April 22, 2025 • 40 mins
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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Joy ex.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Six.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
to the main characters of the Internet to see how
now 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 Tazon Day, a retrospective
on the Chocolate Rain singer's time in the Spotlight. And
(01:15):
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 two thousand and seven,
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 by
(01:38):
racial 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
(01:58):
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 twenties, And today
he's going to talk about how that translated into viral
fame and how it helped and hurt him come into
(02:19):
his own as a grown man, plus some weird a
sides because it's tays on Day.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Enjoy the twenty seventeen Beet interview where I first spoke
about Chocolate Rain being a ballad 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 two thousand and
seven to twenty seventeen, I became more and more averse
(02:48):
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 pag 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
(03:10):
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 twenty seventeen when
BT expressed interest, I think my dad was helping pay
(03:32):
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 seems 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.
(03:54):
What I can't say about the way I describe chocolate
Rain as a trojan horse that's not unique. I mean,
it's a history music. I mean, how many millions of
people have played Michael Jackson's they don't care about us
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,
(04:16):
either by overestimating risks or underestimating benefits. I didn't even
syndicate Chocolate Rain to digital stories until twenty ten, and yeah,
my thinking was, hey, you know, the video says download
the free MP three. 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
(04:37):
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
(04:59):
and ration 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
I would presume that human beings are motivated by accuracy
(05:19):
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 Taizon Day. I never played Tason
Day as a superhero avatar, and I never buried my
(05:42):
insecurity and my uncertainties when I described the twenty seventeen
Beeight interview as me being honest about the medium of
chocolal rain. And obviously it's a bit more complicated than
the same was dishonest before that, But generally speaking, I
am honest to a fault. I lived in Los Angeles
for twelve and a half years, which is famously a
play where everybody is bullshitting is the norm. Everybody is
(06:03):
name dropping, everybody is grasping for calling cards and 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 and 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.
But it's like, well, you know when I was working
with James Gunn, Well you know when I was talking
(06:25):
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
that 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 ooh and
curate yourself as a cult of personality and non stop
(06:46):
highlight reel of recognizable things. And I think anybody who
saw me at social events or conventions as Daizon day
saw me being visibly hesitant and reluctant and uncomfortable on
top of being autistic and neurologically since we overwhelmed just
being out in the world period. I was never good
(07:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
You know. They want Tazon Day to sink.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
Four include rain and you move away from 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
(07:41):
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 fanciness and cosplaying
aristocracy by poor people. Sorry, I know what that's like.
I'm speaking autobiographically. I'm just saying I will personally never
(08:02):
feel more comfortable with pageantry than a squirrel taking a
nap on Times Square on 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 Dazon Day is supposed to be, Adam is
an autistic deer cot in headlights everywhere he goes, and
Adam is a terrible liar. And also, to be fair,
(08:24):
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're 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
(08:45):
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
thoughts spaghetti with chapters and sub sections applied as an afterthought,
like the Manuscript is an acid trip that got sent
(09:07):
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 and to maybe it'd be called
middle middle class. But many more years my net worth
has technically been negative, and I've been very grateful to
(09:28):
have a family that's able to support me when they can.
As I mentioned earlier, I turned forty three this year.
In one of my biggest fears of my parents dying
is that, well, I mean, I'll obviously be sad and devastated,
and you know, there's that whole grief journey that one
goes through, but it so I was kind of like,
I'm not sure I've ever actually for a sustained period
of like a decade, lived as a financially independent adult.
(09:48):
Like I look at older transients who have nothing, and
I'm like, oh, I hope I don't end up there.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
But I don't know.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
There's no guarantees that Billie Club of life can beat
you up any moment. They're like, oh there's a car wreck, help,
there's can there's you know whatever. It's all downhill after
this podcast. This is a Swan song. I've said it
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
was young, partly because of what I talked about earlier,
the ethos I grew up with, Well, 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 the psychiatric disability has such a stigma
you can't just like use it because people like, oh,
(10:59):
it does not mean is 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
and things like domestic violence. But I digress a more
politic term that's used for neurodivergent and autistic people by
organizations like Culture City.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Kulture is sinceory inclusion.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
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 where
there go I'm on the set and the cameras rolling
and the cruise being paid, and oh shit, I can't
(11:41):
do this. I'm completely sincere overwhelmed, and this medication cocktail
is not helping. I've been miscast. That actually happened when
I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel in two thousand and seven.
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
(12:01):
and no keyboard, and being the passionate segment producers that
they are. They 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.
(12:22):
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 in 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
(12:45):
Chocolate Rain the way I wanted to sing it, which
was just with the microphone and the backing track. The
moment comes, Jimmy Kimmel hypes me up, the crowd is screaming,
the curtain goes up, and I cannot feel my arms,
like literally, I my hand it's felt like jello. I
was so disoriented and since re overwhelmed. I missed the
(13:05):
first four lines of the song. You know chocolate Rain
some stage right now, This feel of pain, chocolate rain,
a baby born with eye before this 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, spiced it in with my actual performance,
(13:29):
and they started with a very very very wide shot
like above the heads of the audience in the last row.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
You couldn't see me not singing.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
And God blessed the Q 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 Q card changed on time.
It's funny to think this was almost eighteen years ago.
I think there are a few shows that still use
handwritten cque cards and human operators, but it's a lost
(13:58):
art today. I know that my psychiatric experiences that contributed
to my mindor 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 hypercusius, misophonia, photophobia,
and hapophobia, dyspraxia, which is basically muddled signaling between your
brain and muscle movement, also played a role. My dyspraxia
(14:21):
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 side about
psychiatric metach is that stimulants like ADHDM phetamines will help
majorly improve my dyspraxia, but they will also worsen my sensitivity.
Is like misophonia, hapophobia, hyperacusis, et cetera, and all of
(14:44):
these are autistic comorbidities, meaning they just occur more in
autistic people. I should bring up alexithymia too, because alexithymia
is not having words for your feelings, and in my case,
it is 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
(15:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Oh wow, we're talking about spoon theory.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Now we're just doing like this crash course and autistic psychiatry.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Now.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
I started this by talking about trauma dumping, and it
goes back to the theme I touched on earlier, which
is 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
(15:44):
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 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
(16:05):
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
(16:26):
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 try 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
(16:48):
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 just that
singing and playing simultaneously it was not going to be
mission critical.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I showed up for the shoot.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
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
of events because when I'm in that type of moment
(17:26):
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 point too, I don't have a
prosthetic leg. I don't have a wheelchair. All I have,
(17:47):
with dozens of talented crew members on set and xxx
xx x amount of money being spent, are words coming
out of my mouth describing limitations that are invisible to
everybody else. And I know that as polite and different
and professional as everybody else is not of them.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Nderstand We'll be back with the grand conclusion to the world.
According to Tason Day, welcome back to sixteenth minute. Imagine
(18:28):
you're me and after nine months you've gotten your interview
with Taizon. Day you send questions back late because you're
struggling with depression. He checks in a 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,
(18:48):
and then the day arrives. Tayson Day replies with a
single audio file. But when you open that eye audio file,
it is two and a half hours long. Within the
audio file. Our thoughts insightful, thoughts deep. He maybe answers
(19:09):
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 taison
Days parting thoughts.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
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,
(19:46):
so there's 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
(20:07):
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 non mess of partially attempted
things that didn't really value stack or get executed in
a foundational way, including being Tazon day as an entertainer.
(20:30):
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 to
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,
(20:50):
took out what company's Instagram and nothing has been posted
for two months, it reflects poorly on you, or people
assume it is an un serious endeavor and you are
an un serious person, Like it would almost be better
to just not have an Instagram at that point, And
I can list one hundred different ways that rigging a
content economy wherever green content infrequently uploaded, content never has
(21:12):
organic region is not able to thrive, is grotesquely ablest
and unfair towards people who struggled to speak, people who
struggled 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. Not just say my Internet,
I'm saying like an old man.
Speaker 5 (21:31):
On my Internet, every piece of content got a fair shot.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Upload once a day, upload once a year. It was
the land of opportunity.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Although it's not even accurate to describe what we experience
in twenty twenty five 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 intro net. Like the early dial up services
in the eighties and nineties, Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, they
(22:04):
were closed networks. Those are intronnets, 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.
(22:24):
We are toiling on oligarchic algorithmic feed plantations. And because
the ten percent of the population who make the best
algorithmic kunti kentes, yes, I went there, get ninety percent
of the engagement on these platforms as they destroy their bodies,
destroy their mental health, destroy their personal relationships, desperately tossing
(22:45):
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 are drug cartels who have
a single nautical conciones. And I love today's influences. Many
are amazingly talented and very hard working. But we cannot
get to a point as a civilization where that is
(23:07):
the anticipated redemption arc for capitalism sucking.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
And that's what I fear.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
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 healthcare bills where I
look at the invoice and it's four hundred and fifty
dollars for a bandage. But it's okay because I'm gonna
be on the influencer grind and I can blow up
any day.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
No, it's not okay.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
You better start listing 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 Taizonda is.
An atom 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
(23:50):
because I am making and recording the best music I
have ever made. It's just hoping I 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
(24:10):
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
(24:33):
la carte.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
It's a take it or leave it quid pro quo.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
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, AI and derivative rights
with terrible economics that are impossible for independent artists to
opt out of. My grievance number two is bad deals
(24:58):
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
(25:19):
different and then take a percentage of the ad revenue.
There is a small amount of content management involved with
the shorts platforms because music tracks are being integrated with video,
but the percentage is being paid to distributors are awfully
high relative to my understanding of that actual cost. Grievance
number three amounts to YouTube in twenty twenty five being
a product design hot mess for independent musicians. Short history lesson.
(25:43):
I believe there was a time in two thousand and
nine when major music label music videos were approximately eighty
percent of YouTube's monetized advertising traffic. That's one reason major
music labels had leverage to force YouTube to create Vevo,
which is a separate reskin for their videos where they
get a better ad revenue split. Viacoms unresolved billion dollar
(26:03):
copyright lossit against YouTube also affected sentiments of 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 two three billion views regularly on
their Vivo music videos, we've seen the rising domination of
mobile viewing and algorithmic feeds that prioritize watch time, session time,
(26:27):
click through rates, etc. That's one reason you see content
creators who make longer gameplay videos like market Plier and
Dashy 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
(26:48):
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 Volli in
two thousand and nine, with thousands of content creators making
entire businesses out of parroting popular music videos, and after
(27:08):
twenty twelve they just became one of the lowest earning
content categories is important context for YouTube's products design afterwards.
The problem YouTube is trying to solve is that music
is tremendously disadvantaged at creating the user behavior and advertised
behavior that is most profitable for its business. That means
my grievance one and grievance two make the artists give
(27:30):
up their AI rights, their derivative work rights, and submits
to unfavorable social platform distribution terms. Most distributors are asking
for that before they'll anoint your own YouTube channel as
your official artist channel, which causes the channel subscribers to
merge if you have one that was autogenerated, which I
do right now. My main YouTube channel is eighteen years old.
It does not need a third party music distributor operating
(27:53):
as a multi channel network taking a portion of the
ad revenue on music video assets. As an independent muse
a 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
(28:14):
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 YouTube is an
absent parent and music as a category is its runt
child in terms of alphabet shareholder value. Although to be fair,
(28:34):
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.
(28:54):
It goes back to what I said earlier. Capitalism forces
fixed assets, fixed me, 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
(29:15):
in terms of I control what you see. You can
tell I'm getting prophetic when the mother goose rhyms come out,
the doctor seuss. The parts of this where my speaking
gets faster and less guttural are when my ADHD medication
is hitting and I'm just not fighting it. Doing this
actually had me go down from sixty milligrams to forty
milligrams of events, because on sixty I was like, I
(29:37):
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 lyrics very deliberately and moving my lips
in big formations, that is actually a muscular effort compensation
(30:00):
for the reduced neurological control that dyspraxia creates. There are
parts of me, the question, am I better off knowing that?
Because Tasonta was just doing what came naturally in the moment.
It was Taison Tape blowing up as an entertainer and
being forced into contact with society, me being put into
constant realization that I am not like others, but must
(30:22):
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
(30:43):
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 cast role of transcendent capability fused with profound disability.
I am both borderline savant and my information aggregation and
(31:05):
retention speed while measuring is learning disabled in some kind
of battery tests because my brain sucks at translating the
parallelism with which it experiences truth into the dogmatic serial
declarative that majoritarian neurology change humankind to its likeness with
and as that last sentence shows, it's a struggle that
(31:25):
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 pros meant I was stupid that
the job of a 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
(31:46):
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, it 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
(32:07):
reason to be confident in a safe and provided future.
Some people have that in the post blog, 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
(32:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
It was this.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Exceptional eye of the storm before ferocious backlash. People who
had to live under Jim Crow for seventy years looked
back at Reconstruction and mar and said, yeah, Mississippi had
a black senator. Yeah, 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
(33:11):
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,
(33:32):
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
(33:54):
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 seventy years.
(34:14):
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
(34:38):
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
(34:59):
no to make me free. There, guys, mother goose again,
I should end us. But it's been interesting for sure.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Thank you so much to the wonderful Taison 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
(35:28):
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
(35:48):
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
(36:09):
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
(36:29):
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 sixteenth minute
away from our character of the Week format and take
more time between series so I can take a closer
(36:52):
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
(37:15):
want to look at how this has developed more closely,
because stories like tay Is almost serve as a canary
in a coal mine for where we were headed and
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
(37:37):
any kind of fame unwittingly or rooted in mockery, Tazon
Day 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,
(37:58):
and it shouldn't have had to be hard won. But
there's a lot to learn from that experience. And so
with that, Tayson Day, your sixteenth minute ends now. But
hold your little ponies, dear listener, there are still a
(38:18):
few more characters that I have to share with you.
Next week we check in with the main character of
twenty twenty four, Hailey 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 very twenty twenty five of her and
(38:40):
that's next week. But as acend off to our Tay series,
here is the man himself, honoring my people, the Irish
with Oh Danny Boy, We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Oh Danny Boy. The pipes.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
The pipes are lea from Glen to Glen and down
the mountainside. The songs gone and.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Do the roses, Fallly.
Speaker 6 (39:18):
Eats, You Eats, You must go, and I must buy,
but come ye back.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Queen Salons in the name.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Pollween.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Thele is host and White with Snow.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Sixteenth minute is a production of Whole Zone Media and Iheartwodia.
It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Astis.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans. Hemsy
Ian Johnson is our super using producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
(40:09):
producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee and Casper and my pet
Rockbird who will outlive us all Bye.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Joy ex.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Six.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
to the main characters of the Internet to see how
now 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 Tazon Day, a retrospective
on the Chocolate Rain singer's time in the Spotlight. And
(01:15):
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 two thousand and seven,
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 by
(01:38):
racial 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
(01:58):
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 twenties, And today
he's going to talk about how that translated into viral
fame and how it helped and hurt him come into
(02:19):
his own as a grown man, plus some weird a
sides because it's tays on Day.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Enjoy the twenty seventeen Beet interview where I first spoke
about Chocolate Rain being a ballad 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 two thousand and
seven to twenty seventeen, I became more and more averse
(02:48):
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 pag 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
(03:10):
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 twenty seventeen when
BT expressed interest, I think my dad was helping pay
(03:32):
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 seems 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.
(03:54):
What I can't say about the way I describe chocolate
Rain as a trojan horse that's not unique. I mean,
it's a history music. I mean, how many millions of
people have played Michael Jackson's they don't care about us
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,
(04:16):
either by overestimating risks or underestimating benefits. I didn't even
syndicate Chocolate Rain to digital stories until twenty ten, and yeah,
my thinking was, hey, you know, the video says download
the free MP three. 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
(04:37):
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
(04:59):
and ration 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
I would presume that human beings are motivated by accuracy
(05:19):
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 Taizon Day. I never played Tason
Day as a superhero avatar, and I never buried my
(05:42):
insecurity and my uncertainties when I described the twenty seventeen
Beeight interview as me being honest about the medium of
chocolal rain. And obviously it's a bit more complicated than
the same was dishonest before that, But generally speaking, I
am honest to a fault. I lived in Los Angeles
for twelve and a half years, which is famously a
play where everybody is bullshitting is the norm. Everybody is
(06:03):
name dropping, everybody is grasping for calling cards and 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 and 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.
But it's like, well, you know when I was working
with James Gunn, Well you know when I was talking
(06:25):
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
that 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 ooh and
curate yourself as a cult of personality and non stop
(06:46):
highlight reel of recognizable things. And I think anybody who
saw me at social events or conventions as Daizon day
saw me being visibly hesitant and reluctant and uncomfortable on
top of being autistic and neurologically since we overwhelmed just
being out in the world period. I was never good
(07:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
You know. They want Tazon Day to sink.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
Four include rain and you move away from 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
(07:41):
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 fanciness and cosplaying
aristocracy by poor people. Sorry, I know what that's like.
I'm speaking autobiographically. I'm just saying I will personally never
(08:02):
feel more comfortable with pageantry than a squirrel taking a
nap on Times Square on 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 Dazon Day is supposed to be, Adam is
an autistic deer cot in headlights everywhere he goes, and
Adam is a terrible liar. And also, to be fair,
(08:24):
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're 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
(08:45):
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
thoughts spaghetti with chapters and sub sections applied as an afterthought,
like the Manuscript is an acid trip that got sent
(09:07):
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 and to maybe it'd be called
middle middle class. But many more years my net worth
has technically been negative, and I've been very grateful to
(09:28):
have a family that's able to support me when they can.
As I mentioned earlier, I turned forty three this year.
In one of my biggest fears of my parents dying
is that, well, I mean, I'll obviously be sad and devastated,
and you know, there's that whole grief journey that one
goes through, but it so I was kind of like,
I'm not sure I've ever actually for a sustained period
of like a decade, lived as a financially independent adult.
(09:48):
Like I look at older transients who have nothing, and
I'm like, oh, I hope I don't end up there.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
But I don't know.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
There's no guarantees that Billie Club of life can beat
you up any moment. They're like, oh there's a car wreck, help,
there's can there's you know whatever. It's all downhill after
this podcast. This is a Swan song. I've said it
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
was young, partly because of what I talked about earlier,
the ethos I grew up with, Well, 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 the psychiatric disability has such a stigma
you can't just like use it because people like, oh,
(10:59):
it does not mean is 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
and things like domestic violence. But I digress a more
politic term that's used for neurodivergent and autistic people by
organizations like Culture City.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Kulture is sinceory inclusion.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
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 where
there go I'm on the set and the cameras rolling
and the cruise being paid, and oh shit, I can't
(11:41):
do this. I'm completely sincere overwhelmed, and this medication cocktail
is not helping. I've been miscast. That actually happened when
I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel in two thousand and seven.
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
(12:01):
and no keyboard, and being the passionate segment producers that
they are. They 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.
(12:22):
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 in 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
(12:45):
Chocolate Rain the way I wanted to sing it, which
was just with the microphone and the backing track. The
moment comes, Jimmy Kimmel hypes me up, the crowd is screaming,
the curtain goes up, and I cannot feel my arms,
like literally, I my hand it's felt like jello. I
was so disoriented and since re overwhelmed. I missed the
(13:05):
first four lines of the song. You know chocolate Rain
some stage right now, This feel of pain, chocolate rain,
a baby born with eye before this 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, spiced it in with my actual performance,
(13:29):
and they started with a very very very wide shot
like above the heads of the audience in the last row.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
You couldn't see me not singing.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
And God blessed the Q 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 Q card changed on time.
It's funny to think this was almost eighteen years ago.
I think there are a few shows that still use
handwritten cque cards and human operators, but it's a lost
(13:58):
art today. I know that my psychiatric experiences that contributed
to my mindor 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 hypercusius, misophonia, photophobia,
and hapophobia, dyspraxia, which is basically muddled signaling between your
brain and muscle movement, also played a role. My dyspraxia
(14:21):
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 side about
psychiatric metach is that stimulants like ADHDM phetamines will help
majorly improve my dyspraxia, but they will also worsen my sensitivity.
Is like misophonia, hapophobia, hyperacusis, et cetera, and all of
(14:44):
these are autistic comorbidities, meaning they just occur more in
autistic people. I should bring up alexithymia too, because alexithymia
is not having words for your feelings, and in my case,
it is 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
(15:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Oh wow, we're talking about spoon theory.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Now we're just doing like this crash course and autistic psychiatry.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Now.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
I started this by talking about trauma dumping, and it
goes back to the theme I touched on earlier, which
is 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
(15:44):
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 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
(16:05):
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
(16:26):
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 try 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
(16:48):
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 just that
singing and playing simultaneously it was not going to be
mission critical.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I showed up for the shoot.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
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
of events because when I'm in that type of moment
(17:26):
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 point too, I don't have a
prosthetic leg. I don't have a wheelchair. All I have,
(17:47):
with dozens of talented crew members on set and xxx
xx x amount of money being spent, are words coming
out of my mouth describing limitations that are invisible to
everybody else. And I know that as polite and different
and professional as everybody else is not of them.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Nderstand We'll be back with the grand conclusion to the world.
According to Tason Day, welcome back to sixteenth minute. Imagine
(18:28):
you're me and after nine months you've gotten your interview
with Taizon. Day you send questions back late because you're
struggling with depression. He checks in a 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,
(18:48):
and then the day arrives. Tayson Day replies with a
single audio file. But when you open that eye audio file,
it is two and a half hours long. Within the
audio file. Our thoughts insightful, thoughts deep. He maybe answers
(19:09):
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 taison
Days parting thoughts.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
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,
(19:46):
so there's 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
(20:07):
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 non mess of partially attempted
things that didn't really value stack or get executed in
a foundational way, including being Tazon day as an entertainer.
(20:30):
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 to
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,
(20:50):
took out what company's Instagram and nothing has been posted
for two months, it reflects poorly on you, or people
assume it is an un serious endeavor and you are
an un serious person, Like it would almost be better
to just not have an Instagram at that point, And
I can list one hundred different ways that rigging a
content economy wherever green content infrequently uploaded, content never has
(21:12):
organic region is not able to thrive, is grotesquely ablest
and unfair towards people who struggled to speak, people who
struggled 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. Not just say my Internet,
I'm saying like an old man.
Speaker 5 (21:31):
On my Internet, every piece of content got a fair shot.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Upload once a day, upload once a year. It was
the land of opportunity.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Although it's not even accurate to describe what we experience
in twenty twenty five 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 intro net. Like the early dial up services
in the eighties and nineties, Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, they
(22:04):
were closed networks. Those are intronnets, 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.
(22:24):
We are toiling on oligarchic algorithmic feed plantations. And because
the ten percent of the population who make the best
algorithmic kunti kentes, yes, I went there, get ninety percent
of the engagement on these platforms as they destroy their bodies,
destroy their mental health, destroy their personal relationships, desperately tossing
(22:45):
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 are drug cartels who have
a single nautical conciones. And I love today's influences. Many
are amazingly talented and very hard working. But we cannot
get to a point as a civilization where that is
(23:07):
the anticipated redemption arc for capitalism sucking.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
And that's what I fear.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
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 healthcare bills where I
look at the invoice and it's four hundred and fifty
dollars for a bandage. But it's okay because I'm gonna
be on the influencer grind and I can blow up
any day.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
No, it's not okay.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
You better start listing 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 Taizonda is.
An atom 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
(23:50):
because I am making and recording the best music I
have ever made. It's just hoping I 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
(24:10):
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
(24:33):
la carte.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
It's a take it or leave it quid pro quo.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
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, AI and derivative rights
with terrible economics that are impossible for independent artists to
opt out of. My grievance number two is bad deals
(24:58):
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
(25:19):
different and then take a percentage of the ad revenue.
There is a small amount of content management involved with
the shorts platforms because music tracks are being integrated with video,
but the percentage is being paid to distributors are awfully
high relative to my understanding of that actual cost. Grievance
number three amounts to YouTube in twenty twenty five being
a product design hot mess for independent musicians. Short history lesson.
(25:43):
I believe there was a time in two thousand and
nine when major music label music videos were approximately eighty
percent of YouTube's monetized advertising traffic. That's one reason major
music labels had leverage to force YouTube to create Vevo,
which is a separate reskin for their videos where they
get a better ad revenue split. Viacoms unresolved billion dollar
(26:03):
copyright lossit against YouTube also affected sentiments of 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 two three billion views regularly on
their Vivo music videos, we've seen the rising domination of
mobile viewing and algorithmic feeds that prioritize watch time, session time,
(26:27):
click through rates, etc. That's one reason you see content
creators who make longer gameplay videos like market Plier and
Dashy 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
(26:48):
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 Volli in
two thousand and nine, with thousands of content creators making
entire businesses out of parroting popular music videos, and after
(27:08):
twenty twelve they just became one of the lowest earning
content categories is important context for YouTube's products design afterwards.
The problem YouTube is trying to solve is that music
is tremendously disadvantaged at creating the user behavior and advertised
behavior that is most profitable for its business. That means
my grievance one and grievance two make the artists give
(27:30):
up their AI rights, their derivative work rights, and submits
to unfavorable social platform distribution terms. Most distributors are asking
for that before they'll anoint your own YouTube channel as
your official artist channel, which causes the channel subscribers to
merge if you have one that was autogenerated, which I
do right now. My main YouTube channel is eighteen years old.
It does not need a third party music distributor operating
(27:53):
as a multi channel network taking a portion of the
ad revenue on music video assets. As an independent muse
a 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
(28:14):
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 YouTube is an
absent parent and music as a category is its runt
child in terms of alphabet shareholder value. Although to be fair,
(28:34):
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.
(28:54):
It goes back to what I said earlier. Capitalism forces
fixed assets, fixed me, 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
(29:15):
in terms of I control what you see. You can
tell I'm getting prophetic when the mother goose rhyms come out,
the doctor seuss. The parts of this where my speaking
gets faster and less guttural are when my ADHD medication
is hitting and I'm just not fighting it. Doing this
actually had me go down from sixty milligrams to forty
milligrams of events, because on sixty I was like, I
(29:37):
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 lyrics very deliberately and moving my lips
in big formations, that is actually a muscular effort compensation
(30:00):
for the reduced neurological control that dyspraxia creates. There are
parts of me, the question, am I better off knowing that?
Because Tasonta was just doing what came naturally in the moment.
It was Taison Tape blowing up as an entertainer and
being forced into contact with society, me being put into
constant realization that I am not like others, but must
(30:22):
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
(30:43):
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 cast role of transcendent capability fused with profound disability.
I am both borderline savant and my information aggregation and
(31:05):
retention speed while measuring is learning disabled in some kind
of battery tests because my brain sucks at translating the
parallelism with which it experiences truth into the dogmatic serial
declarative that majoritarian neurology change humankind to its likeness with
and as that last sentence shows, it's a struggle that
(31:25):
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 pros meant I was stupid that
the job of a 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
(31:46):
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, it 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
(32:07):
reason to be confident in a safe and provided future.
Some people have that in the post blog, 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
(32:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
It was this.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Exceptional eye of the storm before ferocious backlash. People who
had to live under Jim Crow for seventy years looked
back at Reconstruction and mar and said, yeah, Mississippi had
a black senator. Yeah, 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
(33:11):
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,
(33:32):
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
(33:54):
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 seventy years.
(34:14):
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
(34:38):
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
(34:59):
no to make me free. There, guys, mother goose again,
I should end us. But it's been interesting for sure.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Thank you so much to the wonderful Taison 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
(35:28):
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
(35:48):
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
(36:09):
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
(36:29):
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 sixteenth minute
away from our character of the Week format and take
more time between series so I can take a closer
(36:52):
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
(37:15):
want to look at how this has developed more closely,
because stories like tay Is almost serve as a canary
in a coal mine for where we were headed and
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
(37:37):
any kind of fame unwittingly or rooted in mockery, Tazon
Day 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,
(37:58):
and it shouldn't have had to be hard won. But
there's a lot to learn from that experience. And so
with that, Tayson Day, your sixteenth minute ends now. But
hold your little ponies, dear listener, there are still a
(38:18):
few more characters that I have to share with you.
Next week we check in with the main character of
twenty twenty four, Hailey 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 very twenty twenty five of her and
(38:40):
that's next week. But as acend off to our Tay series,
here is the man himself, honoring my people, the Irish
with Oh Danny Boy, We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Oh Danny Boy. The pipes.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
The pipes are lea from Glen to Glen and down
the mountainside. The songs gone and.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Do the roses, Fallly.
Speaker 6 (39:18):
Eats, You Eats, You must go, and I must buy,
but come ye back.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Queen Salons in the name.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Pollween.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Thele is host and White with Snow.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Sixteenth minute is a production of Whole Zone Media and Iheartwodia.
It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Astis.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans. Hemsy
Ian Johnson is our super using producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
(40:09):
producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee and Casper and my pet
Rockbird who will outlive us all Bye.
Host
Jamie Loftus
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.