, this first bump of encouragement on the platform was what motivated him to finish and then upload Chocolate Rain, a song he had been tooling around with for months that, if you pay attention to the lyrics, is very obviously about systemic racism. And Tay would later confirm systemic racism he had experienced or witnessed firsthand.

So before we get into how the 2007 world received chocolate rain, let's actually listen to the song. And we're going to take it first by verse. The song begins. Chocolate rain. Some stay dry and others feel the pain. Chocolate rain. A baby born will die before this in chocolate rain. The school books say it can't be here again.

So in short, Tay is talking about the liberal notion of a post-racial society, one that Adam Bonner was raised in during the 80s and 90s, while black Americans continued to suffer. He also mentions, quote, a baby will die before the sin, a possible reference to black infant mortality rates, and the prisons will make you wonder where it went. the prison industrial complex that disproportionately imprisons black men. He's saying this right out the gate. So let's keep going. The next few verses expand upon the idea of a post-racial society. Lyrics like, zoom the camera out and see the lie. Only in the past is what they say.

And then he gets into more issues. Let's listen. The past is what they say chocolate rain. With your neighborhood insurance rates chocolate. Reign makes us happy living and again chocolate rain Made me cross the street the other day Chocolate rained Made you turn your head the other way

Okay now we're getting into housing discrimination and redlining As well as the very common fear mongering around black people As dangerous to be in your neighborhood And look I want to go through the whole story but to be honest, it is quite long, and I would like to get to the Tay interview. So to summarize, the other issues mentioned in chocolate rain reference everything from the public gaslighting that happens to people of color who insist that systemic racism is still alive and well.

And there are many more references to the prison industrial complex, lines like this. The same crime has a higher price to pay. The judge and jurors where it's not. He mentions the bell curve theory, a very racist notion that is popular within Mensa that dictates that black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. Here's the line. The bell curve blames the baby's DNA. The song also tries to acknowledge international racism.

And then closes on this verse. Quickly crashing through your veins, chocolate rain Using you to fall back down again Chocolate rain is an intense song, one whose agenda is very clear, particularly when you're just listening to the song without any music video kind of visual. Because sure, Tay's voice is unusually deep,

but personally I don't find that distracting because there's plenty of famous singers with voices just as low or even lower. The great Paul Robeson is a great example, a civil rights activist who most famously sang, But this is YouTube in 2000. But this is YouTube in 2000. and seven. And I would be lying if I said that as a kid, I understood the song Chocolate Rain or was even bothering to listen to the lyrics when it first came out. No, Chocolate

Rain was not received as an anti-racist anthem. It was received as comedy. So let's get into a few reasons why that may have been. First, let's talk about the visuals because there's no getting around. The visuals of the Chocolate Rain video are distinct. As Tay is quick to acknowledge himself, in the 2007 video, he is a very young-looking, skinny guy with this deep bass voice, and the juxtaposition is a little jarring at first. Not to mention the camera he's using is pretty low quality, and Tay's body language, well, it rules, but it can be a little bit distracting from the song's message. The most famous and still iconic to this day example of this is every time that Tay, then 25 years old, wearing his white t-shirt and glasses, takes a breath during the song, he leans really far away from the microphone and kind of like inhales from the side of his mouth.

It's a little weird to be sure. But what makes it iconic is that Tay in the video, adds text on screen that further draws attention to this, writing into the annals of history. I move away from the mic to breathe in. Amazing, incredible, poetry. Yes, it's awkward. Yes, TAY is clearly not a professional performer yet, but let's be clear. It is not TAY's fault that the internet audience of 2007 completely failed to interpret. this clearly political song for what it was, because he famously moves away from the mic to breathe in.

The problem is, well, the problem is kind of what Tay is singing about in the song. The liberal idea of a post-racial society suits people of many races, an idea that assured them that America used to be a racist place, but it isn't now. And while certainly not everyone drank this Kool-Aid, a lot of it. of people did. And that's kind of what Tay's fighting. He sings, anyone really get it when YouTube reached out to Tay to see if they could feature his work on their front page again? No, not really. It is framed almost universally as comedy. And as with a lot of early YouTube success stories, it's actually a second-party website

that ends up making the video take off a couple months after it was posted. And here's Tay-Zonday explaining what he thinks was the initial appeal of chocolate rain to the internet in a video for Know Your Meme back in 2021. I think there was an appealing aspect of chocolate rain that was found footage. It was like someone just put a camera in their living room and this is what you see. In that period of time, the internet was driven by novelty, finding new interesting things that hadn't been seen before and kind of getting to know each other in that way. And it changed around 2011, 2012.

And after that, you know, videos did not go viral in the same way. In future interviews, Tay would credit the link-sharing site Dig for really drawing attention to the video. And Dig was kind of a prototype for the Reddit model. And the early characterization of Chocolate Rain was not, hey, this kind of weird guy has a really salient point to make about racist, in America. It much closer aligns with headlines like this from the Edmonton Journal. Mo chocolate, mo money. Yeah, mainly framing the video as novelty comedy. And this remained consistent for nearly a decade, which especially sticks out now when you see how many of Tay's early fans

were prominent white people. The closest that publications get to meaningfully analyzing what the song means is with a little bit of bewilderment. This is from the Honolulu Star Advertiser from August 2007. As the initial puzzlement wears off and you begin to listen to the lyrics, you quickly become aware of Chocolate Rain's central contradiction. Hold on a second. Some stay dry and others feel the pain. This is a song about racism, but racism is not funny. But Chocolate Rain is funny. or maybe it's not, but isn't it?

The next internet forum to take notice of chocolate rain was 4chan, which sounds a little scarier in this case than it actually was. Because at this time, 4chan had yet to escalate to the full-on hate group generator that they would become in a few short years. But they were still overwhelmingly male and good at organizing shit posting campaigns. A system they would never use for evil. Gersand LaFleche was attacked by an online group of gamers whose activities are known as GamerGate. Initially a social media hashtag for discussion of ethics in gaming journalism, it has increasingly become a catchphrase for the online harassment of female gamers. And it's here where things really start to heat up for the video. Because, remember, it did take much longer for Internet stars to get their first.

foothold in the mainstream back in the 2000s. You could still become an overnight star a la William Hung in 2004, but not without the help of a nationally successful media conglomerate like American Idol. In 2007, YouTube was still too niche to turn someone into a household name without a lot of help. And that help came in the form of Tom Green somehow, the Freddie Got Fingered Guy, never seen. seen it, don't really want to. But a group of 4chan users organized a shit posting campaign in order to flood Green's live-streamed call-in show and start singing chocolate rain until Tom Green had to ask them, what the fuck they were doing? And when he learned the video

they were referencing, he loved it. And so while there's no exact moment that Tezonde goes supersonic, this first celebrity co-sign seems to be what got the ball. rolling. And very soon after, boy, oh boy, did people love Hazan Day. He embodied all that was eccentric about how the internet was perceived at the time. And it was almost a sign that you knew what the kids were into by knowing who he was, which led to covers from other artists. Here's John Mayer. Chocolate Come down

That's right Dr. Geiser I felt it Plus about a million expectantly bad parodies Here's the most popular one For some reason Called

Vanilla Snow Wow, good one Vanilla Snow My Basketball Entry Her They came vanilla snow Open doors with hot spaghetti 7.3 million views. No accounting for it. But add this internet engagement to the appearances

in traditional media that Tay made that first year. And he was becoming famous. And I mean a lot of appearances. Going viral can be a nightmare, but make no mistake, Hay was not resisting the attention. Hey Tay. Hey. We're digging your Chocolate Rain song. What? We love the song. Can you repeat that?

I didn't get it. We like your song a lot. Chocolate rain. Chocolate rain. Yeah, well, thanks. Are you making any money just yet off of this at you too? Chocolate Rain. You know, I mean, I can't talk about that in too much detail.

You know, nothing to change my life at this point, but, you know, maybe a little bit here and there. But, you know, I take it a day at a time. Who knows what happens? Come on now. Come on, a little bit here or there. Come on. How much we're talking about, Tegh. You know, that's all I can say.

You know, it's not going to retire to my penthouse in Dubai. Easily gets my vote for song in the summer from Minneapolis. Please welcome Teizan Day with the song Chocolate Rain to tonight's Internet Talent Showcase. Well, Kay, that was a real treat to see you here live in person. Was that your first live performance? It was. Pretty much. I did one last week, but pretty new to it.

I didn't know if your voice really was that deep or just your senior voice was that. No, that's my voice. It's real. Israel, what do you do for a living? I'm a grad student. And can you believe all the attention that you've gotten for the show? No, you know, you just kind of put something silly up on YouTube, and it gets lots of attention. So I had no idea.

You could be the next Darth Vader, you know. know? Or at least say this is CNN. Let's just see. This is CNN. And do you get recognized in the street and stuff now? I do. It was funny. I was at a White Castle Fest, who chained in the U.S. the other day? And, you know, this person was just sticking out the window as I was trying to order a burger just like, you know, practically in my car. And like, chocolate rain, chocolate rain. So, you know, it does happen. This is just a sampling of Tazond Day's TV and radio appearances from 2007 into 2008. You just heard him on Opie and Anthony,

on Jimmy Kimmel, on CNN, and on Lily Allen's BBC talk show. And even when he didn't physically appear, he was mentioned on basically every TV institution of the day across genres, from the daily show to Maury, and everything in between. Tay also got a bump from traditional print media, which was only just starting to take

an eventual nosedive into obscurity, RIP to all my friend's jobs. And in a lot of print media, people also tracked Tay's on Day's journey to attempt to monetize the sudden fame that had come with chocolate rain. And so like a lot of early online successes, we just spoke with Liam Kyle Sullivan about this recently, there weren't any systems in place that could take an online star into a mainstream star

in the way there is now, in part because the Hollywood people with money didn't yet understand how the internet worked really. People who became famous online were viewed as flashes in the pan, and even if they weren't, as Tay explains in our interview and in others, virtually every major music label was trying to work with him at the time that Chocolate Rain got really big. Most big institutions didn't know what to do with Tay. Many publications at the time compared Tay's on Day to William Hung, basically a novelty act who didn't seem to be in on the joke, which in my opinion is also a pretty ablest way of assuming that neurodivergent people are incapable of being in on the joke. We'll circle back to that. But what we see Tay try to do to monetize his career

and turn it into something more. Because, yeah, he dropped out of grad school shortly after, just like William Hung and Lena Morris did after they went viral. But what we see him do is kind of the playbook we've discussed on the show before. Very much the 2000s internet famous playbook. He sells MP3s, although because Chocolate Rain had been up online for so long, it seemed difficult to get much return on investment there. He sold ringtones.

He takes meetings in Hollywood. He does public appearances with Mario Lopez. He wins an obscure award from an award that wouldn't exist two years later. He moves to Los Angeles in 2008, and he starts a career in voice acting, which he would later successfully parlay into gigs on robot chicken and epic rack battles of history. And because of where he went viral, Hay-on-Day makes more videos. And while nothing ever goes anywhere close to as viral as Chocolate Rain, Hay's work on YouTube in the few years that followed the hit

seemingly experimented with how to stay relevant on the platform while remaining true to himself. So the question seems to be, is he going to lean into the perceived comedy of Chocolate Rain that people took away at the time? Or was he going to continue with the core motivation behind his first hit? extreme musical earnestness. He tries out both.

Here's one of the comedy songs, Do the Can't Dance, from September 2007. Some do the river dance. Some do the salsa dance. Some do the chicken dance. I do the can't dance. And here is a very sincere ballad. This is called Someday, and it is also from September 2007.

You'll close your eyes and hear my name. Someday I'll be talked about. I failed a lot, but tried to help. I love you, child. But someday I'll be gone. And then there's the work that kind of falls somewhere in the middle of these two categories. As July 2007 song, Internet Dreams, Best Demonstrates. I actually really like this song.

It plays for jokes while making some light critiques of people being addicted to the internet and the nature of viral fame, as Tay was right in the middle of experiencing it himself. Man, this internet is something else. Kind of closely, the dishes turned green, everyone chasing their internet's dream. Some like you're hot in a triple-x funk. Winning the auction, turning money to junk, capping the flag in a virtual dash, skipping your wedding to playing on match.

Shut all the blinds, oh, you might have been seen. Sit alone with your internet dream. And at the height of his name recognition, shortly after he'd been established as a reliable TV, radio, and print fixture, Tay gets what I have to assume is the biggest paycheck of his career when he was the face of a Dr. Pepper commercial in November 2007. I give you Cherry Chocolate Rain. Allow me to it.

introduce myself. My name is Jay. It's T-A-Y, T-A-Y-2-the-Z. This is the web, and it's gonna murder your TV. It was Chocolate Rain, wrote a song about that history. Feptive feet Chocolate rain Listen to the funky rhymes I weave chocolate rain I move our way

From the mic to breathe He moves his mouth away from the mic So he can breathe Okay, as much as we're enjoying This amazing verse I'm going to cut it off here Because you can hear and not see this This is a high budget video

Where Tay is Advertising chocolate Dr. Pepper, which even as a fan sounds repulsive. But the aesthetics of the video are cool and definitely echo how William Hung was presented in his earlier high-budget appearances after he first got famous on American Idol. Hey William! I'm Sony, the record company got.

Nice to meet you. I want you to meet you their girlfriend. In both of these videos, the viral star is surrounded by hot, scantily-clad women who are all over him. And the underlying suggestion is, isn't it funny that women want to be around this awkward guy? Lazy. It's lazy. And in Tay's case,

the closest we get to knowing what the original intent of Chocolate Rain was in this video is that early in the song reference to history. But the paid song quickly moves on, mainly focused on Tay's newfound fame and clout. Here's a bit of the second rap guest first. And just like that, in short video clips, most explosive video shits making big

videos. And so here, T. TAYN make pop jerry, whoa. Tick-top to the clock, little berry flow. And just like that, in short order, it's become a Dr. Pepper commercial. And so here, Tay makes an interesting full circle with this outwardly political song. In the space of a couple of months, he's changed the meaning of chocolate rain

in order to sell something for someone else, just as so many political songs have been transformed to warp their meaning before him. He actually commented on the process of working with Dr. Pepper at this time 10 years later in an interview with BET. Dr. Pepper approached me to write a song about Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper.

They didn't like any of the songs that I made. They said, why don't we just do this song you've already done? And they did a fancy video. So did anyone criticize or even point this out about chocolate rain to cherry chocolate rain at the time? Well, not really. But to be fair, Tay himself was pretty avoidant about acknowledging how intensely political the original song was himself. Here are more clips from those same Opie and Anthony and Lily Allen interviews. Yeah, I mean, I think it has undertones about, you know, racism and institutional racism. Yeah, yeah, I felt that, but I didn't know if, if, yeah, you had like a meaning to everything or some of it was just the kind of words coming out of you.

So what Tay's trying to say is that Voss was wrong again. It's not about heroin. Of course, Voss is not, uh, yeah, he's pretty stupid. Well, you have a... Hey, don't that people! Offier's question next. What is chocolate rain? You know, I always say that the question is more important than the answer.

So even when interviewers did ask about the meaning of the song, and I'm honestly kind of impressed that fucking Opie and Anthony thought to, for about 10 years, they avoided ever talking about its meaning explicitly, usually saying some version of, the song means whatever you think it means. But that would change over 10 years later in 2018. In that same interview with B.E.T. titled,

Hay's on Day's Chocolate Rain was more woke than we realized. I grew up in a biracial household. My mom's black, my dad's white. We never talked to each other, referred to each other as black and white. So it was a little bit of a shock to go out into the world as I became a teenager. Like, wait, there are these things, and they don't really speak to my life or who I know human beings to be. I guess overall chocolate rain was intended as a ballot about institutional racism. And when he was asked why he waited so long to talk about this in the years since,

Tay basically cites his own work. Here he is last year talking with Anthony Padilla from Smosh, alongside friend of the show, Lena Morris. For 10 years, I refused to answer that question. I dodged. The first time I actually just came out and said, yeah, it's a bad about a ballot about institutional racism was a BET interview in 2017. I hate to say, but I didn't want to write everybody's fun. A lot of the perception of it going viral was that it had a comedic potential or people didn't take it super, super seriously. And 80% of people who heard Chocolate Rain believed it was a funny joke. And only maybe about 20% of people saw a deeper meaning, whether it was, you know, Black Lives Matter or, you know, Trayvon Martin, a lot who would come back to that and be like, oh,

I thought this was about defecation when I was a child. But now I'm looking back and like, I really see this is a serious story about institutional racism. I'm like, oh, thank you. He thought that being overtly political would ruin the fun and probably sabotage his commercial prospects. The only value a song has to capitalism is its ability to sell something after all. And that's a cynical thing to say, but remember what era this song came out into. Barack Obama had announced his candidacy for president in February 2007, and Chocolate Rain came out in April.

More than ever, it was a moment for many liberals of what they called optimism, dare I say hope, and change. So let me be clear. That extended this 1990s Clinton-era liberal post-racial attitude. If a black man could be considered a viable candidate for the American presidency, doesn't that mean racism is over? So for what it's worth, it did seem like a uniquely challenging time to be pushing a radical, as well as kind of pessimistic idea with regards to American racism, even though

the message of Chocolate Rain itself is true. On YouTube, particularly before that BET interview in 2018, TAY seems most comfortable in the world of infotainment. So there's always a comedy bent to his work, but as you'll hear, he still wants to explore some pretty complex ideas. This is from November 2011. after a few years in L.A. and weathering the recession. A song called Mama Economy.

Are you confused about the economy? Well, have no fear. I'm going to explain the American economy right now. The dollar just think of a like a promise from the government, but the value of the dollar has to be there to be relevant. The value of the dollar comes from China and I ran when they put the cash reserves and a U.S. dollar plan. They're about treasury bonds from the Federal Reserve.

And while plenty of these videos do well, as time goes on, as TAY alternatively works in voice performance chases the occasional YouTube trend, but after a while he mainly switches to covering songs he likes. As with Liam Kyle Sullivan's experience performing as Kelly,

Tay remained an iconic, beloved early YouTube character, but the timing of his fame made it nearly impossible to capitalize on. And like many early YouTube stars, he didn't have any desire to be a YouTuber as that

came to be known in the years to come. Here he is in a vlog from March 2018. Part of the reason is that YouTube has changed so much, and I legit don't recognize the platform anymore. Not in a bad way, just in a point where it's like, I'm looking at videos that go viral now, and it's like I spent 24 hours in Coca-Cola, where someone fills a bathtub with Coca-Cola,

and that goes viral, or I flew using leaf blowers, which, you know, by the way, he doesn't actually fly in the video, but hey, good for him, it went viral. There's this tremendous pressure now to be sensational and extreme. So while Tay participated in internet retrospectives in the years that followed, your classic BuzzFeed I accidentally went viral, your Anthony Padilla videos, Tay moved forward in his life, not sharing very much in the meantime. How does he look back on all of it now?

Well, it's complicated. So when we come back, the world according to Tay's on day. 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 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

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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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Leitra Tate. 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 lock in. We're moving towards liberation.

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Ladies and gentlemen, days on day. Or Adam Bonner. I'll let him tell you. And this interview has been edited for time and clarity. I'm Teizonday. I sang the song Chocolate Rain, which was one of the early viral videos on YouTube. As I'm recording this, I'm almost 43 years old, and at the time I was on the cusp of turning 25. So April of 2007 is when the video got uploaded. And of course, I've done many other things, as is often the case in entertainment and life. Do hundreds of things, and a couple of them get more attention. William Shatner is primarily known for being Captain Kirk and maybe the price line spokesperson and Boston legal and he's done hundreds and hundreds of things. The surprising future that was hard to get a perspective on while I was living that moment

is that I became sort of this torchbearer and this common point of experiential reference for a moment in internet history and a moment in viral video experience history. I'll see young people commenting at my video saying, oh, my parents sent me here as though chocolate rain is like the most immaculately preserved Tyrannosaurus via this embodiment. You know, the entire world used to be filled with these things. And along with some other viral videos of the time, like Evolution of Dance or the Shoes video,

it became a common touchstone in point of reference, a positive memory that's widely shared. Like people widely share a lot of negative memories, like everybody who was past a certain age remembers where they were when they found out Michael Jackson died or, you know, if they're a bit older, John Lennon. And so viral videos are kind of this happy memory that people can come to, oh, wow, this is a happy memory, a positive memory that many of us share. I was born in 1982 while living in Chicago as the youngest of three by quite a bit. My siblings are six and 11 years older than me. My parents were both school teachers.

my dad was a high school science teacher. My mother taught elementary school and eventually served 25 years as a principal. Is served the right word there? I guess it's a public service. I definitely had many, many memories of being alone in gigantic school buildings as a child with my mom because she started her principal career when I was about six. So, and if you didn't know, principals are often coming in and doing work on Saturday and or Sunday. So not just the five school days of the week. This was before. phone. So if my mom wanted to talk to me, she'd just get on the building-wide intercom. I guess if your family owns a bodega, you grew up learning about the food retail business.

It kind of felt like elementary schools were our family business. We moved around quite a bit, partly because of my mom's principal career. So I had 10 different schools that I attended from kindergarten through 12th grade. Not having a consistent cohort of kids to grow up with or landmarks to interact with over time probably contributed to a sense of loneliness as well as just being the youngest in my family by quite a bit. I felt very intensely and helicopter parented as a child. As school teachers, my parents had plenty of examples of who they did not want their kids to turn out like. I've had the privilege of growing older with both of my parents, so that's been an interesting perspective because I barely survived my teenage years.

I experienced some bullying in junior high in the start of high school. Anyone who remembers me from that time probably would say more than some, but also for reasons I'll get into that we're not completely my parents' fault, ended up being self-mutilating suicidal, and eventually from about ages 16 to 19, completely non-verbal at home. And non-verbal at home really meant I could not be verbal anywhere. I believe there was any possibility of my parents hearing me speak, which also meant the outside world. I remember being 17 years old, attending my therapeutic day school as a special ed placement. And my therapist, outside of her job description, said we needed to do our sessions walking around outside. It took her multiple weeks to convince me that my mother or

father might not incidentally be among the cars that passed by as we walked outside and therefore it was safe for me to speak. And the school was in Wilmet, Illinois, which is a very storybook and bucolic place to walk around. A lot of people would ask me later on, what was it like when your voice got deep? And the truthful answer is I was grunting like a toddler and completely nonverbal and terrified of being verbal. Eventually that same therapist, again, outside of her job description, did family therapy between my parents and I when I was about 18 and a half, and I finally started to at least occasionally and awkwardly be able to speak. I didn't appreciate when I was a teenager that getting to know my parents as a teenager and then during my 20s and then in my 30s and then

in my 40s, I would be getting to know different dimensions and different layers and different vulnerabilities of both of them, which would then give me new insights into what happened in my childhood. There's a lot that I was not allowed to do in terms of pop culture when I was a child. I was not allowed to own any toys with weapons. So no G.I. Joe's, no He-Man, no Shira, no watching Indiana Jones or McIver or any of those other things that one might have thought would be iconic for a 1980s childhood. I resented while growing up the way that what I perceived as overparenting forced me into this mold of being like a Steve Rical or Carlton Banks, the archetypical nerd and model child. I realized much, much later in life that my parents had

their own traumas that were unique to them that informed the way that they parented me and then that I'm also autistic and had certain sensitivities in the ways that I reacted. to stimuli that, you know, there was a lot happening that nobody was particularly conscious of at the time, but everybody did the best that they knew how to do with, you know, the person that they could bring to the table in those moments. I was a loved child and my parents loved each other. They've been together more than 50 years. As of this recording, they're still alive. Knock on wood, cross your fingers as people get older. My father would want me to clarify even the story that I was say, provided for a child. We were never rich, but we were also.

never poor and it was one of his proudest life accomplishments. So yeah, I was born in 82 and a lot of the things that you can mention pop culture-wise, I just wasn't allowed to you. Ninja Turtles, not allowed. Terminator 2, not allowed. Wayne's World, not allowed. Beavis and Butthead, not allowed. MC Hammer and other rap music, not allowed. Kurt Cobain, or Nirvana, crunch music, not allowed. South Park, which eventually parodied me. I wasn't allowed to watch that when I was 15 years old at the time that it launched. I would say that black affect and vernacular was not allowed, but it was really just that anything that was not highly educated affect and vernacular was not allowed. I did become quite a Star Trek fan, starting around age nine, both of the original series

and Star Trek The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Star Trek and then especially characters like Spock and Data and Odo existed on sort of a nerd pass island that did not set off my parents' anxieties and therefore it was allowed. There were aspects of my childhood family life that could be emotionally immature and tumultuous, not always have the healthiest dynamics. And so characters like an android or a Vulcan who have no emotion, I retreated into those characters to process that. The same way that Star Trek got a pass, I felt like Disney and Broadway music was the only thing I was allowed to listen to musically.

I felt a tremendous pressure at all ages as a child to both cosplay being older because my siblings were older and cosplay being a future governor or senator or future pinnacle of human achievement in some ways particularly my father could lean towards being sad and i kind of realize in retrospect i became sort of this cosplay of an ein-ran protagonist this little seedling who over-signaled my trajectory of being a future perfect human in order to soothe and assure both parents my parents being baby boomers were never the type to be particularly vulnerable with their feelings on one hand it can be good i think to not turn your kids into your therapist, but on the other hand, when feelings and irrationality and subjectivity that we each have inside of us just kind of present without any interrogation or

explanation, that can be disorienting for a child because speaking on those things in a way that is honest and that validates everybody involved is a life skill. Instead of learning that skill I learned to care for my parents by pretending to be perfect and repress my true self, which probably leaned towards wanting to be more of a wild child. My parents would ardently say this was never their intention, but at times in my life it has felt like that has been the only pathway to validation from them or my family. Both Gene Roddenberry with Star Trek and Disney Renaissance movies had a sappy vision of life being a post-racial utopia. Very imperfectly, if you think of some original Star Trek episodes or movies like Pocahontas and Moulon.

We didn't talk about race and my family. My dad's white. My mom's black. I do not present as white passing at all. I present as black. I was not ever allowed to identify as being black. And I think my parents meant well. Their love blossomed towards the end of the civil rights movement.

And they truly believed that a post-racial utopia was America's future. And whether or not that was happening in America, I think they tried to create that in their vision of the family. My parents would say that this is a true love story that race never occurred to either of them. And it's kind of this dumb idea that the world retconned onto the trajectory of their lives. So if at any point in my childhood I'd even deigned to suggest that the black identity was a key and salient experience in my own life, my mom would immediately redirect me and say, You come from two heritages. Black was like the F word in my household, if used in the first person,

by us as children. My mom might rarely use it if she was talking to one of her best friends on the phone, but she really didn't use it either. That created plenty of interesting tensions for me as a teenager in the 1990s, which, if anyone recalls, was not a post-racial utopia. And in some ways, I feel like my mom did not ever want my father to feel left out of my life experience, or for me to feel like I was somehow less the son of my father, which America did not give my mom an easy job, because that's exactly what it tells me that I am less the son of my white father. I mean, our first black president was biracial. He didn't get to use his mom's racial identity. There's a lot more to be said about my teenagers, especially, but I'm going to zoom ahead on the timeline to being age 21 because there was an awkward moment when I was an undergrad that's a very teachable moment. And we had moved to Washington State by the same. point. I had started learning more, as often happens in college, about marginalization theory and

critical race theory and black radicalism and Bell Hooks. And I was having lunch with my parents at hometown buffet of all places remember those restaurants. And I started excitedly parroting the language used by Bell Hooks and talking to my parents saying, yeah, the world is run by white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. And my father started to cry. And as a little tear started to run down his eye, it's almost like a part of him was saying, not me. And I feel like that moment is this micro-encapsulation of American society and the way that some terminology like capitalist patriarchy, like white supremacy as part of critical race theory, as part of sociological marginalization theory, can land. Because my father was not alone in that type of

reaction. I think a lot of people react by feeling aghast, feeling sad, feeling personally attacked, and not just white people, because my mom was present. She was not crying, but she also did not like to hear that language. I want you to pause the story of my life in this moment with my father, because I'm going to use this moment to unpack a whole lot of things and a whole lot of different timelines in seeking to answer this question, why did my white father cry when 21-year-old be enthusiastically celebrated learning about white supremacist capitalist patriarchy from Bell Hooks. We'll be back with more Tays on 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 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 Shearrett. Fade. Glorilla. Jellyroll. Sean Fogarty. Lil Wayne. L.L. Cool J.

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

AXS.com. My name is Ed. Everyone say hello, Ed. Hello, Ed. I'm from a very rural back. around myself. My dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin. So, like, it's not like... What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago. I just normally do

straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear. Well, 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated.

Your beloved brother. goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share ten powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I finished my undergrad in communications in 2004 at the Evergreen State College, where, as a footnote, I was the 2021 commencement speaker. In late summer, 2004, I moved to Minneapolis and began the Ph.D. program at American Studies at the University of Minnesota. I still see Minnesota like a Minnesotan. I have extended family, Minneapolis, who I visited as a child, so I was always a part-time Minnesota, even growing up in Chicago. I did not thrive as a graduate student. To enjoy being a graduate student, I put in joy there in quotes, you have to either really love

research or love teaching, love pedagogy. And I just, I had so much personal stuff going on. I couldn't focus on either of them. There are aspects of my childhood and the way I was raised, as well as being autistic. I was first diagnosed at age 15, where I ended up being very emotionally regressed. I love my parents dearly, but it's probably not inaccurate to describe my life as ages zero to 18 were me becoming a legal adult and then ages 18 to 36 is me kind of figuring out how regressed my childhood actually left me and the next 18 years we're figuring out how to retread the first 18 and mature to being a viable human being in society. So age 36 was my age 18. So with any luck age 100 will be my age 50. Anyway, by the summer of 2007 when chocolate rain went viral, I was a distracted

and middling Ph.D. student dealing with a lot of unseen internal baggage. I apologize to any undergrads who had me as a teaching assistant during this period of time because I think I was a hot mess. Although, to be fair, institutional pedagogy is also a hot mess. So it was sort of a tango. Instead of being passionate about teaching research, I had been passionate about independent music pursuits for the prior three years. And I intermittently performed at open mics throughout the greater Minneapolis metropolitan area. Honestly, I was never a great performer or singer live. I've learned that I'm very, very sensory overwhelmed, both in haphophobia, sensitivity to touch, hypercous, misophonia, sensitivity to sound, photophobia, sensitivity to light. And all of that kind of overwhelms me in live environments are honestly just everyday society environments.

But I didn't know that quite as clearly at the time. YouTube came along and it was easier for me to sing in my living room than it was for me to drag an amp and keyboard and other stuff. along to an open mic, so I started uploading content to YouTube. I invented Teizonday, which is not my birth name. My birth name is Adam Potter, but Teizonday was this alter ego for my music pursuits, and I assumed it would never have any intersection with my serious career, which at the time was on the trajectory of finishing my PhD and eventually, presumably, becoming a professor or researcher of some sort. My first YouTube videos, I was singing and playing the stage piano, the same thing I did at open mics, and eventually I wrote a song over a backing

track that had been created by an Australian who goes by the moniker of Kubi. Michelle Flannery, who was YouTube's music editor at the time, reached out to me to ask if I would like to have that video featured, the song was titled Love, on YouTube's front page. And that was the email that every YouTuber dreamed of receiving an early 2007. It felt like winning the lottery to be featured on the front page. I knew the week that the love video was going to be featured, and I also knew that I could sort of double dip on the exposure that that feature created for me by having another video in the automatic or default player of my YouTube channel so that people who watched the featured video on the front page would click and see this other video on my

channel. So I had already written the lyrics to Chocolate Rain over the prior six weeks, and I had the arrangement idea in my head for a number of years. A lot of my songs are like that. They come together in various conceptual pieces in my brain, and eventually I decide to assemble all those pieces. So I rushed chocolate rain to completion the weekend before I knew this other video would be featured on YouTube's front page. And so I released it.

It did not immediately go viral. It was uploaded in April. I'd say by June of 2007, it had about 30,000 views. Then somebody posted it on. dig.com, which is kind of an earlier version of Reddit with a slower cycle time. Someone saw it on that social bookmarking site, Dig, and decided to post it on 4chan. 4chan was an internet forum, primarily known as an image board, and also known for being, to say, very inclusive, to put it mildly, with regard to the content that surfaced on their

B subform, other than my own experience, which is that when Chocolate Rain was posted on 4chan in 2007, I entered a succession of nerds that 4chan both embraced and helped the spread on social media prior nerds, including Gary Postman and Tom Green, whom are both more than able to tell their own stories. So that's the story of my recollection. My first aha moment that Chocolate Rain might be going more viral was in early July of 2007 when 4chan successfully prank called Tom Green's late night show that he was at the time doing in his living room. And a caller broke out and randomly busted out singing, Chocolate Rain, and, you know, Tom Green being a good improv comedian,

he took it as a prank call, and yes, and it, yeah, droll the rain, and slammed the phone and hung up. And I was kind of like, oh, wait, I've heard of Tom Green before. After The Dig.com and then 4-Chance exposure, chocolate rain, began to take off as a wider cultural phenomenon. A day or two later, Carson Daly, who was doing a late night show on, I believe in NBC at the time, featured. it on his show. And in mid-July, it took off as a national news story where media outfits

began feverishly attempting to contact me. I did my first radio interview ever on Opie and Anthony, which was not a small platform. And my first television interview ever on CNN Saturday morning, which was not an obscure show. I was a terrible, awkward, inexperienced interviewer. I spoke like a nerd who had had very little human contact and who was socially regressed. being plucked out of my living room and stuck in front of a national spotlight because that's who I was. There was a magical Santa Claus aspect about the way chocolate rain was going viral because it was not going viral as a deep ballot about institutional racism. It was going viral as a, oh, wow, there's the funny guy who moves like Mr. Bean with a voice like Barry White and has absolutely no awareness of it. So from mid-July to the end of July in 2007, I probably did 30 or 40 different media interviews.

And in none of them, was I actually ready to be a person? Because I said earlier that there was a little bit of strategy and my not just blurting out polemically my intended meeting for chocolate rain. And you're kind of sitting back, like, oh, yeah, it's kind of a joke and let it be a joke. The deeper reason is that while autism spectrum disorder is probably my most public and formal diagnosis, I've probably also experienced dissociative identity disorder, also formerly known as multiple personality disorder, which is basically a trauma response that happens when you are, for whatever reason, not able to naturally develop and cohere a healthy individual identity in your childhood. That's not all it is, but that's what it is for me. And what happens in many experiences of dissociative identity disorder, including my own, is you end up being kind of a receiver of identity and you never built in. any infrastructure to push back on that.

And so with me receiving no autism diagnosis until I was a teenager, my parents through emotional intuition sort of improvised their own applied behavior analysis methodology for me to live. I've never been a parent and it's kind of like fighting in war. You shouldn't speak too authoritatively on it without actually doing it. But I think there's a day-to-day drudgery of it of how do I get this sentient bag of liquids out the door someday and able to thrive. So like I said before, my parents are passionate, loving imperfect people. Part of their parenting is informed by their own traumas, but I was not

an easy project to raise. And it's kind of amazing. I developed into any type of functioning adult, regressed or not. So I can't take everything that I know in 2025 and ask, well, hey, why wasn't that done in 1985 when I was two and three years old? All of this is important backstory for why I dodged and hemmed and hawed and did not talk about the intended meaning of chocolate rain for 10 years. When I say I did not know how to be a person while I believe I was trending worldwide on Google as chocolate rain was going viral, that's not hyperbole, that's not metaphor. It's psychiatrically true. Now, imagine me not knowing this about myself at the time when I'm appearing on Jimmy Kimmel, three out of the four major music labels at the time,

wanted to do deals with me. A random wealthy people who would contact me to like, please come singing my kids bar mitzvah publishers wanted to do book deals with me i quickly began to feel like i was floating in space and just a spectator to this cult of personality called tezonde depersonization de-realization disorder dpdr is another psychiatric diagnosis that can be a comorbidity of autism i feel like i should stop listing psychiatric diagnoses because i've often joked that the dsm5 the prevailing authority on psychiatric conditions it's just my memoir but even as the momentum of chocolate rain and its attention continued. That October, I opened for Girl Talk at First Avenue, which is made famous by Prince and his Purple Rain song. I did a big remix with

Dr. Pepper. The following spring, I was parodied on South Park. I did Weezer's Pork and Beads video that brought many viral stars together. The following summer 2008, I won a Webby Award, all while neglecting my graduate studies and being politely asked to leave the PhD program after four years with a master's degree and offer that I accepted. Notice how I describe this period of my through headline-grabbing events that I participated in, but that were largely initiated by other people, not myself. Because while I was 25 and 26 years old on the outside in 2007 and 2008, on the inside, I was still six or seven years old

and learning how to process being in contact with an overstimulating world that my parents had largely said, well, just don't be in contact with it. You're not allowed to be in contact with it. Well, you know, that life strategy kind of sort of worked until I accidentally went viral. And, of course, nobody knew what going viral was. It was kind of the first time or one of the first times, like being launched with Sputnik. Well, we think it's going to orbit the earth and we call the satellite. So, de boys, another one with his a Greg Death video.

If Russian dressing heard that terrible accident, it would pretend to be Aquafina. So while I was graded conceptualizing Tezonday as a recognizable and iconic brand, Adam Potter, who I actually am outside of Tazonday, lacked the developmental and life skills to hue that brand coherently out of a chaotic world. It's hard to describe the magnitude of just the sensory experience that overwhelmed me, just walking around in public or being anywhere as chocolate rain blew up and continued to become sort of a phenomenon. Because, you know, I'd be in the drive-thru at White Castle and the person practically falls out the

window into my lap trying to take my picture as they're handing me my sliders and it's not just my face that's recognizable just my body and movement style and mannerisms stick out like big bird a dhl driver almost crashed his courier van rolling down his window yelling chocolate rain and i was on my bike i had my helmet on i had sunglasses on i did not have an inch of skin exposed if i robbed his 7-11 completely covered up the entire world that's tays on day even if they hadn't thought about me for 15 years. Just put microphones at all the intersections. He'll be trapped because, you know, he moves away.

I don't know if my jokes are funnier or this moment where I feel like I have to break the fourth wall and acknowledge each one, like a three-year-old who just has to show everybody the picture I drew. So I just described some of the magnitude of public attention that entered my life kind of permanently after chocolate rain blew up. Now, keep that in mind. Now, combine that with the fact that being unremarkable

and blending in, had been my life and heart and soul's passionate desire from the time I was very young, because it's exactly what I was forbidden to be. I couldn't just be a kid. I had to be the teacher's son, the principal's son. I couldn't be my age. I was always surrounded by older family, so I had to be older. Plus, my father might have some of my special needs diagnoses, but undiagnosed, being a boomer who just mental health care wasn't acceptable when he came of age and he just never believed in it. I know in my own life experience that I've developed many maladaptive beliefs and behaviors

to cope with being autistic in a neurotypical world. My crude definition of a maladaptation is an adaptation that helps you survive a specific environmental hostility, but can itself be injurious or counterproductive? One maladaptive attitude of mine was that, hey, if I'm never allowed to be normal and never allowed to do normal things, well, my only permitted pathway to confidence and self-esteem was to lead into being weird and

bizarre. And that maladaptive behavior was very much modeled by my father because my father can often be shy and or sensitive. But he is manic and confident when he has an opportunity to dramatically demonstrate both being weird and correct. Some of you go, wow, Tay, you don't say. But my point is that while during my childhood proud weirdness was my only existential option and a behavior that was modeled for me, that conflicted with my true desire that all I wanted was to dump this affect and have some actual friends and consume some actual popular culture, dabble in actual vice, and have it all be unremarkable. So I obsessed over my heart just went pitter, pitter, pat my entire childhood from the youngest ages I can remember, like three, all the way to like being nonverbal and taken five years to graduate high school at age 19, like my entire childhood and even early adulthood, I just obsessed

over this desire to be more normal. Now, in practice, when I got a little bit older, got to know some more people and some more intimate details and more people's lives, I kind of found out that a lot of people got some messed up stuff in their closets. I don't know if anybody's that normal. You ever had that experience where you believe that your family has all these problems and then you learn about somebody else's family? Like, oh, shoot. Okay, I guess we're okay sometimes. But I still, to this day, struggle with a limiting self-belief. It's a belief that goes back to childhood trauma If I'm in a predicament or encountering adversity, the problem is that I need to be more normal or be more conventional, more of what's expected.

Because I lived my whole childhood in what felt like some upside down, staring at ogling at normalcy, as if the world was in a cage and everything outside my parents' control was this menagerie. The truth is, I was in the menagerie and often felt it when I got teased by or had to interact with other kids. A big takeaway of feeling involuntarily shoved into an embrace of weird affect while actually wanting to be less remarkable is that independent of race, gender, sexuality, height, or any other personal attribute, I felt constantly marginalized as a child and harmed by that marginalization and resentful towards it. So even without sociological marginalization theory or critical race theory, I am feeling. from ages barely beyond being a toddler, like I am missing things that are key to connecting with and belonging in the rest of the species. So you can bet that when I first encountered

those types of theories in college, I took to them like a lawnmower dumped in the battles of bravehood. And I'm like, stop the movie, I am mowing all of this. I'm the main character. Now, I didn't even know grass existed. They told me I was a snowblower. That one, I feel like I lost some people. Not everybody, but I lost some people.

because y'all aren't overall that imaginative. Sometimes I really have to think, am I staying within the abstraction bandwidth of my audience? And that's as good a place as I need to end the first part of our Tay's on Day series. He's the best. And this Thursday, we're going to hear more from him. As Tay admits throughout this interview file,

he does have a tendency to go on some real tangents. So I assembled what really amounts to the story of his political awakening, spurred on by this moment, moment he just spoke about, his father crying when hearing what Tay had discovered about writing and theory around race in America. So this Thursday, the political world, according to Tay's on Day. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Hard Radio. 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 rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. 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 anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story. Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story.

It's about the scariest night of my life. This is Wisecrack, available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets.

We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.