the world according to tay zonday

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello sixteenth minute listeners. It's Jamie, just saying really quick
at the top that a show that is my honor
to produce on the iHeartRadio network. We 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

(00:24):
that began in twenty nineteen. It's created, hosted, and reported
by the wonderful Theo Henderson. He began the podcast while
living on the streets of LA 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

(00:44):
the unhoused while continuing to center their own perspectives and experiences.
We've been nominated in a Weby 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

(01:04):
if you both gave us a vote and also checked
out the show. You can do both at the link
and 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.

(01:26):
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 nineteen eighty eight. My
dad loved Billy Bragg. He's a punk, Dad staple and
mister Bragg, who's still with us, built his career on
leftist politics that some fans will debate whether he remained

(01:49):
completely consistent with many such punks. But regardless, I love
this song and it's unflinchingly political.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
Mixing Puplin pul.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
He asks me what the U sees I offer.

Speaker 5 (02:05):
Embarrassment, my usual excuses while looking down the corridor fatuate
Vani's lighting.

Speaker 6 (02:14):
I'm looking for the quely forward.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
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 nineteen sixties, to
Oppenheimer's optimism leading to again the death of hundreds of thousands,

(02:44):
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

(03:05):
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,
so I'm join.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
This fugging whoever.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
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

(03:51):
feminist protests 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 nineteen sixties.

(04:12):
Here's Billy Bragg talking about the song in an interview,
saying that Waiting for the Great Leap Forward was.

Speaker 5 (04:18):
My way of owning up to the ambiguities of being
a political pop star, while stating clearly that I still
believe in Sam Cooks promised that a change was going.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
To come, and that song is one you absolutely know.

Speaker 7 (04:32):
I was by the river.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
In a little sense ooh and just live the river.
I'm in a running every since. It's been a long,
a long time coming when I loved Let's Chase Go Come.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Oh, Yes, A Change is Gonna Come. Was originally released
in nineteen sixty four, 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

(05:22):
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

(05:47):
lead singer Laura Jane Grace's transition, Loretta Lynn's the pill
that scandalized country music for being overtly pro birth control.

Speaker 8 (06:06):
Damn your bruder health, because now I've got.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
The far.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
There was Peter Tash's legalize It about well, you know,
there was Woody Guthrie's all you fascists are bound to
lose oil.

Speaker 8 (06:24):
We'll show these fascist what a couple of hill Billies
can do.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
And there's my man Billy Bragg again, with 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

(06:51):
an anti slavery folk spiritual, It was actually used as
a political signal. The sweet Chariot in question will 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

(07:13):
possibly can to erase the fact that Black Americans invented
both jazz and rock and roll, In the twentieth century,
politically charged hits kept coming. It would be impossible to
mention them all, but some of the highlights. The late
nineteen thirties brought Billie Holliday's Strange Fruit, a song about
public lynching of black Americans during the Jim Crow era.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
So Cheese Bazz Strange through Blood onwle.

Speaker 9 (07:54):
And led it.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
And while a Change Is Gonna Come is probably the
most famous example of a nineteen sixties civil rights protest song.
There are so many urgently politically charged classics from this
stretch of years, and you know them all. Nina Simons
Mississippi Goddamn, James Brown's say It Loud, I'm Black and
I'm proud Edwin Stars, Wow, Aretha Franklin's Respect my personal favorite,

(08:24):
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 picket lad and Pickett sience,
don't punish me with brutalities.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Talk to me so you can see what's going on.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
And I'm skipping around in history a bit here, But
there's also a legacy of protest in reggae music. The
way 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.

(09:15):
In the earlier days, you have NWA's Fucked the Police,
a song that Ice Cube said was four hundred years
in the making. There is Public Enemies Fight the Power,
which shared a title and pulled a sample from an
Eisley Brothers protest song of the same name from the seventies,
and soon after would become the iconic intro to Do
the Right Thing from Spike Lee. There's Tupac's Changes, Lauren

(09:39):
Hill's Black Rage, all the way up to Kendrick Lamar's
most famous works before recently pivoting to Ruin 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 prot songs are either

(10:01):
misunderstood in their day or later have their meaning capitalized
upon to sell something unrelated to its original message. Sam
Cooks A Change Is Gonna Come is actually a pretty
decent example of this. Back in twenty seventeen, Alicia Keys
covered that song for a Nike commercial, Nike being a

(10:22):
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

(10:43):
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

(11:05):
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

(11:32):
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. Billie Eilish and Lil NASA's come
straight to mind. Before that, there was MySpace, which can
take credit for basically every two thousand's emo band that

(11:56):
initially lacked studio backing. I had to check, but the
most famous Exams people 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 two thousands on that

(12:17):
platform that failed the catapult its singer songwriter to international
lasting fame.

Speaker 3 (12:25):
Broom Room Za two thousand and a.

Speaker 9 (12:40):
Can.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
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

(13:03):
realized was indeed a protest song.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
It's been a bud of Jella time. Been a bud
of Jella time, been a bud of Jella time.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Wait, 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.

(13:37):
You can see the top of his head in the
lower left corner of the video before he springs into
frame and starts singing.

Speaker 10 (13:46):
Tough metaling, some speed dry and others feel the pain
chok littering. A baby born would die before this in
tough littery.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
Adam Bonner aka a Dayzon Day. Your sixteenth minute starts now.

Speaker 11 (14:17):
Stay it, Thank you. Sixteen sixteen.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
to the main characters of the Internet see how their
moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says
about us and the Internet and this week and Thursday
and next week. Because boy is this a dense topic.
We are talking with one of the greats, the one

(15:17):
and only Tayson Day Tay, as you might expect, is
easily one of the most popular requests for this show
and has been from moment one, 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.

(15:39):
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 the Tayson 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

(16:01):
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 neurodivergence to forming
friendships with fellow Internet stars. And eventually Tay decided it
would be best if I sent him my questions and
he would then record his answers in response. But what

(16:24):
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 gonna do today.
I'm gonna give you the broad strokes of Tay's moment
of massive viral fame, and then for the remainder of

(16:45):
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 Tayzon Day, you will know he is
a really smart and insightful guy, and not for nothing.

(17:06):
His voice is way more fun to listen tooth than mine.
But before we can get there, we have to go
back to April two thousand and seven, a mass shooting
at Virginia Tech leaves thirty three dead and twenty nine
injured to this day, the most deadly school shooting in
American history. Talk radio host Don Imus as one of

(17:30):
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 twenty third, two thousand
and seven, a YouTube user going by Tayzon Day uploads

(17:52):
what he says was his twelfth 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

(18:12):
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 you wouldn't talk about for years
in the press. He's biracial, he was raised by a

(18:36):
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

(18:59):
more than and 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 Tayson Day was noticed by the YouTube staff. His
second video ever, which I'm just reading the title here,
Love original song by Kooby featuring Tayzon Day, was also

(19:25):
featured by the website on its front page after being
handpicked by an employee. Here's a taste. Oh shit, Hey
keep going, give me yiss a.

Speaker 9 (19:49):
Hot and have.

Speaker 12 (20:07):
I.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
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 aka Kelly from Shoes. But to refresher memory,
the YouTube of two thousand and seven had twenty million

(20:28):
monthly visitors to their now two point seven 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,

(20:52):
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'd 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

(21:17):
he had experienced or witnessed firsthand. So before we get
into how the two thousand and seven world received Chocolate Rain,
let's actually listen to the song, and we're gonna take
it first by verse. The song begins.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
Chaff lit rain. Some stayed dry and others feel.

Speaker 9 (21:38):
A pain chocolate rain.

Speaker 7 (21:41):
A baby born will.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
Die before this in chof lit ring.

Speaker 10 (21:46):
The school books say it can't be here again, chocolt rain.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
The prisons make you wonder where it win chok So.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
In short, Tay is talking about the liberal notion of
a post racial society, one that Adam Bonner was raised
in during the eighties and nineties 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.

(22:15):
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,

(22:39):
and then he gets into more issues.

Speaker 10 (22:41):
Let's listen we say chocklit rain, we is your neighborhood
insureance rage, chop lit rain makes us happy live. Then
in again, chocklit rain.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Made me cross the.

Speaker 10 (22:57):
Street of the day, choflp ray.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
Made you turn your hand the way child.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
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 song, but to be honest,
it is quite long, and I would like to get
to the Tay interview. So to summarize the other issues

(23:26):
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.

Speaker 6 (23:41):
Lines like this, the same crime has a high you've
priced upate the dure gen juries where is not in
the base?

Speaker 3 (23:49):
Turn that body into GDP.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
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 mill cup blames the baby, the nag The song
also tries to acknowledge international racism, and then closes on this.

Speaker 6 (24:15):
Verse, cho Rain, it's pre quickly crashing through your Chocolate Rain,
using you to bomb back down again.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
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

(24:50):
as low or even lower. The great Paul Robison is
a great example, a civil rights activist who most famously sang.

Speaker 7 (25:00):
Oh man rebad man, he must, but don't say no man.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
But this is YouTube in two thousand 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

(25:36):
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 two thousand and seven video.
He is a very young looking, skinny guy with this
deep bass voice, and the juxtaposition is a little jarring

(26:01):
at first, not to mention the camera he's using his
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
twenty five years old, wearing his white T shirt and glasses,

(26:25):
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

(26:46):
attention to this writing into the annals of history.

Speaker 5 (26:50):
I move away from the mic to breathe.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
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
two thousand and seven completely failed to interpret this clearly

(27:14):
political song for what it was, because he famously moves
away from the mic de 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

(27:34):
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 people did, and that's kind
of what Tay's fighting.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
He sings choflit rain.

Speaker 10 (27:51):
Worse than swearing, worse than calling names, chocksld rain, saying
it publicly, and you're insane, chocklit rain. No one wants
to hear her about it. Now, chocolate rain, which real hot?
It goes away somehow.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
So to answer the question, did 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

(28:32):
video take off a couple months after it was posted.
And here's Tayson Day explaining what he thinks was the
initial appeal of Chocolate Rain to the Internet. In a
video for Know Your Meme back in twenty twenty one.

Speaker 13 (28:46):
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 driven
by novelty, finding new interesting things that hadn't been seen before,
and kind of getting to know each other in that way.

(29:08):
And it changed around twenty eleven twenty twelve, and after that,
you know, videos did not go viral in the same way.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
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 racism in America. It much closer aligns with

(29:41):
headlines like this from the Edmonton.

Speaker 5 (29:44):
Journal Mo Chocolate, Mo Money.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
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

(30:11):
from August two thousand and seven.

Speaker 5 (30:14):
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.

(30:38):
Or maybe it's not, but isn't it.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
The next Internet forum to take notice of Chocolate Rain
was four Chan, which sounds a little scarier in this
case than it actually was, because at this time four
Chan 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

(31:04):
shit posting campaigns, a system they would never use for evil.

Speaker 14 (31:10):
Giorsine La Flesh was attacked by an online group of
gamers whose activities are known as gamer Gate. Initially a
social media hashtag for discussion of ethics and gaming journalism,
it has increasingly become a catchphrase for the online harassment
of female gamers.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
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 foothold in the mainstream.
Back in the two thousands. You could still become an
overnight star a Lah William Hung in two thousand and four,
but not without the help of a nationally successful media

(31:47):
conglomerate like American Idol. In two thousand and seven, 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 Freddy got
Fingered guy Never seen it, don't really want to, but

(32:07):
a group of four Chan users organized a shit posting
campaign in order to flood Green's livestreamed 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 Taizon Day

(32:29):
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 Haazon day. He embodied all
that was eccentric about how the Internet was perceived at
the time, and it was almost a sign that you

(32:51):
knew what the kids were into by knowing who he was,
which led to covers from other artists. Here's John Mayer
Dollar plus about a million expectedly bad parodies. Here's the

(33:19):
most popular one for some reason called Vanilla Snow Wow
good one.

Speaker 12 (33:26):
Snow a basketball Launtrey who became Vanilla Snow Open Doors
with hotspotettity use Vanilla the.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
Snow seven point three 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.

Speaker 13 (34:16):
Hey Tay, Hey, we're digging your Chocolate Rain song.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
What we love the song?

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (34:23):
What can you repeat that?

Speaker 12 (34:24):
I didn't get it?

Speaker 13 (34:25):
We like your song a lot, Chocolate Rain, Chocolate Rain.

Speaker 15 (34:29):
Yeah, well thanks?

Speaker 16 (34:31):
Are you making any money just yet off of this?

Speaker 12 (34:33):
At you too? Chocolate Rain?

Speaker 1 (34:35):
You know?

Speaker 17 (34:35):
I mean, I can't talk about that in too much detail.
You know, nothing that 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.

Speaker 12 (34:44):
Come on, now a little bit here there? Come on?

Speaker 17 (34:46):
How much were talking about?

Speaker 4 (34:48):
You know?

Speaker 3 (34:49):
That's all I can say.

Speaker 17 (34:50):
You know, it's uh not going to retire to my
penthouse in Dubai.

Speaker 16 (34:53):
Easily gets my vote for Song in the Summer from Minneapolis.
Please welcome tays On Day with the song Chocolate Rain
into Tonight's Internet Talent showcase.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
Thas On.

Speaker 16 (35:05):
Well, I'll tell you that was a real treat to
see you here live in person. Was that your first
live performance?

Speaker 18 (35:10):
It was pretty much I did one last week, but
pretty new to it.

Speaker 16 (35:13):
Well, I didn't know if your voice really was that
d board just your svoic was No, that's my voice,
it's real, Israel.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
What do you do for a living?

Speaker 17 (35:21):
I'm a grand student.

Speaker 16 (35:22):
And can you believe all the attention that you've gotten
for the No.

Speaker 17 (35:25):
You know, you just kind of put something silly upon
YouTube and it gets lots of attention.

Speaker 7 (35:29):
So what do you tend? No idea you could.

Speaker 16 (35:31):
Be the next Darth Vader, you know, or at least
say this is CNN.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
Let's just see this is CNN, and.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
Do you do you get recognized in the street and stuff?

Speaker 7 (35:40):
Now I do.

Speaker 17 (35:41):
It was funny. I was at a white Castle fast
food chain in the US the other day and you know,
this person was just sticking out the window as I
was trying to order at Burger, just like you know,
practically in my car, Charcot Ryan Chains. You know, it
does happen.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
This is just a sampling of Taizon Day's TV and
radio appearances from two thousand and seven into two thousand
and eight. 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

(36:19):
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 nose
dive into obscurity. Rip to all my Friend's jobs and
in a lot of print media people also tracked Tayzon

(36:40):
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

(37:00):
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

(37:20):
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 Taizon Day to William Hung, basically a novelty
act who didn't seem to be in on the joke, which,

(37:40):
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

(38:01):
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 two thousands Internet
famous playbook. He sells MP three's, although because Chocolate Rain
had been up online for so long it seemed difficult
to get much return on investment there. He sold Ringtones,

(38:24):
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 two thousand and eight, and he starts a
career in voice acting, which he would later successfully parlay
into gigs on Robot Chicken and Epic Rap Battles of History.

(38:46):
And because of where he went viral, Hayes on day
makes more videos and while nothing ever goes anywhere close
to his viral as Chocolate Rain, Hayes work on YouTube
in a 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

(39:10):
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 two thousand and seven.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
Sound the River Dance.

Speaker 9 (39:41):
Sad, the Salsa Dance, Sound the Dance, I do the
Can't Dance.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
And here is a very sincere ballad. This is called
Someday and it is also from September two thousand and seven.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
Lose Your Rise and hear my name Sody, I'll be
talk about I have failed a lot, but try to help.
I love you, child, you, but someday, Oh be God.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
And then there's the work that kind of falls somewhere
in the middle of these two categories, as July two
thousand and seven 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 he was right

(40:51):
in the middle of experiencing it himself.

Speaker 17 (40:55):
Man this is in and his something Else.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
Cindy.

Speaker 15 (41:00):
Closely, there is done Green everyone chasing Devin Dream, so
I can't help me a triple next funk When in
the auction turning my editor Jones Cavin's the flag.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah a virtue will dash skipping your wedding to bring
your old match shut out a lands o. Ye I
I've seen say it alone with Yam and Dream.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
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 doctor Pepper commercial in November two thousand and seven.
I give you cherry Chocolate, Rain, allow.

Speaker 18 (41:47):
Me to introduce myself. My name is j It's t
A Y T A Y to the Z. This is
the web and it's gone my murder your TV.

Speaker 8 (42:07):
It was chop Rain, a song out my bad your
stuffy chomp Yet Rain.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
Now I'm paid a.

Speaker 8 (42:17):
Half py half if job yet Rain re sim to
the punk you bands that we chop Yet Rain. I
moved my way from the night to breathe.

Speaker 9 (42:29):
He moves his mouth away from the.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
Mic so he can breathe.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
Bring okay as much as we're enjoying this amazing verse.
I'm gonna 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

(42:54):
are cool and definitely echo how William Hung was presented
in his early high budget appearances after he first got
famous on American idol.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
William I'm telling you the record company got nice meets you.
I want you to meet you in a PEARLFI.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
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

(43:32):
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.

Speaker 10 (43:51):
Mostly video clips mostly closed Bady Yo Shake, Sneaking Pig Baby,
Yo's fluid Big City pros got tad witty prose that over.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
And just like that, in short order, it's become a
Doctor 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

(44:28):
warp their meaning before him. He actually commented on the
process of working with Doctor Pepper at this time ten
years later in an interview with B. E. T.

Speaker 13 (44:38):
Doctor Pepper approached me to write a song about diet
cherry chocolate.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
Doctor Pepper.

Speaker 13 (44:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
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.
There are more clips from those same Opie and Anthony

(45:13):
and Lily Allen interviews.

Speaker 17 (45:15):
Yeah, I mean I mean I think, I mean, it
has undertones about you know, racism and institutional right.

Speaker 13 (45:20):
Yeah, yeah, I felt that, but I didn't know if
you had like a meaning to everything or some of
it was just the kind of words coming at you.
So what Day's trying to say is that Voss was wrong. Again,
It's not about Heroin Horace Boss.

Speaker 7 (45:34):
Yeah, he's pretty simple.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
Obvious question next, what is chocolate line?

Speaker 17 (45:46):
You know, I always say that the question is more
important than the answer.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
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 ten years, he
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 ten years later in twenty eighteen,

(46:15):
in that same interview with b T titled Hazon Day's
Chocolate Rain was more woke than we realized.

Speaker 13 (46:24):
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 it became a teenager like, wait, there
are these things and they don't really speak to my
life for who I know human beings to be.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
I guess overall, Chocolate.

Speaker 13 (46:42):
Rain was intended as a ballad about institutional racism, and.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
When he was asked why he waited so long to
talk about this in the years since, Hay basically cites
his own work. Here he is last year talking with
Anthony Padia from Smash alongside friend of the show Lena Morris.

Speaker 13 (47:00):
For ten years, I refused to answer that question.

Speaker 3 (47:03):
I dodged the first time.

Speaker 13 (47:05):
I actually just came out and said, yeah, it's a
ballad about institutional racism. Was a bet interview in twenty seventeen.
I hate to say, but I didn't want to run
everybody's fun and 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 eighty percent
of people who heard Chocolate Rain believed it was a

(47:26):
funny joke, and only maybe about twenty percent of people
saw a deeper meaning, whether it was you know, black
lives matter or you had Trayvon Martin. What a lot
who would come back to that and be like, oh,
I thought this was about defication when I was a child,
But now I'm looking back and like, I really see this,
this serious story about institutional racism.

Speaker 17 (47:48):
I'm like, oh, oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
He thought that being overtly political would ruin the fun
and probably sabotage his commercial prospects. The only value a
song has to capital 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 two thousand

(48:12):
and seven, 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 may be clear that extended this nineteen nineties
Clinton era liberal post racial attitude. If a black man
could be considered a viable candidate for the American presidency,

(48:34):
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

(48:55):
Beet interview in twenty eighteen. Kay 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
twenty eleven, after a few years in la and weathering
the recession, a song called Mama Economy.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
Are you confused about the economy?

Speaker 7 (49:19):
Well, have no fear.

Speaker 13 (49:20):
I'm going to explain the American economy right now.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
The dollar just think of a luck of promise from
the government. But the value of the dalla has to
be there to be relevant.

Speaker 13 (49:30):
The value of the dalla comes from China and a
van when they put the cast reserves in a US
dollar plan.

Speaker 3 (49:35):
There by firs Rey bonds from the federal reserves.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
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

(50:01):
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
twenty eighteen.

Speaker 13 (50:15):
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 to a point where it's like,
I'm looking at videos that go viral now and it's like,
I spent twenty four hours in Coca cola where someone
fills a bathtub with coca cola and that goes viral.
Lord I flew using leaf flowers, which he and by

(50:36):
the way, he doesn't actually find the video, but hey, good,
good for him, it went viral. There's this tremendous pressure
now to be sensational and extreme.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
So while Tay participated in Internet retrospectives in the years
that followed your classic BuzzFeed, I accidentally went virals. You're
Anthony Padilla videos. Hey moved forward in his life, not
sharing very much in the meantime, How is he look
back on all of it now, Oh, it's complicated. So
when we come back the world according to Tayson Day,

(51:21):
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.

Speaker 13 (51:31):
I'm Tayson Day. I sang the song Chocolate Rain, which
was one of the early viral videos on YouTube. As
I'm recording this, I'm almost forty three years old, and
at the time I was on the cusp of turning
twenty five. So April of two thousand and seven is
when the video got uploaded. And of course I've done
many other things, As is often the case in entertainment

(51:52):
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 in
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 torch bearer and this common point

(52:16):
of experiential reference for a moment in internet history and
a moment in viral video experience history. I'll see young
people commenting on my video saying, oh, my parents at
me here, as though chocolate rain is like the most
immaculately preserved tyrannosaurus. Via this, this embodiment, you know, the

(52:39):
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 and 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 or if

(53:00):
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 nineteen
eighty two while living in Chicago, as the youngest of
three by quite a bit. My siblings are six and
eleven years older than me. My parents were both school teachers.

(53:23):
My dad was a high school science teacher. My mother
taught elementary school and eventually served twenty five years as
a principal. Is served the right word there? I guess
it's a public service. I definitely had had many, many
memories of being alone in gigantic school buildings as a
child with my mom because she started her principal career

(53:43):
when I was about six, And if you didn't know,
principles 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 cell 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
reach hell business. I kind of felt like elementary schools
were our family business. We moved around quite a bit,

(54:05):
partly because of my mom's principal career, so I had
ten different schools that I attended from kindergarten through twelfth 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

(54:25):
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

(54:47):
remembers me from that time probably would say more than some.
But also for reasons I'll get into that were not
completely my parents' fault, ended up being self mutilating, suicidal,
and eventually from about ages sixteen to nineteen completely nonverbal
at home. And nonverbal at home really meant I could
not be verbal anywhere I believed there was any possibility
of my parents hearing me speak, which also meant the

(55:08):
outside world. I remember being seventeen 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

(55:31):
walked outside, and therefore it was safe for me to speak.
And the school was in Wilmette, Illinois, which is a
very storybook and douclic 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 answers.
I was grunting like a toddler and completely nonverbal and
terrified of being verbal. Eventually, that same therapist, again outside

(55:55):
of her job description, did family therapy between my parents
and I. I was about eighteen 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 twenties, and then in my thirties

(56:16):
and then in my forties, 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 Gi Jones,

(56:38):
no he Man, no Shira, no watching Indiana Jones or
mc iver or any of those other things that one
might have thought would be iconic for a nineteen eighties childhood.
I resented while growing up the way that what I
perceived as overparenting forced me into this mold of being
like a Steve vercle or Carlton Banks, the archetypic nerd

(57:00):
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

(57:22):
of at the time, but everybody did the best that
they knew how to do with 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 fifty years as of this regarding
they're still alive. Knock on woodcrossy fingers. As people get older,
my father would want me to clarify it, even the
story that I was. They provided for a child. We

(57:44):
were never rich, but we were also never poor, and
it was one of his proudest life accomplishments. So yeah,
I was born in eighty two, and a lot of
the things that you can mention pop culture wise, I
just wasn't allowed to you. Ninja Turtle is not allowed,
Terminator to not allowed, Wayne's World not allowed, Beavis Butthead
not allowed, mc hammer and other rap music not allowed.
Kurt Cobain or Devada country music not allowed. South Park,

(58:07):
which eventually parodied me. I wasn't allowed to watch that
when I was fifteen years old at the time that
I 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

(58:30):
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

(58:53):
that the same way that Star Trek got to pass.
I felt like Disney and Broadway music was the only
thing I was allowed to listen to Musically. I felt
the tremendous pressure at all ages as a child to
both costplay 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 realized in

(59:16):
retrospect I became sort of this costplayven ein Rand protagonist,
this little seedling who oversignaled 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

(59:37):
can be good, I think, to not turn your kids
into a therapist. But on the other hand, when feelings
and irrationality and subjectivity that we each have inside of
us just to 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

(59:58):
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

(01:00:20):
or my family. Both Geene 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 Mulan.
We didn't talk about race in my family. My dad's white,
my mom's black. I do not present as white passing

(01:00:41):
at all. I'd 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 movements, 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

(01:01:05):
would say that there is a true love story that
race never occurred to either of them, and it's kind
of this dumb idea that the world retcouned onto the
trajectory of their lives. So if at any point of
my childhood I've en 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

(01:01:27):
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
nineteen nineties, which, if anyone recalls, was not a post
racial utopia. And in some ways, I feel like my

(01:01:49):
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

(01:02:10):
his mom's racial identity. There's a lot more to be
said about my teenage years especially, but I'm going to
zoom ahead on the timeline to being age twenty one
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 this point, I had started learning more,
as often happens in college, about marginalization theory and critical
race theory and black radicalism and Belle Hooks. And I

(01:02:34):
was having lunch with my parents at hometown beffet 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

(01:02:56):
part of him was saying, not me. 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, is part of
sociological marginalization theory can lend because my father was not

(01:03:19):
alone in that type of reaction. I think a lot
of people react by feeling agast, 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 in a whole lot of different

(01:03:40):
timelines in seeking to answer this question, why did my
white father cry when twenty one year old me enthusiastically
celebrated learning about white supremacist capitalist patriarchy from Bell Hooks.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
We'll be back with more taison day maybe.

Speaker 13 (01:04:10):
I finished my undergrad in communications in two thousand and
four at the Evergreen State College, where as a footnote,
I was the twenty twenty one commencement speaker. In late
summer two thousand and four, I moved to Minneapolis and
began the PhD program at American Studies at the University
of Minnesota. I still see in Minnesota. Like Minnesotan, I
have extended family Minneapolis, so I visited as a child,
so I was always a part time Minnesotan, even growing

(01:04:31):
up in Chicago, I did not thrive as a graduate student.
To enjoy being a graduate student, I put enjoy there
in quotes. You have to either really love research or
love teaching, love pedagogy, and 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

(01:04:52):
diagnosed at age fifteen, 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
eighteen or may becoming a legal adult and then ages
eighteen to thirty six is me kind of figuring out
how regressed my childhood actually left me. And the next
eighteen years we're figuring out how to retread the first

(01:05:14):
eighteen and mature to being a viable human being in society.
So age thirty six was my age eighteen, So with
any luck, age one hundred will be my age fifty Anyway.
By the summer of two thousand and seven, when Chocolate
Rangin went viral, I was a distracted and middling PhD
student dealing with a lot of unseen internal baggage. I

(01:05:37):
apologized 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 and 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

(01:06:01):
a great performer or singer live. I've learned that I'm very,
very sensory overwhelmed, both in hapophobia, sensitivity to touch, hypercusis, missiphonia,
sensitivity to sound, photophobia, sensitivity delight, and all of that
kind of overwhelms me in live environments or honestly just
every day society environments. But I didn't know that quite

(01:06:22):
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 Taison Day,
which is not my birth name. My birth name is
Adam Potter. But Taison Day was this alter ego for
my music pursuits, and I assumed it would never have

(01:06:45):
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 stage piano,
the same thing I did at open Mics, and eventually
I wrote a song over a backing track that had

(01:07:08):
been created by an Australian who goes by the moniker
of Kooby. 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 in early two
thousand and seven, and flt like winning the lottery to

(01:07:29):
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

(01:07:51):
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 arrange 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

(01:08:14):
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 two thousand and seven, it had about
thirty thousand views. Then somebody posted it ondig dot com,
which is kind of an earlier version of Reddit with
a slower cycle time. Someone saw it on that social

(01:08:36):
book marking site dig and decided to post it on
four chan. Four Chan was an Internet forum primarily known
as an imageboard and also known for being to say,
very inclusive. To put it mildly with regard to the
content that surfaced on their b sub form other than
my own experience, which is that when Chocolate Rain was

(01:08:57):
posted on four Chan in two thousand and seven, I
entered a succession of nerds that four Chan both embraced
and helped the spread on social media, prior nerds including
Gary Postman Tom Green, who are both more than able
to tell their own stories. So yeah, that's the story
of my recollection. My first aha moment that Chocolate Rain
might be going more viral was in early July two

(01:09:19):
thousand and seven, when four Chan 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 Choklue Rain, and you know,
Tom Green, being a good improv comedian, he took it
as a prank call and yes and yeah Rain and

(01:09:40):
slammed the phone and hung up, and I was kind
of like, oh, wait, I've heard of Tom Green before.
After the dig dot com and then four Chan exposure,
Chocolate Rain began to take off as a wider cultural phenomenon.
A day or two later, Carson Daley, who was doing
a late night show, and I believe in BC at
the time featured it on his show and in Midgely.

(01:10:00):
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 OPI 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 and experienced interviewer. I spoke

(01:10:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:10:43):
It was going.

Speaker 13 (01:10:44):
Viral as a oh wow, there's the funny guy who
moves like mister Bean, with a voice like Barry White
and has absolutely no awareness of it. So from mid
July to the end of July two thousand and seven,
I probably did thirty or forty different media interviews, and
in none of them, was I actually ready to be
a person, because I said earlier that there was a

(01:11:05):
little bit of strategy in 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 why a autism spectrum disorder is probably my most
public and formal diagnosis. I probably also experienced dissociative identity disorder,
also formerly known as multiple personality disorder, which is basically

(01:11:29):
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

(01:11:50):
and you never built 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

(01:12:11):
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
was informed by their own traumas. But I was not
an easy project to raise, and it's kind of amazing

(01:12:32):
I developed into any type of functioning adult, regressed or not.
So I can't take everything that I know in twenty
twenty five and ask, well, hey, why wasn't that done
in nineteen eighty five 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 ten years.
When I say I did not know how to be

(01:12:54):
a person, while I believe I was trending worldwide on Google,
his chocolate Rain was going by. 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 were contacting me to like, please come

(01:13:17):
sing of 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 Taizon Day. Depersonalization derealization disorder
DPDR is another psychiatric diagnosis that can be a co
morbidity of autism. I feel like I should stop listing

(01:13:37):
psychiatric diagnoses because I've often joked that the DSM five
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 prints in his
Purple Rain song. I did a big remix with Doctor Pepper.
The following spring, I was parodied on South Park. I

(01:13:58):
did Weezer's Pork and Dads video that brought many viral
stars together. The following summer two thousand and eight, I
want 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 offered that I accepted.
Notice how I describe this period of my life through
headline grabbing events that I participated in, but that were

(01:14:21):
largely initiated by other people, not myself, Because while I
was twenty five and twenty six years old on the
outside in two thousand and seven to two thousand and eight,
on the inside, I was still six or seven years
old and learning how to process being in contact with
an over stimulating world that my parents had largely said, well,
just don't be in contact with it, We're not allowed

(01:14:43):
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 Spotnik, and we
think it's going to automit the out within Becorde Saturday
full Dubois another one with these greg that video if

(01:15:03):
Russian dressing her that terrible action, I would pretend to
be Aquafina. So while I was great at conceptualizing tas
On Day as a recognizable and iconic brand, Adam Ponter,
who I actually am outside of Tayson Day, lacked the
developmental and life skills to hew that brand coherently out
of a chaotic world. It's hard to describe the magnitude

(01:15:24):
of just the sensory experience that overwhelmed me just walking
around in public or being anywhere as chocolate rain blew
up and you know, continued to become sort of a phenomenon,
because you know, I'd be in the drive through at
White Castle and the person practically falls out the window
unto my lap, trying to take my picture as they're
handing me my sliders. And it's not just my face

(01:15:46):
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 Yella Chocolate Ride,
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 at seven to eleven,

(01:16:07):
completely covering up the entire world that's days on day,
even if they hadn't thought about me for fifteen years.
Just put microphones in all the intersections. He'll be trapped
because 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 to just sas to show
everybody the picture I drew. So I just described some
of the magnitude of public attention that entered my life

(01:16:31):
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 could just be a kid. I had to be

(01:16:53):
the teacher's son, the principal son. That I couldn't be
my age. I was always surrounded by older families, so
I had to be older. LUs 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

(01:17:13):
many maladaptive beliefs and behaviors to cope with being auxistic
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

(01:17:34):
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 lean 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

(01:17:56):
is manic and confident when he has an opportunity to
dramatic demonstrate both being weird and correct. Some of you
going 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

(01:18:17):
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 pat. My entire childhood, from

(01:18:38):
the youngest ages I can remember, like three, all the
way to like being nonverbal, and it taken five years
to graduate high school at age nineteen. 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

(01:18:59):
people and 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.

Speaker 3 (01:19:06):
I don't know if anybody's that normal.

Speaker 13 (01:19:08):
You ever had that experience where you believe that your
family has all these problems and then you learn about
somebody else's family.

Speaker 3 (01:19:15):
Like, oh, shoot.

Speaker 13 (01:19:17):
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 child the trauma that 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

(01:19:39):
and what felt like some upside down staring at oggling
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 sh

(01:20:00):
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.

(01:20:21):
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

(01:20:42):
lawn mower, a dumpt In the battles of Brave Heart,
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?

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
And that's as good a place as I need to
end the first part of our Tayzon 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

(01:21:23):
his political awakening, spurred on by this 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 Tazon Day sixteenth

(01:21:44):
minute as a production of fool Zone Media and iHeart
rod Desk. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Jamie Rostis. Our executive producers are Sophie Lickterman and Robert Evans.
The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer, and our
editor are song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant Crater and pet. Shout outs to our dog

(01:22:06):
producer Anderson, my cat's flee and Casper, and my pet Rockbert,
who will outlive us all. Bye.