the world according to tay zonday

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

addresses Billy Bragg's insecurities around being a political artist. In the verse I just shared, he says that he's embarrassed to be a political musician in an age where it didn't feel like his work was moving the needle very much, even when that music was successful for him personally. And maybe the most famous line from the song is this, so I'm join.

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

like Bob Dylan, but music is so cool. Protest music is a genre so vast that it's easier to break it down into subcategories, whether that be by musical genre or just subject. There's against Me's transgender dysphoria, Blues about lead singer Laura Jane Grace's transition, Loretta Lynn's the pill that scandalized country music for being overtly pro birth control.

was time to begin the dangerous process of escape. And while throughout history, white music executives have done everything they possibly can to erase the fact that Black Americans invented both jazz and rock and roll, In the 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.

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, 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.

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 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 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 company that's been credibly accused of their product being produced

in sweatshops in East Asia. In the last couple of months, there have been criticisms lobbed against Kendrick Lamar for headlining the Super Bowl due to, among other things, the NFL not being an institution known for supporting black lives. There's a great episode of Code Switch on NPR on this topic of the commercialization of hip hop and rap throughout time from a couple months ago that I'm going to

link in the description for more on that topic. But the point is that protest music is both in the DNA of music history, but that music's message is often sanitized in order to be monetized. But everything we've talked about here so far has had to make its way through traditional music hubs, record labels, promotional machines, even if those labels are independent or pretty small, because for a long time that was really the only way to get

your work out there until until you've got mail. The Internet was a new world when it came to music distribution, with so many of today's biggest acts getting their start by making music in their bedroom and uploading it to band Camp or SoundCloud. 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

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 platform that failed the catapult its singer songwriter to international lasting fame.

you that this was worth the wait. This is a story that needs to be told in multiple parts and in a way that we've never done on this show before. What we're airing is less of an interview with Tay than Tay Aka Adam telling you his story directly. Okay,

let me explain. I first reached out 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 black mother and white father, and is autistic, another facet of his life that he wasn't initially open to sharing

about outside of performing at a fundraiser or two. All that to say, Tay's interest in the themes of discrimination that are explored in Chocolate Rain come from a very sincere place and were initially intended to make people think more than 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 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.

algorithms as they are today. And that doesn't mean that the site was a total meritocracy, but it was certainly

much closer and there was far less competition from other users. So, as Tay explains in our interview and in many others he's done, this first bump of encouragement on the platform was what motivated him to finish and then upload Chocolate Rain, a song he'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

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.

The next few verses expand upon the idea of a post racial society, lyrics like zoom the camera out and see the lie only in the past is what they say, and then he gets into more issues.

racism is still alive and well. And there are many more references to the prison industrial complex.

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 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, takes a breath during the song. He leans really far away from the microphone and kind of like inhales from

the side of his mouth. It's a little weird, to be sure, but what makes it iconic is that Tay in the video adds text on screen that further draws attention to this writing into the annals of history.

in the song. The liberal idea of a post racial society suits people of many races, an idea that assured them that America used to be a racist place, but it isn't now. And while certainly not everyone drank this kool aid, a lot of people did, and that's kind of what Tay's fighting.

initial appeal of Chocolate Rain to the Internet. In a video for Know Your Meme back in twenty twenty one.

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 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 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 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 most popular one for some reason called Vanilla Snow Wow good one.

dive into obscurity. Rip to all my Friend's jobs and in a lot of print media people also tracked Tayzon Day's journey to attempt to monetize the sudden fame that had come with Chocolate Rain, and so, like a lot of early online successes. We just spoke with Liam Kyle Sullivan about this recently, there weren't any systems in place that could take an online star into a mainstream star in the way there is now, in part because the

Hollywood people with money didn't yet understand how the internet worked. Really, people who became famous online were viewed as flashes in the pan, and even if they weren't, as Tay explains in our interview and in others, virtually every major music label was trying to work with him. At the time that Chocolate Rain got really big, most big institutions didn't

know what to do with Tay. Many publications at the time compared Taizon Day to William Hung, basically a novelty act who didn't seem to be in on the joke, which, in my opinion is also a pretty ablest way of assuming that neurodivergent people are incapable of being in on the joke. We'll circle back to that, but what we see Tay try to do to monetize his career and turn it into something more because yeah, he dropped out of grad school shortly after, just like William Hung and

Lena Morris did after they went viral. But what we see him do is kind of the playbook we've discussed on the show before, very much the 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, 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.

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 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.

Tay's newfound fame and clout. Here's a bit of the second rap guest first.

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.

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, 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 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.

switches to covering songs he likes. As with Liam Kyle Sullivan's experience performing as Kelly, Tay remained an iconic, beloved early YouTube character, but the timing of his fame made it nearly impossible to capitalize on, and like many early YouTube stars, he didn't have any desire to be a YouTuber as that came to be known in the years to come. Here he is in a vlog from March twenty eighteen.

good for him, it went viral. There's this tremendous pressure now to be sensational and extreme.

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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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 felt very intensely and helicopter parented as a child. As school teachers, my parents had plenty of examples of who they did not want their kids to turn out like. I've had the privilege of growing older with both of my parents, so that's been an interesting perspective because I

barely survived my teenage years. I experienced some bullying in junior high in the start of high school. Anyone who remembers me from that time probably would say more than some. But also for reasons I'll get into that 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 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 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 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 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, 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

and model child. I realized much much later in life that my parents had their own traumas that were unique to them that informed the way that they parented me, and then that I'm also autistic and had certain sensitivities in the ways that I reacted to stimuli. That you know, there was a lot happening that nobody was particularly conscious of at the time, but everybody did the best that they knew how to do with 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 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, 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 then especially characters like Spock and Data and Odo existed on sort of a nerd pass island that did not set off my parents' anxieties, and therefore it was allowed. There were aspects of my childhood family life that could be emotionally immature and tumultuous, not always have the healthiest dynamics, and so characters like an Android or a Vulcan who

have no emotion. I retreated into those characters to process that the same way that Star Trek got 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 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 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

validates everybody involved is a life skill. Instead of learning that skill, I learned to care for my parents by pretending to be perfect and repress my true self, which probably leaned towards wanting to be more of a wild child. My parents would ardently say this was never their intention, but at times in my life it has felt like that has been the only pathway to validation from them

or my family. Both 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 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 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 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 mom did not ever want my father to feel left out of my life experience or for me to feel like I was somehow less the son of my father, which America did not give my mom an easy job, because that's exactly what it tells me, that I am less the son of my white father. I mean, our

first black president was biracial. He didn't get to use his mom's racial identity. There's a lot more to be said about my 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

be featured on the front page. I knew the week that the love video was going to be featured, and I also knew that I could sort of double dip on the exposure that that feature created for me by having another video in the automatic or default player of my YouTube channel, so that people who watched the featured video on the front page would click and see this

other video on my channel. So I had already written the lyrics to Chocolate Rain over the prior six weeks, and I had the 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 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 a trauma response that happens when you are, for whatever reason, not able to naturally develop and cohere a healthy individual

identity in your childhood. That's not all it is, but that's what it is for me, And what happens in many experiences of dissociative identity disorder, including my own, is you end up being kind of a receiver of identity and you never built any infrastructure to push back on that.

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

parents are passionate, loving, imperfect people. Part of their parenting was informed by their own traumas. But I was not an easy project to raise, and it's kind of amazing I developed into any type of functioning adult, regressed or not. So I can't take everything that I know in 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 into an embrace of weird affect while actually wanting to be less remarkable is that independent of race, gender, sexuality, height, or any other personal attribute, I felt constantly marginalized as a child and harmed by that marginalization and resentful towards it.

So even without sociological marginalization theory or critical race theory, I am feeling from ages barely beyond being a toddler, like I am missing things that are key to connecting with and belonging in the rest of the species. So you can bet that when I first encountered those types of theories in college, I took to them like a 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?

discovered about writing and theory around race in America. So this Thursday, the Political World according to Tazon Day sixteenth 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 producer Anderson, my cat's flee and Casper, and my pet Rockbert, who will outlive us all. Bye.