- I accidentally became a meme.
And this is that story.
I'm Tay Zonday.
I am probably best known for the viral video
♪ Chocolate rain ♪
And have also done a lot of other stuff.
I was in graduate school
on a career path to become a historian.
I made music as a hobby while I lived in Minneapolis.
I got tired of dragging equipment to open mics
in the middle of the winter
in Minneapolis where it's very cold.
YouTube came along and I said
"Hey, why don't I start filming music in my living room
and putting it on this YouTube thing?"
And it ended up being bigger than I expected.
The riff had been a riff of mine for many years.
The lyrics I wrote over a period of about six weeks
as a serious ballad about racism.
In some ways, perhaps it's a literal metaphor
for me having brown skin
and also the way that I play the riff on the piano,
being a little bit rain-like.
I uploaded "Chocolate Rain" to YouTube as an afterthought.
It wasn't intended as the final version.
It was just an experimental ballad and poem.
It did not blow up immediately.
Someone eventually posted it on digg.com.
Someone saw it there, they posted it on 4chan.
I would say it became viral largely in part
because I had a voice body mismatch.
You know, I look like Bruno Mars.
I sound like Barry White.
I move like Mr. Bean,
and a lot of 4chan's audience
saw me as a potential patron saint,
as sort of like, oh, this is a nerd.
He's totally not self-aware and he's being big and loud,
and this is like perfect.
And it started to go massively viral.
I did the worst satellite interview ever on CNN.
I had no experience in public relations.
It's an awkward nerd plucked out of his living room.
And everybody, three of the four major labels of the time
wanted to sign me as an artist,
everyone is contacting me to sing
at their kid's bar mitzvah, at their corporate party.
I just kind of said "yes"
and I didn't know what yes meant necessarily.
The Dr. Pepper video was a fun video.
Some people criticize it in some ways.
Everybody did that, you know,
Michael Jackson used his songs in major sponsorships.
Lionel Richie and whatnot,
so I did have a little bit of a precedent
for doing that type of pivot with the song.
People who worked at ad agencies,
they'll tell me "that video was in a case study
that I read in college" and I'm like
"Oh, I didn't know that was in a marketing case study."
I have been very lucky to pursue a career in entertainment,
acting, voice work, narration, and other things
that stemmed from that viral moment of "Chocolate Rain."
Why wasn't the world ready in 2007 for a serious message
about racism that perhaps it was ready for 2020?
In 2007, YouTube was not considered mainstream.
New things would become viral in a novelty economy.
Around 2012, recommendation engines started to show people
what they wanted to see on the internet.
It sort of supercharged the ability of people to fall off
onto their own islands of their own prejudices and biases
and live in a reality distortion field.
So there was a sort of lag time where anti-racism
and progressive thought had to
mobilize itself against that onslaught.
What gives me hope is that a 12-year-old
who is watching "Chocolate Rain" today
has many more tools to understand the actual message
of a critique of institutional racism
than a 12-year-old who was watching it in 2007.
(relaxed music)