Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello sixteenth minute listeners. It's Jamie, just saying really quick
Speaker 2: at the top that a show that is my honor
Speaker 2: to produce on the iHeartRadio network. We the Unhoused has
Speaker 2: been nominated for a Webby and we need your help.
Speaker 2: If you haven't listened to the show before, first of all,
Speaker 2: I highly recommend you do. But it is a show
Speaker 2: that began in twenty nineteen. It's created, hosted, and reported
Speaker 2: by the wonderful Theo Henderson. He began the podcast while
Speaker 2: living on the streets of LA and it's grown significantly
Speaker 2: during that time, but remains the only podcast that tells
Speaker 2: stories that affect the unhoused and tells the stories of
Speaker 2: the unhoused while continuing to center their own perspectives and experiences.
Speaker 2: We've been nominated in a Weby category and we need
Speaker 2: your help. If you click the link in the description,
Speaker 2: it goes directly to our category. It's literally two clicks.
Speaker 2: It's a tight race, so I would really appreciate it
Speaker 2: if you both gave us a vote and also checked
Speaker 2: out the show. You can do both at the link
Speaker 2: and the description. I want to ask what your favorite
Speaker 2: protest song is, but I don't know if you're prepared
Speaker 2: for that question, because protest songs over time haven't always
Speaker 2: been celebrated for their original intention. Okay, I'll tell you mine.
Speaker 2: It's from a pretty political artist who I grew up
Speaker 2: listening to. It's called Waiting for the Great Leap Forward
Speaker 2: by English singer Billy Bragg from nineteen eighty eight. My
Speaker 2: dad loved Billy Bragg. He's a punk, Dad staple and
Speaker 2: mister Bragg, who's still with us, built his career on
Speaker 2: leftist politics that some fans will debate whether he remained
Speaker 2: completely consistent with many such punks. But regardless, I love
Speaker 2: this song and it's unflinchingly political.
Speaker 3: Mixing Puplin pul.
Speaker 4: He asks me what the U sees I offer.
Speaker 5: Embarrassment, my usual excuses while looking down the corridor fatuate
Speaker 5: Vani's lighting.
Speaker 6: I'm looking for the quely forward.
Speaker 2: So there's already a lot coming up here. The title
Speaker 2: references Mao Zedong's disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in China,
Speaker 2: which promised progress but resulted in the death of millions
Speaker 2: by starvation, and its lyrics reference everything from the false
Speaker 2: promise of the Kennedy administration in the nineteen sixties, to
Speaker 2: Oppenheimer's optimism leading to again the death of hundreds of thousands,
Speaker 2: to che Guevara, Fidel Castro. The list of references goes on.
Speaker 2: But what I love about this song is how it
Speaker 2: addresses Billy Bragg's insecurities around being a political artist. In
Speaker 2: the verse I just shared, he says that he's embarrassed
Speaker 2: to be a political musician in an age where it
Speaker 2: didn't feel like his work was moving the needle very much,
Speaker 2: even when that music was successful for him personally. And
Speaker 2: maybe the most famous line from the song is this,
Speaker 2: so I'm join.
Speaker 3: This fugging whoever.
Speaker 2: The revolution is just a T shirt away. Come on,
Speaker 2: that's so good. He's cooking here, folks. Billy Bragg is
Speaker 2: talking about something that is still very present in today's culture,
Speaker 2: the tendency for protest to be quickly commoditized in some
Speaker 2: ways to make it more acceptable, aside any of the
Speaker 2: feminist protests from the first Trump administration. And he wrote
Speaker 2: this song as so many of these political songs have
Speaker 2: been written in the past, in conversation with a song
Speaker 2: from a previous generation that he admired, that song being
Speaker 2: Sam Cook's A Change is Gonna come from the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: Here's Billy Bragg talking about the song in an interview,
Speaker 2: saying that Waiting for the Great Leap Forward was.
Speaker 5: My way of owning up to the ambiguities of being
Speaker 5: a political pop star, while stating clearly that I still
Speaker 5: believe in Sam Cooks promised that a change was going.
Speaker 2: To come, and that song is one you absolutely know.
Speaker 7: I was by the river.
Speaker 3: In a little sense ooh and just live the river.
Speaker 3: I'm in a running every since. It's been a long,
Speaker 3: a long time coming when I loved Let's Chase Go Come.
Speaker 2: Oh, Yes, A Change is Gonna Come. Was originally released
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty four, in the midst of the civil
Speaker 2: rights movement, and was inspired by Sam Cook and his
Speaker 2: entourage being refused rooms at a holiday inn because of
Speaker 2: their race and fun fact, the song was also inspired
Speaker 2: by Sam Cook's love of the Bob Dylan song Blowing
Speaker 2: in the Wind from the previous year. I don't even
Speaker 2: like Bob Dylan, but music is so cool. Protest music
Speaker 2: is a genre so vast that it's easier to break
Speaker 2: it down into subcategories, whether that be by musical genre
Speaker 2: or just subject. There's against Me's transgender dysphoria, Blues about
Speaker 2: lead singer Laura Jane Grace's transition, Loretta Lynn's the pill
Speaker 2: that scandalized country music for being overtly pro birth control.
Speaker 8: Damn your bruder health, because now I've got.
Speaker 3: The far.
Speaker 2: There was Peter Tash's legalize It about well, you know,
Speaker 2: there was Woody Guthrie's all you fascists are bound to
Speaker 2: lose oil.
Speaker 8: We'll show these fascist what a couple of hill Billies
Speaker 8: can do.
Speaker 2: And there's my man Billy Bragg again, with which he
Speaker 2: performs at rallies to this day. But one of the
Speaker 2: largest subcategories under the protest music umbrella is Black American
Speaker 2: protest music, which has produced some of the greatest songs
Speaker 2: of all time. Swing Low Sweet Chariot was not just
Speaker 2: an anti slavery folk spiritual, It was actually used as
Speaker 2: a political signal. The sweet Chariot in question will the
Speaker 2: underground railroad, and the song being played meant that it
Speaker 2: was time to begin the dangerous process of escape. And
Speaker 2: while throughout history, white music executives have done everything they
Speaker 2: possibly can to erase the fact that Black Americans invented
Speaker 2: both jazz and rock and roll, In the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: politically charged hits kept coming. It would be impossible to
Speaker 2: mention them all, but some of the highlights. The late
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties brought Billie Holliday's Strange Fruit, a song about
Speaker 2: public lynching of black Americans during the Jim Crow era.
Speaker 3: So Cheese Bazz Strange through Blood onwle.
Speaker 9: And led it.
Speaker 2: And while a Change Is Gonna Come is probably the
Speaker 2: most famous example of a nineteen sixties civil rights protest song.
Speaker 2: There are so many urgently politically charged classics from this
Speaker 2: stretch of years, and you know them all. Nina Simons
Speaker 2: Mississippi Goddamn, James Brown's say It Loud, I'm Black and
Speaker 2: I'm proud Edwin Stars, Wow, Aretha Franklin's Respect my personal favorite,
Speaker 2: Marvin Gay's What's going On, which was a Motown release
Speaker 2: that protested the Vietnam War, and then Governor Ronald Reagan's
Speaker 2: violent reprisal on student protesters picket lad and Pickett sience,
Speaker 2: don't punish me with brutalities.
Speaker 3: Talk to me so you can see what's going on.
Speaker 2: And I'm skipping around in history a bit here, But
Speaker 2: there's also a legacy of protest in reggae music. The
Speaker 2: way Get Up Stand Up is probably the most famous
Speaker 2: mainstream example, but a lot of Bob Marley's catalog stands
Speaker 2: out as having these revolutionary themes, and protest was critical
Speaker 2: to early rap music all the way to the present.
Speaker 2: In the earlier days, you have NWA's Fucked the Police,
Speaker 2: a song that Ice Cube said was four hundred years
Speaker 2: in the making. There is Public Enemies Fight the Power,
Speaker 2: which shared a title and pulled a sample from an
Speaker 2: Eisley Brothers protest song of the same name from the seventies,
Speaker 2: and soon after would become the iconic intro to Do
Speaker 2: the Right Thing from Spike Lee. There's Tupac's Changes, Lauren
Speaker 2: Hill's Black Rage, all the way up to Kendrick Lamar's
Speaker 2: most famous works before recently pivoting to Ruin Drake's Life,
Speaker 2: songs like all Right, Stay Woke, and on and on.
Speaker 2: But music, particularly music so successful that virtually everyone knows it,
Speaker 2: is a business, and plenty of prot songs are either
Speaker 2: misunderstood in their day or later have their meaning capitalized
Speaker 2: upon to sell something unrelated to its original message. Sam
Speaker 2: Cooks A Change Is Gonna Come is actually a pretty
Speaker 2: decent example of this. Back in twenty seventeen, Alicia Keys
Speaker 2: covered that song for a Nike commercial, Nike being a
Speaker 2: company that's been credibly accused of their product being produced
Speaker 2: in sweatshops in East Asia. In the last couple of months,
Speaker 2: there have been criticisms lobbed against Kendrick Lamar for headlining
Speaker 2: the Super Bowl due to, among other things, the NFL
Speaker 2: not being an institution known for supporting black lives. There's
Speaker 2: a great episode of Code Switch on NPR on this
Speaker 2: topic of the commercialization of hip hop and rap throughout
Speaker 2: time from a couple months ago that I'm going to
Speaker 2: link in the description for more on that topic. But
Speaker 2: the point is that protest music is both in the
Speaker 2: DNA of music history, but that music's message is often
Speaker 2: sanitized in order to be monetized. But everything we've talked
Speaker 2: about here so far has had to make its way
Speaker 2: through traditional music hubs, record labels, promotional machines, even if
Speaker 2: those labels are independent or pretty small, because for a
Speaker 2: long time that was really the only way to get
Speaker 2: your work out there until until you've got mail. The
Speaker 2: Internet was a new world when it came to music distribution,
Speaker 2: with so many of today's biggest acts getting their start
Speaker 2: by making music in their bedroom and uploading it to
Speaker 2: band Camp or SoundCloud. Billie Eilish and Lil NASA's come
Speaker 2: straight to mind. Before that, there was MySpace, which can
Speaker 2: take credit for basically every two thousand's emo band that
Speaker 2: initially lacked studio backing. I had to check, but the
Speaker 2: most famous Exams people is in fact Panic at the Disco.
Speaker 2: And of course there was early YouTube. As we've discussed
Speaker 2: on this show before, Justin Bieber is probably still YouTube's
Speaker 2: most successful pop star output, but there are plenty of
Speaker 2: songs that went viral in the two thousands on that
Speaker 2: platform that failed the catapult its singer songwriter to international
Speaker 2: lasting fame.
Speaker 3: Broom Room Za two thousand and a.
Speaker 9: Can.
Speaker 2: I thought about playing Rebecca Black's Friday, but she actually
Speaker 2: has become a pop diva. It just took a little while.
Speaker 2: Love Rebecca Black. But there was one song that went
Speaker 2: viral on YouTube to this day, probably the song that
Speaker 2: defines the platform that everyone knew but very few initially
Speaker 2: realized was indeed a protest song.
Speaker 3: It's been a bud of Jella time. Been a bud
Speaker 3: of Jella time, been a bud of Jella time.
Speaker 2: Wait, sorry, I had to no. I am talking about
Speaker 2: a YouTube video with the contrast levels set so high
Speaker 2: that the artist and his single microphone are flooded in light.
Speaker 2: A video that begins with an automated piano sample looping
Speaker 2: with the artist just out of frame, as many would parody. Later.
Speaker 2: You can see the top of his head in the
Speaker 2: lower left corner of the video before he springs into
Speaker 2: frame and starts singing.
Speaker 10: Tough metaling, some speed dry and others feel the pain
Speaker 10: chok littering. A baby born would die before this in
Speaker 10: tough littery.
Speaker 2: Adam Bonner aka a Dayzon Day. Your sixteenth minute starts now.
Speaker 11: Stay it, Thank you. Sixteen sixteen.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
Speaker 2: to the main characters of the Internet see how their
Speaker 2: moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says
Speaker 2: about us and the Internet and this week and Thursday
Speaker 2: and next week. Because boy is this a dense topic.
Speaker 2: We are talking with one of the greats, the one
Speaker 2: and only Tayson Day Tay, as you might expect, is
Speaker 2: easily one of the most popular requests for this show
Speaker 2: and has been from moment one, and I can promise
Speaker 2: you that this was worth the wait. This is a
Speaker 2: story that needs to be told in multiple parts and
Speaker 2: in a way that we've never done on this show before.
Speaker 2: What we're airing is less of an interview with Tay
Speaker 2: than Tay Aka Adam telling you his story directly. Okay,
Speaker 2: let me explain. I first reached out the Tayson Day
Speaker 2: almost a year ago now to see if he would
Speaker 2: ever be interested in coming on the show, and over
Speaker 2: the course of that year, we figured out what the
Speaker 2: best way to get deep into his history, not just
Speaker 2: with the Internet, but with any number of things he
Speaker 2: wanted to touch on, from race to neurodivergence to forming
Speaker 2: friendships with fellow Internet stars. And eventually Tay decided it
Speaker 2: would be best if I sent him my questions and
Speaker 2: he would then record his answers in response. But what
Speaker 2: neither of us expected, I don't think, is not just
Speaker 2: Tay's story, but the way that his politics have evolved
Speaker 2: and changed over time, a journey that I think is
Speaker 2: well worth your time. So here's what we're gonna do today.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna give you the broad strokes of Tay's moment
Speaker 2: of massive viral fame, and then for the remainder of
Speaker 2: the series. I'm going to let him take it away,
Speaker 2: and whether he leans away from the mic to take
Speaker 2: a breath is up to him, but I'll say if
Speaker 2: he doesn't, I'm going to freak out because if you
Speaker 2: know anything about Tayzon Day, you will know he is
Speaker 2: a really smart and insightful guy, and not for nothing.
Speaker 2: His voice is way more fun to listen tooth than mine.
Speaker 2: But before we can get there, we have to go
Speaker 2: back to April two thousand and seven, a mass shooting
Speaker 2: at Virginia Tech leaves thirty three dead and twenty nine
Speaker 2: injured to this day, the most deadly school shooting in
Speaker 2: American history. Talk radio host Don Imus as one of
Speaker 2: the most cruelly, out of pocket, casually racist and misogynistic
Speaker 2: comments about black women basketball players at Rutgers, which gets
Speaker 2: him fired. Don't worry, though, he got a redemption arc
Speaker 2: for some reason. And on April twenty third, two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven, a YouTube user going by Tayzon Day uploads
Speaker 2: what he says was his twelfth video ever, a video
Speaker 2: that would go down in history. Chocolate Rain, a complete
Speaker 2: unknown tay Or Adam was a graduate student in Minnesota
Speaker 2: who was performing his original work at open mics around
Speaker 2: the city before realizing that uploading the songs to YouTube
Speaker 2: wasn't just more time efficient, it also stood to net
Speaker 2: him a much larger audience since entering college and going
Speaker 2: into grad school, Tay and I'm going to call him Tay.
Speaker 2: Throughout the series, Tay had taken an increased interest in
Speaker 2: studying institutional racism, something you wouldn't talk about for years
Speaker 2: in the press. He's biracial, he was raised by a
Speaker 2: black mother and white father, and is autistic, another facet
Speaker 2: of his life that he wasn't initially open to sharing
Speaker 2: about outside of performing at a fundraiser or two. All
Speaker 2: that to say, Tay's interest in the themes of discrimination
Speaker 2: that are explored in Chocolate Rain come from a very
Speaker 2: sincere place and were initially intended to make people think
Speaker 2: more than and laugh. But he's rolled with it and
Speaker 2: continues to roll with it to this day. But believe
Speaker 2: it or not, Chocolate Rain wasn't even the first time
Speaker 2: that Tayson Day was noticed by the YouTube staff. His
Speaker 2: second video ever, which I'm just reading the title here,
Speaker 2: Love original song by Kooby featuring Tayzon Day, was also
Speaker 2: featured by the website on its front page after being
Speaker 2: handpicked by an employee. Here's a taste. Oh shit, Hey
Speaker 2: keep going, give me yiss a.
Speaker 9: Hot and have.
Speaker 12: I.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we've talked about how YouTube curation has changed
Speaker 2: significantly in past episodes of this show, our series on
Speaker 2: Lena Morris, the Overly Attached Girlfriend, as well as Liam
Speaker 2: Kyle Sullivan aka Kelly from Shoes. But to refresher memory,
Speaker 2: the YouTube of two thousand and seven had twenty million
Speaker 2: monthly visitors to their now two point seven billion monthly visitors,
Speaker 2: and the recommendation pages were curated by staff members, not
Speaker 2: algorithms as they are today. And that doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: the site was a total meritocracy, but it was certainly
Speaker 2: much closer and there was far less competition from other users. So,
Speaker 2: as Tay explains in our interview and in many others
Speaker 2: he's done, this first bump of encouragement on the platform
Speaker 2: was what motivated him to finish and then upload Chocolate Rain,
Speaker 2: a song he'd been tooling around with for months that,
Speaker 2: if you pay attention to the lyrics, is very obviously
Speaker 2: about systemic racism, and Tay would later confirm systemic racism
Speaker 2: he had experienced or witnessed firsthand. So before we get
Speaker 2: into how the two thousand and seven world received Chocolate Rain,
Speaker 2: let's actually listen to the song, and we're gonna take
Speaker 2: it first by verse. The song begins.
Speaker 3: Chaff lit rain. Some stayed dry and others feel.
Speaker 9: A pain chocolate rain.
Speaker 7: A baby born will.
Speaker 3: Die before this in chof lit ring.
Speaker 10: The school books say it can't be here again, chocolt rain.
Speaker 3: The prisons make you wonder where it win chok So.
Speaker 2: In short, Tay is talking about the liberal notion of
Speaker 2: a post racial society, one that Adam Bonner was raised
Speaker 2: in during the eighties and nineties while Black Americans continued
Speaker 2: to suffer. He also mentions, quote a baby will die
Speaker 2: before the sin, a possible reference to black infant mortality rates.
Speaker 2: And the prisons will make you wonder where it went,
Speaker 2: the prison industrial complex that disproportionately imprisons black men. He's
Speaker 2: saying this right out the gate, so let's keep going.
Speaker 2: The next few verses expand upon the idea of a
Speaker 2: post racial society, lyrics like zoom the camera out and
Speaker 2: see the lie only in the past is what they say,
Speaker 2: and then he gets into more issues.
Speaker 10: Let's listen we say chocklit rain, we is your neighborhood
Speaker 10: insureance rage, chop lit rain makes us happy live. Then
Speaker 10: in again, chocklit rain.
Speaker 3: Made me cross the.
Speaker 10: Street of the day, choflp ray.
Speaker 3: Made you turn your hand the way child.
Speaker 2: Okay, now we're getting into housing discrimination and redlining, as
Speaker 2: well as the very common fear mongering around black people
Speaker 2: as dangerous to be in your neighborhood. And look, I
Speaker 2: want to go through the whole song, but to be honest,
Speaker 2: it is quite long, and I would like to get
Speaker 2: to the Tay interview. So to summarize the other issues
Speaker 2: mentioned in Chocolate Rain, reference everything from the public gaslighting
Speaker 2: that happens to people of color who insist that systemic
Speaker 2: racism is still alive and well. And there are many
Speaker 2: more references to the prison industrial complex.
Speaker 6: Lines like this, the same crime has a high you've
Speaker 6: priced upate the dure gen juries where is not in
Speaker 6: the base?
Speaker 3: Turn that body into GDP.
Speaker 2: He mentions the Bell Curve theory, a very racist notion
Speaker 2: that is popular within mensa that dictates that black people
Speaker 2: are genetically less intelligent than white people. Here's the line
Speaker 2: the mill cup blames the baby, the nag The song
Speaker 2: also tries to acknowledge international racism, and then closes on this.
Speaker 6: Verse, cho Rain, it's pre quickly crashing through your Chocolate Rain,
Speaker 6: using you to bomb back down again.
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain is an intense song, one whose agenda is
Speaker 2: very clear, particularly when you're just listening to the song
Speaker 2: without any music video kind of visual because sure Tay's
Speaker 2: voice is unusually deep, but personally I don't find that
Speaker 2: distracting because there's plenty of famous singers with voices just
Speaker 2: as low or even lower. The great Paul Robison is
Speaker 2: a great example, a civil rights activist who most famously sang.
Speaker 7: Oh man rebad man, he must, but don't say no man.
Speaker 2: But this is YouTube in two thousand and seven, and
Speaker 2: I would be lying if I said that as a kid,
Speaker 2: I understood the song Chocolate Rain, or was even bothering
Speaker 2: to listen to the lyrics. When it first came out, No,
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain was not received as an anti racist anthem.
Speaker 2: It was received as comedy. So let's get into a
Speaker 2: few reasons why that may have been. First, let's talk
Speaker 2: about the visuals, because there's no getting around the visuals
Speaker 2: of the Chocolate Rain video are distinct as Tay is
Speaker 2: quick to acknowledge himself in the two thousand and seven video.
Speaker 2: He is a very young looking, skinny guy with this
Speaker 2: deep bass voice, and the juxtaposition is a little jarring
Speaker 2: at first, not to mention the camera he's using his
Speaker 2: pretty low quality and Tay's body language. Well, it rules,
Speaker 2: but it can be a little bit distracting from the
Speaker 2: song's message. The most famous and still iconic to this
Speaker 2: day example of this is every time that Tay, then
Speaker 2: twenty five years old, wearing his white T shirt and glasses,
Speaker 2: takes a breath during the song. He leans really far
Speaker 2: away from the microphone and kind of like inhales from
Speaker 2: the side of his mouth. It's a little weird, to
Speaker 2: be sure, but what makes it iconic is that Tay
Speaker 2: in the video adds text on screen that further draws
Speaker 2: attention to this writing into the annals of history.
Speaker 5: I move away from the mic to breathe.
Speaker 2: In amazing, incredible poetry. Yes it's awkward, Yes Tay is
Speaker 2: clearly not a professional performer yet. But let's be clear,
Speaker 2: it is not Tay's fault that the Internet audience of
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven completely failed to interpret this clearly
Speaker 2: political song for what it was, because he famously moves
Speaker 2: away from the mic de breathe in the problem is, well,
Speaker 2: the problem is kind of what Tay is singing about
Speaker 2: in the song. The liberal idea of a post racial
Speaker 2: society suits people of many races, an idea that assured
Speaker 2: them that America used to be a racist place, but
Speaker 2: it isn't now. And while certainly not everyone drank this
Speaker 2: kool aid, a lot of people did, and that's kind
Speaker 2: of what Tay's fighting.
Speaker 3: He sings choflit rain.
Speaker 10: Worse than swearing, worse than calling names, chocksld rain, saying
Speaker 10: it publicly, and you're insane, chocklit rain. No one wants
Speaker 10: to hear her about it. Now, chocolate rain, which real hot?
Speaker 10: It goes away somehow.
Speaker 2: So to answer the question, did anyone really get it?
Speaker 2: When YouTube reached out to Tay to see if they
Speaker 2: could feature his work on their front page, again, no,
Speaker 2: not really. It is framed almost universally as comedy, and
Speaker 2: as with a lot of early YouTube success stories, it's
Speaker 2: actually a second party website that ends up making the
Speaker 2: video take off a couple months after it was posted.
Speaker 2: And here's Tayson Day explaining what he thinks was the
Speaker 2: initial appeal of Chocolate Rain to the Internet. In a
Speaker 2: video for Know Your Meme back in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 13: I think there was an appealing aspect of Chocolate Rain
Speaker 13: that was found footage. It was like someone just put
Speaker 13: a camera in their living room and this is what
Speaker 13: you see. In that period of time, the Internet driven
Speaker 13: by novelty, finding new interesting things that hadn't been seen before,
Speaker 13: and kind of getting to know each other in that way.
Speaker 13: And it changed around twenty eleven twenty twelve, and after that,
Speaker 13: you know, videos did not go viral in the same way.
Speaker 2: In future interviews, Tay would credit the link sharing site
Speaker 2: dig for really drawing attention to the video, and Dig
Speaker 2: was kind of a prototype for the Reddit model. And
Speaker 2: the early characterization of Chocolate Rain was not, Hey, this
Speaker 2: kind of weird guy has a really salient point to
Speaker 2: make about racism in America. It much closer aligns with
Speaker 2: headlines like this from the Edmonton.
Speaker 5: Journal Mo Chocolate, Mo Money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, mainly framing the video as novelty comedy. And this
Speaker 2: remained consistent for nearly a decade, which especially sticks out
Speaker 2: now when you see how many of Tay's early fans
Speaker 2: were prominent white people. The closest that publications get to
Speaker 2: meaningfully analyzing what the song means is with a little
Speaker 2: bit of bewilderment. This is from the Honolulu Star Advertiser
Speaker 2: from August two thousand and seven.
Speaker 5: As the initial puzzlement wears off and you begin to
Speaker 5: listen to the lyrics, you quickly become aware of Chocolate
Speaker 5: Rain's central contradiction. Hold on a second. Some stay dry
Speaker 5: and others feel the pain. This is a song about racism,
Speaker 5: but racism is not funny, But Chocolate Rain is funny.
Speaker 5: Or maybe it's not, but isn't it.
Speaker 2: The next Internet forum to take notice of Chocolate Rain
Speaker 2: was four Chan, which sounds a little scarier in this
Speaker 2: case than it actually was, because at this time four
Speaker 2: Chan had yet to escalate to the full on hate
Speaker 2: group generator that they would become in a few short years.
Speaker 2: But they were still overwhelmingly male and good at organizing
Speaker 2: shit posting campaigns, a system they would never use for evil.
Speaker 14: Giorsine La Flesh was attacked by an online group of
Speaker 14: gamers whose activities are known as gamer Gate. Initially a
Speaker 14: social media hashtag for discussion of ethics and gaming journalism,
Speaker 14: it has increasingly become a catchphrase for the online harassment
Speaker 14: of female gamers.
Speaker 2: And it's here where things really start to heat up
Speaker 2: for the video, because remember, it did take much longer
Speaker 2: for internet stars to get their foothold in the mainstream.
Speaker 2: Back in the two thousands. You could still become an
Speaker 2: overnight star a Lah William Hung in two thousand and four,
Speaker 2: but not without the help of a nationally successful media
Speaker 2: conglomerate like American Idol. In two thousand and seven, YouTube
Speaker 2: was still too niche to turn someone into a household
Speaker 2: name without a lot of help, and that help came
Speaker 2: in the form of Tom Green. Somehow, the Freddy got
Speaker 2: Fingered guy Never seen it, don't really want to, but
Speaker 2: a group of four Chan users organized a shit posting
Speaker 2: campaign in order to flood Green's livestreamed call in show
Speaker 2: and start singing Chocolate Rain until Tom Green had to
Speaker 2: ask them what the fuck they were doing, and when
Speaker 2: he learned the video they were referencing, he loved it.
Speaker 2: And so while there's no exact moment that Taizon Day
Speaker 2: goes supersonic, this first celebrity co sign seems to be
Speaker 2: what got the ball rolling, and very soon after, Boy
Speaker 2: Oh boy, did people love Haazon day. He embodied all
Speaker 2: that was eccentric about how the Internet was perceived at
Speaker 2: the time, and it was almost a sign that you
Speaker 2: knew what the kids were into by knowing who he was,
Speaker 2: which led to covers from other artists. Here's John Mayer
Speaker 2: Dollar plus about a million expectedly bad parodies. Here's the
Speaker 2: most popular one for some reason called Vanilla Snow Wow
Speaker 2: good one.
Speaker 12: Snow a basketball Launtrey who became Vanilla Snow Open Doors
Speaker 12: with hotspotettity use Vanilla the.
Speaker 2: Snow seven point three million views, no accounting for it.
Speaker 2: But add this Internet engagement to the appearances in traditional
Speaker 2: media that Tay made that first year, and he was
Speaker 2: becoming famous, and I mean a lot of appearances. Going
Speaker 2: viral can be a nightmare, But make no mistake, Hay
Speaker 2: was not resisting the attention.
Speaker 13: Hey Tay, Hey, we're digging your Chocolate Rain song.
Speaker 3: What we love the song?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 7: What can you repeat that?
Speaker 12: I didn't get it?
Speaker 13: We like your song a lot, Chocolate Rain, Chocolate Rain.
Speaker 15: Yeah, well thanks?
Speaker 16: Are you making any money just yet off of this?
Speaker 12: At you too? Chocolate Rain?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 17: I mean, I can't talk about that in too much detail.
Speaker 17: You know, nothing that change my life at this point,
Speaker 17: but you know, maybe a little bit here and there,
Speaker 17: but you know, I take it a day at a time.
Speaker 17: Who knows.
Speaker 12: Come on, now a little bit here there? Come on?
Speaker 17: How much were talking about?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: That's all I can say.
Speaker 17: You know, it's uh not going to retire to my
Speaker 17: penthouse in Dubai.
Speaker 16: Easily gets my vote for Song in the Summer from Minneapolis.
Speaker 16: Please welcome tays On Day with the song Chocolate Rain
Speaker 16: into Tonight's Internet Talent showcase.
Speaker 3: Thas On.
Speaker 16: Well, I'll tell you that was a real treat to
Speaker 16: see you here live in person. Was that your first
Speaker 16: live performance?
Speaker 18: It was pretty much I did one last week, but
Speaker 18: pretty new to it.
Speaker 16: Well, I didn't know if your voice really was that
Speaker 16: d board just your svoic was No, that's my voice,
Speaker 16: it's real, Israel.
Speaker 3: What do you do for a living?
Speaker 17: I'm a grand student.
Speaker 16: And can you believe all the attention that you've gotten
Speaker 16: for the No.
Speaker 17: You know, you just kind of put something silly upon
Speaker 17: YouTube and it gets lots of attention.
Speaker 7: So what do you tend? No idea you could.
Speaker 16: Be the next Darth Vader, you know, or at least
Speaker 16: say this is CNN.
Speaker 3: Let's just see this is CNN, and.
Speaker 1: Do you do you get recognized in the street and stuff?
Speaker 7: Now I do.
Speaker 17: It was funny. I was at a white Castle fast
Speaker 17: food chain in the US the other day and you know,
Speaker 17: this person was just sticking out the window as I
Speaker 17: was trying to order at Burger, just like you know,
Speaker 17: practically in my car, Charcot Ryan Chains. You know, it
Speaker 17: does happen.
Speaker 2: This is just a sampling of Taizon Day's TV and
Speaker 2: radio appearances from two thousand and seven into two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight. You just heard him on Opie and Anthony,
Speaker 2: on Jimmy Kimmel on CNN, and on Lily Allen's BBC
Speaker 2: talk show. And even when he didn't physically appear, he
Speaker 2: was mentioned on basically every TV institution of the day
Speaker 2: across genres, from The Daily Show to Maury and everything
Speaker 2: in between. Tay also got a bump from traditional print media,
Speaker 2: which was only just starting to take an eventual nose
Speaker 2: dive into obscurity. Rip to all my Friend's jobs and
Speaker 2: in a lot of print media people also tracked Tayzon
Speaker 2: Day's journey to attempt to monetize the sudden fame that
Speaker 2: had come with Chocolate Rain, and so, like a lot
Speaker 2: of early online successes. We just spoke with Liam Kyle
Speaker 2: Sullivan about this recently, there weren't any systems in place
Speaker 2: that could take an online star into a mainstream star
Speaker 2: in the way there is now, in part because the
Speaker 2: Hollywood people with money didn't yet understand how the internet worked. Really,
Speaker 2: people who became famous online were viewed as flashes in
Speaker 2: the pan, and even if they weren't, as Tay explains
Speaker 2: in our interview and in others, virtually every major music
Speaker 2: label was trying to work with him. At the time
Speaker 2: that Chocolate Rain got really big, most big institutions didn't
Speaker 2: know what to do with Tay. Many publications at the
Speaker 2: time compared Taizon Day to William Hung, basically a novelty
Speaker 2: act who didn't seem to be in on the joke, which,
Speaker 2: in my opinion is also a pretty ablest way of
Speaker 2: assuming that neurodivergent people are incapable of being in on
Speaker 2: the joke. We'll circle back to that, but what we
Speaker 2: see Tay try to do to monetize his career and
Speaker 2: turn it into something more because yeah, he dropped out
Speaker 2: of grad school shortly after, just like William Hung and
Speaker 2: Lena Morris did after they went viral. But what we
Speaker 2: see him do is kind of the playbook we've discussed
Speaker 2: on the show before, very much the two thousands Internet
Speaker 2: famous playbook. He sells MP three's, although because Chocolate Rain
Speaker 2: had been up online for so long it seemed difficult
Speaker 2: to get much return on investment there. He sold Ringtones,
Speaker 2: He takes meetings in Hollywood. He does public appearances with
Speaker 2: Mario Lopez. He wins an Obscure Award from an award
Speaker 2: that wouldn't exist two years later. He moves to Los
Speaker 2: Angeles in two thousand and eight, and he starts a
Speaker 2: career in voice acting, which he would later successfully parlay
Speaker 2: into gigs on Robot Chicken and Epic Rap Battles of History.
Speaker 2: And because of where he went viral, Hayes on day
Speaker 2: makes more videos and while nothing ever goes anywhere close
Speaker 2: to his viral as Chocolate Rain, Hayes work on YouTube
Speaker 2: in a few years that followed the hit seemingly experimented
Speaker 2: with how to stay relevant on the platform while remaining
Speaker 2: true to himself. So the question seems to be is
Speaker 2: he going to lean into the perceived comedy of Chocolate
Speaker 2: rain that people took away at the time, or was
Speaker 2: he going to continue with the core motivation behind his
Speaker 2: first hit, extreme musical earnestness. He tries out both. Here's
Speaker 2: one of the comedy songs, Do the Can't Dance from
Speaker 2: September two thousand and seven.
Speaker 3: Sound the River Dance.
Speaker 9: Sad, the Salsa Dance, Sound the Dance, I do the
Speaker 9: Can't Dance.
Speaker 2: And here is a very sincere ballad. This is called
Speaker 2: Someday and it is also from September two thousand and seven.
Speaker 4: Lose Your Rise and hear my name Sody, I'll be
Speaker 4: talk about I have failed a lot, but try to help.
Speaker 4: I love you, child, you, but someday, Oh be God.
Speaker 2: And then there's the work that kind of falls somewhere
Speaker 2: in the middle of these two categories, as July two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven song Internet Dreams Best demonstrates, I actually
Speaker 2: really like this song. It plays for jokes while making
Speaker 2: some light critiques of people being addicted to the Internet
Speaker 2: and the nature of viral fame, as he was right
Speaker 2: in the middle of experiencing it himself.
Speaker 17: Man this is in and his something Else.
Speaker 3: Cindy.
Speaker 15: Closely, there is done Green everyone chasing Devin Dream, so
Speaker 15: I can't help me a triple next funk When in
Speaker 15: the auction turning my editor Jones Cavin's the flag.
Speaker 3: Yeah a virtue will dash skipping your wedding to bring
Speaker 3: your old match shut out a lands o. Ye I
Speaker 3: I've seen say it alone with Yam and Dream.
Speaker 2: And at the height of his name recognition, shortly after
Speaker 2: he'd been established as a reliable TV, radio and print fixture,
Speaker 2: Tay gets what I have to assume is the biggest
Speaker 2: paycheck of his career when he was the face of
Speaker 2: a doctor Pepper commercial in November two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2: I give you cherry Chocolate, Rain, allow.
Speaker 18: Me to introduce myself. My name is j It's t
Speaker 18: A Y T A Y to the Z. This is
Speaker 18: the web and it's gone my murder your TV.
Speaker 8: It was chop Rain, a song out my bad your
Speaker 8: stuffy chomp Yet Rain.
Speaker 3: Now I'm paid a.
Speaker 8: Half py half if job yet Rain re sim to
Speaker 8: the punk you bands that we chop Yet Rain. I
Speaker 8: moved my way from the night to breathe.
Speaker 9: He moves his mouth away from the.
Speaker 3: Mic so he can breathe.
Speaker 2: Bring okay as much as we're enjoying this amazing verse.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna cut it off here because you can hear
Speaker 2: and not see this. This is a high budget video
Speaker 2: where Tay is advertising chocolate dr Pepper, which even as
Speaker 2: a fan, sounds repulsive, but the aesthetics of the video
Speaker 2: are cool and definitely echo how William Hung was presented
Speaker 2: in his early high budget appearances after he first got
Speaker 2: famous on American idol.
Speaker 3: William I'm telling you the record company got nice meets you.
Speaker 3: I want you to meet you in a PEARLFI.
Speaker 2: In both of these videos, the viral star is surrounded
Speaker 2: by hot, scantily clad women who are all over him,
Speaker 2: and the underlying suggestion is isn't it funny that women
Speaker 2: want to be around this awkward guy? Lazy? It's lazy,
Speaker 2: and in Tay's case, the closest we get to knowing
Speaker 2: what the original intent of Chocolate Rain was in this
Speaker 2: video is that early in the song reference to history,
Speaker 2: but the paid song quickly moves on, mainly focused on
Speaker 2: Tay's newfound fame and clout. Here's a bit of the
Speaker 2: second rap guest first.
Speaker 10: Mostly video clips mostly closed Bady Yo Shake, Sneaking Pig Baby,
Speaker 10: Yo's fluid Big City pros got tad witty prose that over.
Speaker 2: And just like that, in short order, it's become a
Speaker 2: Doctor Pepper commercial. And so here Tay makes an interesting
Speaker 2: full circle with this outwardly political song. In the space
Speaker 2: of a couple of months, He's changed the meaning of
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain in order to sell something for someone else,
Speaker 2: just as so many political songs have been transformed to
Speaker 2: warp their meaning before him. He actually commented on the
Speaker 2: process of working with Doctor Pepper at this time ten
Speaker 2: years later in an interview with B. E. T.
Speaker 13: Doctor Pepper approached me to write a song about diet
Speaker 13: cherry chocolate.
Speaker 3: Doctor Pepper.
Speaker 13: They didn't like any of the songs that I made.
Speaker 13: They said, why don't we just do this song you've
Speaker 13: already done and they did a fancy video.
Speaker 2: So did anyone criticize or even point this out about
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain to cherry chocolate Rain at the time, Well,
Speaker 2: not really, But to be fair, Tay himself was pretty
Speaker 2: avoidant about acknowledging how intensely political the original song was himself.
Speaker 2: There are more clips from those same Opie and Anthony
Speaker 2: and Lily Allen interviews.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean I mean I think, I mean, it
Speaker 17: has undertones about you know, racism and institutional right.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, I felt that, but I didn't know if
Speaker 13: you had like a meaning to everything or some of
Speaker 13: it was just the kind of words coming at you.
Speaker 13: So what Day's trying to say is that Voss was wrong. Again,
Speaker 13: It's not about Heroin Horace Boss.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he's pretty simple.
Speaker 1: Obvious question next, what is chocolate line?
Speaker 17: You know, I always say that the question is more
Speaker 17: important than the answer.
Speaker 2: So even when interviewers did ask about the meaning of
Speaker 2: the song, and I'm honestly kind of impressed that fucking
Speaker 2: Opie and Anthony thought to for about ten years, he
Speaker 2: avoided ever talking about its meaning explicitly, usually saying some
Speaker 2: version of the song means whatever you think it means.
Speaker 2: But that would change over ten years later in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: in that same interview with b T titled Hazon Day's
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain was more woke than we realized.
Speaker 13: I grew up in a biracial household. My mom's black,
Speaker 13: my dad's white. We never talked to each other, referred
Speaker 13: to each other as black and white. So it was
Speaker 13: a little bit of a shock to go out into
Speaker 13: the world as it became a teenager like, wait, there
Speaker 13: are these things and they don't really speak to my
Speaker 13: life for who I know human beings to be.
Speaker 3: I guess overall, Chocolate.
Speaker 13: Rain was intended as a ballad about institutional racism, and.
Speaker 2: When he was asked why he waited so long to
Speaker 2: talk about this in the years since, Hay basically cites
Speaker 2: his own work. Here he is last year talking with
Speaker 2: Anthony Padia from Smash alongside friend of the show Lena Morris.
Speaker 13: For ten years, I refused to answer that question.
Speaker 3: I dodged the first time.
Speaker 13: I actually just came out and said, yeah, it's a
Speaker 13: ballad about institutional racism. Was a bet interview in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 13: I hate to say, but I didn't want to run
Speaker 13: everybody's fun and a lot of the perception of it
Speaker 13: going viral was that it had a comedic potential or
Speaker 13: people didn't take it super super seriously. And eighty percent
Speaker 13: of people who heard Chocolate Rain believed it was a
Speaker 13: funny joke, and only maybe about twenty percent of people
Speaker 13: saw a deeper meaning, whether it was you know, black
Speaker 13: lives matter or you had Trayvon Martin. What a lot
Speaker 13: who would come back to that and be like, oh,
Speaker 13: I thought this was about defication when I was a child,
Speaker 13: But now I'm looking back and like, I really see this,
Speaker 13: this serious story about institutional racism.
Speaker 17: I'm like, oh, oh, thank you.
Speaker 2: He thought that being overtly political would ruin the fun
Speaker 2: and probably sabotage his commercial prospects. The only value a
Speaker 2: song has to capital is its ability to sell something,
Speaker 2: after all, and that's a cynical thing to say, But
Speaker 2: remember what era this song came out into. Barack Obama
Speaker 2: had announced his candidacy for president in February two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven, and Chocolate Rain came out in April. More
Speaker 2: than ever, it was a moment for many liberals of
Speaker 2: what they called optimism. Dare I say, hope and change?
Speaker 2: So let may be clear that extended this nineteen nineties
Speaker 2: Clinton era liberal post racial attitude. If a black man
Speaker 2: could be considered a viable candidate for the American presidency,
Speaker 2: doesn't that mean racism is over? So, for what it's worth,
Speaker 2: it did seem like a uniquely challenging time to be
Speaker 2: pushing a radical as well as kind of pessimistic idea
Speaker 2: with regards to American racism. Even though the message of
Speaker 2: Chocolate rain itself is true on YouTube, particularly before that
Speaker 2: Beet interview in twenty eighteen. Kay seems most comfortable in
Speaker 2: the world of infotainment, so there's always a comedy bent
Speaker 2: to his work, but as you'll hear, he still wants
Speaker 2: to explore some pretty complex ideas. This is from November
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, after a few years in la and weathering
Speaker 2: the recession, a song called Mama Economy.
Speaker 3: Are you confused about the economy?
Speaker 7: Well, have no fear.
Speaker 13: I'm going to explain the American economy right now.
Speaker 3: The dollar just think of a luck of promise from
Speaker 3: the government. But the value of the dalla has to
Speaker 3: be there to be relevant.
Speaker 13: The value of the dalla comes from China and a
Speaker 13: van when they put the cast reserves in a US
Speaker 13: dollar plan.
Speaker 3: There by firs Rey bonds from the federal reserves.
Speaker 2: And while plenty of these videos do well as time
Speaker 2: goes on, as Tay alternatively works in voice performance chases
Speaker 2: the occasional YouTube trend, but after a while he mainly
Speaker 2: switches to covering songs he likes. As with Liam Kyle
Speaker 2: Sullivan's experience performing as Kelly, Tay remained an iconic, beloved
Speaker 2: early YouTube character, but the timing of his fame made
Speaker 2: it nearly impossible to capitalize on, and like many early
Speaker 2: YouTube stars, he didn't have any desire to be a
Speaker 2: YouTuber as that came to be known in the years
Speaker 2: to come. Here he is in a vlog from March
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen.
Speaker 13: Part of the reason is that YouTube has changed so much,
Speaker 13: and I legit don't recognize the platform anymore, not in
Speaker 13: a bad way, just to a point where it's like,
Speaker 13: I'm looking at videos that go viral now and it's like,
Speaker 13: I spent twenty four hours in Coca cola where someone
Speaker 13: fills a bathtub with coca cola and that goes viral.
Speaker 13: Lord I flew using leaf flowers, which he and by
Speaker 13: the way, he doesn't actually find the video, but hey, good,
Speaker 13: good for him, it went viral. There's this tremendous pressure
Speaker 13: now to be sensational and extreme.
Speaker 2: So while Tay participated in Internet retrospectives in the years
Speaker 2: that followed your classic BuzzFeed, I accidentally went virals. You're
Speaker 2: Anthony Padilla videos. Hey moved forward in his life, not
Speaker 2: sharing very much in the meantime, How is he look
Speaker 2: back on all of it now, Oh, it's complicated. So
Speaker 2: when we come back the world according to Tayson Day,
Speaker 2: ladies and gentlemen, Days on Day or Adam Bonner, I'll
Speaker 2: let him tell you. And this interview has been edited
Speaker 2: for time and clarity.
Speaker 13: I'm Tayson Day. I sang the song Chocolate Rain, which
Speaker 13: was one of the early viral videos on YouTube. As
Speaker 13: I'm recording this, I'm almost forty three years old, and
Speaker 13: at the time I was on the cusp of turning
Speaker 13: twenty five. So April of two thousand and seven is
Speaker 13: when the video got uploaded. And of course I've done
Speaker 13: many other things, As is often the case in entertainment
Speaker 13: and life, do hundreds of things and a couple of
Speaker 13: them get more attention. William Shatner is primarily known for
Speaker 13: being Captain Kirk and maybe the Price Line spokesperson in
Speaker 13: Boston Legal, and he's done hundreds and hundreds of things.
Speaker 13: The surprising future that was hard to get a perspective
Speaker 13: on while I was living that moment is that I
Speaker 13: became sort of this torch bearer and this common point
Speaker 13: of experiential reference for a moment in internet history and
Speaker 13: a moment in viral video experience history. I'll see young
Speaker 13: people commenting on my video saying, oh, my parents at
Speaker 13: me here, as though chocolate rain is like the most
Speaker 13: immaculately preserved tyrannosaurus. Via this, this embodiment, you know, the
Speaker 13: entire world used to be filled with these things, and
Speaker 13: along with some other viral videos of the time, like
Speaker 13: Evolution of Dance or the Shoes video, it became a
Speaker 13: common touchstone and point of reference, a positive memory that's
Speaker 13: widely shared, like people widely share a lot of negative memories,
Speaker 13: like everybody who was past a certain age remembers where
Speaker 13: they were when they found out Michael Jackson or if
Speaker 13: they're a bit older, John Lennon, and so viral videos
Speaker 13: are kind of this happy memory that people can come to,
Speaker 13: Oh wow, this is a happy memory, a positive memory
Speaker 13: that many of us share. I was born in nineteen
Speaker 13: eighty two while living in Chicago, as the youngest of
Speaker 13: three by quite a bit. My siblings are six and
Speaker 13: eleven years older than me. My parents were both school teachers.
Speaker 13: My dad was a high school science teacher. My mother
Speaker 13: taught elementary school and eventually served twenty five years as
Speaker 13: a principal. Is served the right word there? I guess
Speaker 13: it's a public service. I definitely had had many, many
Speaker 13: memories of being alone in gigantic school buildings as a
Speaker 13: child with my mom because she started her principal career
Speaker 13: when I was about six, And if you didn't know,
Speaker 13: principles are often coming in and doing work on Saturday
Speaker 13: and or Sunday, so not just the five school days
Speaker 13: of the week. This was before cell phone, so if
Speaker 13: my mom wanted to talk to me, she'd just get
Speaker 13: on the building wide intercom. I guess if your family
Speaker 13: owns a bodega, you grew up learning about the food
Speaker 13: reach hell business. I kind of felt like elementary schools
Speaker 13: were our family business. We moved around quite a bit,
Speaker 13: partly because of my mom's principal career, so I had
Speaker 13: ten different schools that I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Speaker 13: Not having a consistent cohort of kids to grow up
Speaker 13: with or landmarks to interact with over time probably contributed
Speaker 13: to a sense of loneliness, as well as just being
Speaker 13: the youngest in my family by quite a bit. I
Speaker 13: felt very intensely and helicopter parented as a child. As
Speaker 13: school teachers, my parents had plenty of examples of who
Speaker 13: they did not want their kids to turn out like.
Speaker 13: I've had the privilege of growing older with both of
Speaker 13: my parents, so that's been an interesting perspective because I
Speaker 13: barely survived my teenage years. I experienced some bullying in
Speaker 13: junior high in the start of high school. Anyone who
Speaker 13: remembers me from that time probably would say more than some.
Speaker 13: But also for reasons I'll get into that were not
Speaker 13: completely my parents' fault, ended up being self mutilating, suicidal,
Speaker 13: and eventually from about ages sixteen to nineteen completely nonverbal
Speaker 13: at home. And nonverbal at home really meant I could
Speaker 13: not be verbal anywhere I believed there was any possibility
Speaker 13: of my parents hearing me speak, which also meant the
Speaker 13: outside world. I remember being seventeen years old attending my
Speaker 13: therapeutic day school as a special ed placement, and my therapist,
Speaker 13: outside of her job description, said we needed to do
Speaker 13: our sessions walking around outside. It took her multiple weeks
Speaker 13: to convince me that my mother or father might not
Speaker 13: incidentally be among the cars that passed by as we
Speaker 13: walked outside, and therefore it was safe for me to speak.
Speaker 13: And the school was in Wilmette, Illinois, which is a
Speaker 13: very storybook and douclic place to walk around. A lot
Speaker 13: of people would ask me later on what was it
Speaker 13: like when your voice got deep and the truthful answers.
Speaker 13: I was grunting like a toddler and completely nonverbal and
Speaker 13: terrified of being verbal. Eventually, that same therapist, again outside
Speaker 13: of her job description, did family therapy between my parents
Speaker 13: and I. I was about eighteen and a half and
Speaker 13: I finally started to at least occasionally and awkwardly, be
Speaker 13: able to speak. I didn't appreciate when I was a
Speaker 13: teenager that getting to know my parents as a teenager
Speaker 13: and then during my twenties, and then in my thirties
Speaker 13: and then in my forties, I would be getting to
Speaker 13: know different dimensions and different layers and different vulnerabilities of
Speaker 13: both of them, which would then give me new insights
Speaker 13: into what happened in my childhood. There's a lot that
Speaker 13: I was not allowed to do in terms of pop
Speaker 13: culture when I was a child, I was not allowed
Speaker 13: to own any toys with weapons. So no Gi Jones,
Speaker 13: no he Man, no Shira, no watching Indiana Jones or
Speaker 13: mc iver or any of those other things that one
Speaker 13: might have thought would be iconic for a nineteen eighties childhood.
Speaker 13: I resented while growing up the way that what I
Speaker 13: perceived as overparenting forced me into this mold of being
Speaker 13: like a Steve vercle or Carlton Banks, the archetypic nerd
Speaker 13: and model child. I realized much much later in life
Speaker 13: that my parents had their own traumas that were unique
Speaker 13: to them that informed the way that they parented me,
Speaker 13: and then that I'm also autistic and had certain sensitivities
Speaker 13: in the ways that I reacted to stimuli. That you know,
Speaker 13: there was a lot happening that nobody was particularly conscious
Speaker 13: of at the time, but everybody did the best that
Speaker 13: they knew how to do with the person that they
Speaker 13: could bring to the table. In those moments, I was
Speaker 13: a loved child, and my parents loved each other. They've
Speaker 13: been together more than fifty years as of this regarding
Speaker 13: they're still alive. Knock on woodcrossy fingers. As people get older,
Speaker 13: my father would want me to clarify it, even the
Speaker 13: story that I was. They provided for a child. We
Speaker 13: were never rich, but we were also never poor, and
Speaker 13: it was one of his proudest life accomplishments. So yeah,
Speaker 13: I was born in eighty two, and a lot of
Speaker 13: the things that you can mention pop culture wise, I
Speaker 13: just wasn't allowed to you. Ninja Turtle is not allowed,
Speaker 13: Terminator to not allowed, Wayne's World not allowed, Beavis Butthead
Speaker 13: not allowed, mc hammer and other rap music not allowed.
Speaker 13: Kurt Cobain or Devada country music not allowed. South Park,
Speaker 13: which eventually parodied me. I wasn't allowed to watch that
Speaker 13: when I was fifteen years old at the time that
Speaker 13: I launched. I would say that black affect and vernacular
Speaker 13: was not allowed, but it was really just that anything
Speaker 13: that was not highly educated affect and vernacular was not allowed.
Speaker 13: I did become quite a Star Trek fan starting around
Speaker 13: age nine, both of the original series and Star Trek
Speaker 13: the Next Generation and Deep Space nine. Star Trek and
Speaker 13: then especially characters like Spock and Data and Odo existed
Speaker 13: on sort of a nerd pass island that did not
Speaker 13: set off my parents' anxieties, and therefore it was allowed.
Speaker 13: There were aspects of my childhood family life that could
Speaker 13: be emotionally immature and tumultuous, not always have the healthiest dynamics,
Speaker 13: and so characters like an Android or a Vulcan who
Speaker 13: have no emotion. I retreated into those characters to process
Speaker 13: that the same way that Star Trek got to pass.
Speaker 13: I felt like Disney and Broadway music was the only
Speaker 13: thing I was allowed to listen to Musically. I felt
Speaker 13: the tremendous pressure at all ages as a child to
Speaker 13: both costplay being older because my siblings were older, and
Speaker 13: cosplay being a future governor or senator or future pinnacle
Speaker 13: of human achievement. In some ways, particularly, my father could
Speaker 13: lean towards being sad, and I kind of realized in
Speaker 13: retrospect I became sort of this costplayven ein Rand protagonist,
Speaker 13: this little seedling who oversignaled my trajectory of being a
Speaker 13: future perfect human in order to soothe and assure both parents.
Speaker 13: My parents, being baby boomers, were never the type to
Speaker 13: be particularly vulnerable with their feelings. On one hand, it
Speaker 13: can be good, I think, to not turn your kids
Speaker 13: into a therapist. But on the other hand, when feelings
Speaker 13: and irrationality and subjectivity that we each have inside of
Speaker 13: us just to kind of present without any interrogation or explanation,
Speaker 13: that can be disorienting for a child because speaking on
Speaker 13: those things in a way that is honest and that
Speaker 13: validates everybody involved is a life skill. Instead of learning
Speaker 13: that skill, I learned to care for my parents by
Speaker 13: pretending to be perfect and repress my true self, which
Speaker 13: probably leaned towards wanting to be more of a wild child.
Speaker 13: My parents would ardently say this was never their intention,
Speaker 13: but at times in my life it has felt like
Speaker 13: that has been the only pathway to validation from them
Speaker 13: or my family. Both Geene Roddenberry with Star Trek and
Speaker 13: Disney Renaissance movies had a sappy vision of life being
Speaker 13: a post racial utopia, very imperfectly if you think of
Speaker 13: some original Star Trek episodes or movies like Pocahontas and Mulan.
Speaker 13: We didn't talk about race in my family. My dad's white,
Speaker 13: my mom's black. I do not present as white passing
Speaker 13: at all. I'd present as black. I was not ever
Speaker 13: allowed to identify as being black, And I think my
Speaker 13: parents meant well. Their love blossomed towards the end of
Speaker 13: the civil rights movements, and they truly believed that a
Speaker 13: post racial utopia was America's future, and whether or not
Speaker 13: that was happening in America, I think they tried to
Speaker 13: create that in their vision of the family. My parents
Speaker 13: would say that there is a true love story that
Speaker 13: race never occurred to either of them, and it's kind
Speaker 13: of this dumb idea that the world retcouned onto the
Speaker 13: trajectory of their lives. So if at any point of
Speaker 13: my childhood I've en deigned to suggest that the black
Speaker 13: identity was a key and salient experience in my own life,
Speaker 13: my mom would immediately redirect me and say, you come
Speaker 13: from two heritages. Black was like the F word in
Speaker 13: my household, if used in the first person by us
Speaker 13: as children. My mom might rarely use it if she
Speaker 13: was talking to one of her best friends on the phone,
Speaker 13: but she really didn't use it either. That created plenty
Speaker 13: of interesting tensions for me as a teenager in the
Speaker 13: nineteen nineties, which, if anyone recalls, was not a post
Speaker 13: racial utopia. And in some ways, I feel like my
Speaker 13: mom did not ever want my father to feel left
Speaker 13: out of my life experience or for me to feel
Speaker 13: like I was somehow less the son of my father,
Speaker 13: which America did not give my mom an easy job,
Speaker 13: because that's exactly what it tells me, that I am
Speaker 13: less the son of my white father. I mean, our
Speaker 13: first black president was biracial. He didn't get to use
Speaker 13: his mom's racial identity. There's a lot more to be
Speaker 13: said about my teenage years especially, but I'm going to
Speaker 13: zoom ahead on the timeline to being age twenty one
Speaker 13: because there was an awkward moment when I was an
Speaker 13: undergrad that's a very teachable moment, and we had moved
Speaker 13: to Washington State. By this point, I had started learning more,
Speaker 13: as often happens in college, about marginalization theory and critical
Speaker 13: race theory and black radicalism and Belle Hooks. And I
Speaker 13: was having lunch with my parents at hometown beffet All places,
Speaker 13: remember those restaurants, And I started excitedly parroting the language
Speaker 13: used by Bell Hooks and talking to my parents saying, yeah,
Speaker 13: the world is run by white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. And
Speaker 13: my father started to cry, and as a little tear
Speaker 13: started to run down his eye, it's almost like a
Speaker 13: part of him was saying, not me. I feel like
Speaker 13: that moment is this micro encapsulation of American society and
Speaker 13: the way that some terminology like capitalist patriarchy, like white
Speaker 13: supremacy as part of critical race theory, is part of
Speaker 13: sociological marginalization theory can lend because my father was not
Speaker 13: alone in that type of reaction. I think a lot
Speaker 13: of people react by feeling agast, feeling sad, feeling personally attacked,
Speaker 13: and not just white people. Because my mom was present,
Speaker 13: she was not crying, but she also did not like
Speaker 13: to hear that language. I want you to pause the
Speaker 13: story of my life in this moment with my father,
Speaker 13: because I'm going to use this moment to unpack a
Speaker 13: whole lot of things in a whole lot of different
Speaker 13: timelines in seeking to answer this question, why did my
Speaker 13: white father cry when twenty one year old me enthusiastically
Speaker 13: celebrated learning about white supremacist capitalist patriarchy from Bell Hooks.
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more taison day maybe.
Speaker 13: I finished my undergrad in communications in two thousand and
Speaker 13: four at the Evergreen State College, where as a footnote,
Speaker 13: I was the twenty twenty one commencement speaker. In late
Speaker 13: summer two thousand and four, I moved to Minneapolis and
Speaker 13: began the PhD program at American Studies at the University
Speaker 13: of Minnesota. I still see in Minnesota. Like Minnesotan, I
Speaker 13: have extended family Minneapolis, so I visited as a child,
Speaker 13: so I was always a part time Minnesotan, even growing
Speaker 13: up in Chicago, I did not thrive as a graduate student.
Speaker 13: To enjoy being a graduate student, I put enjoy there
Speaker 13: in quotes. You have to either really love research or
Speaker 13: love teaching, love pedagogy, and I had so much personal
Speaker 13: stuff going on I couldn't focus on either of them.
Speaker 13: There are aspects of my childhood and the way I
Speaker 13: was raised as well as being autistic. I was first
Speaker 13: diagnosed at age fifteen, where I ended up being very
Speaker 13: emotionally regressed. I love my parents dearly, but it's probably
Speaker 13: not inaccurate to describe my life as ages zero to
Speaker 13: eighteen or may becoming a legal adult and then ages
Speaker 13: eighteen to thirty six is me kind of figuring out
Speaker 13: how regressed my childhood actually left me. And the next
Speaker 13: eighteen years we're figuring out how to retread the first
Speaker 13: eighteen and mature to being a viable human being in society.
Speaker 13: So age thirty six was my age eighteen, So with
Speaker 13: any luck, age one hundred will be my age fifty Anyway.
Speaker 13: By the summer of two thousand and seven, when Chocolate
Speaker 13: Rangin went viral, I was a distracted and middling PhD
Speaker 13: student dealing with a lot of unseen internal baggage. I
Speaker 13: apologized to any undergrads who had me as a teaching
Speaker 13: assistant during this period of time because I think I
Speaker 13: was a hot mess, although to be fair, institutional pedagogy
Speaker 13: is also a hot mess, so it was sort of
Speaker 13: a tango. Instead of being passionate about teaching and research,
Speaker 13: I had been passionate about independent music pursuits for the
Speaker 13: prior three years, and I intermittently performed at open mics
Speaker 13: throughout the Greater Minneapolis metropolitan area. Honestly, I was never
Speaker 13: a great performer or singer live. I've learned that I'm very,
Speaker 13: very sensory overwhelmed, both in hapophobia, sensitivity to touch, hypercusis, missiphonia,
Speaker 13: sensitivity to sound, photophobia, sensitivity delight, and all of that
Speaker 13: kind of overwhelms me in live environments or honestly just
Speaker 13: every day society environments. But I didn't know that quite
Speaker 13: as clearly at the time. YouTube came along, and it
Speaker 13: was easier for me to sing in my living room
Speaker 13: than it was for me to drag an amp and
Speaker 13: keyboard and other stuff along to an open mic. So
Speaker 13: I started uploading content to YouTube. I invented Taison Day,
Speaker 13: which is not my birth name. My birth name is
Speaker 13: Adam Potter. But Taison Day was this alter ego for
Speaker 13: my music pursuits, and I assumed it would never have
Speaker 13: any intersection with my serious career, which at the time
Speaker 13: was on the trajectory of finishing my PhD and eventually
Speaker 13: presumably becoming a professor or researcher of some sort. My
Speaker 13: first YouTube videos, I was singing and playing stage piano,
Speaker 13: the same thing I did at open Mics, and eventually
Speaker 13: I wrote a song over a backing track that had
Speaker 13: been created by an Australian who goes by the moniker
Speaker 13: of Kooby. Michelle Flannery, who was YouTube's music editor at
Speaker 13: the time, reached out to me to ask if I
Speaker 13: would like to have that video featured. The song was
Speaker 13: titled Love on YouTube's front page, and that was the
Speaker 13: email that every YouTuber dreamed of receiving in early two
Speaker 13: thousand and seven, and flt like winning the lottery to
Speaker 13: be featured on the front page. I knew the week
Speaker 13: that the love video was going to be featured, and
Speaker 13: I also knew that I could sort of double dip
Speaker 13: on the exposure that that feature created for me by
Speaker 13: having another video in the automatic or default player of
Speaker 13: my YouTube channel, so that people who watched the featured
Speaker 13: video on the front page would click and see this
Speaker 13: other video on my channel. So I had already written
Speaker 13: the lyrics to Chocolate Rain over the prior six weeks,
Speaker 13: and I had the arrange idea in my head for
Speaker 13: a number of years. A lot of my songs are
Speaker 13: like that. They come together in various conceptual pieces in
Speaker 13: my brain, and eventually I decide to assemble all those pieces.
Speaker 13: So I rushed Chocolate Rain to completion the weekend before
Speaker 13: I knew this other video would be featured on YouTube's
Speaker 13: front page, and so I released it. It did not
Speaker 13: immediately go viral. It was uploaded in April, i'd say.
Speaker 13: By June of two thousand and seven, it had about
Speaker 13: thirty thousand views. Then somebody posted it ondig dot com,
Speaker 13: which is kind of an earlier version of Reddit with
Speaker 13: a slower cycle time. Someone saw it on that social
Speaker 13: book marking site dig and decided to post it on
Speaker 13: four chan. Four Chan was an Internet forum primarily known
Speaker 13: as an imageboard and also known for being to say,
Speaker 13: very inclusive. To put it mildly with regard to the
Speaker 13: content that surfaced on their b sub form other than
Speaker 13: my own experience, which is that when Chocolate Rain was
Speaker 13: posted on four Chan in two thousand and seven, I
Speaker 13: entered a succession of nerds that four Chan both embraced
Speaker 13: and helped the spread on social media, prior nerds including
Speaker 13: Gary Postman Tom Green, who are both more than able
Speaker 13: to tell their own stories. So yeah, that's the story
Speaker 13: of my recollection. My first aha moment that Chocolate Rain
Speaker 13: might be going more viral was in early July two
Speaker 13: thousand and seven, when four Chan successfully prank called Tom
Speaker 13: Green's late night show that he was at the time
Speaker 13: doing in his living room, and a caller broke out
Speaker 13: and randomly busted out singing Choklue Rain, and you know,
Speaker 13: Tom Green, being a good improv comedian, he took it
Speaker 13: as a prank call and yes and yeah Rain and
Speaker 13: slammed the phone and hung up, and I was kind
Speaker 13: of like, oh, wait, I've heard of Tom Green before.
Speaker 13: After the dig dot com and then four Chan exposure,
Speaker 13: Chocolate Rain began to take off as a wider cultural phenomenon.
Speaker 13: A day or two later, Carson Daley, who was doing
Speaker 13: a late night show, and I believe in BC at
Speaker 13: the time featured it on his show and in Midgely.
Speaker 13: It took off as a national news story where media
Speaker 13: outfits began feverishly attempting to contact me. I did my
Speaker 13: first radio interview ever on OPI and Anthony, which was
Speaker 13: not a small platform, and my first television interview ever
Speaker 13: on CNN Saturday Morning, which was not an obscure show.
Speaker 13: I was a terrible, awkward and experienced interviewer. I spoke
Speaker 13: like a nerd who had had very little human contact
Speaker 13: and who was socially regressed being plucked out of my
Speaker 13: living room and stuck in front of a national spotlight
Speaker 13: because that's who I was. There was a magical Santa
Speaker 13: Claus aspect about the way Chocolate Rain was going viral,
Speaker 13: because it was not going viral as a deep ballot
Speaker 13: about institutional racism.
Speaker 3: It was going.
Speaker 13: Viral as a oh wow, there's the funny guy who
Speaker 13: moves like mister Bean, with a voice like Barry White
Speaker 13: and has absolutely no awareness of it. So from mid
Speaker 13: July to the end of July two thousand and seven,
Speaker 13: I probably did thirty or forty different media interviews, and
Speaker 13: in none of them, was I actually ready to be
Speaker 13: a person, because I said earlier that there was a
Speaker 13: little bit of strategy in my not just blurting out
Speaker 13: polemically my intended meeting for chocolate rain and you're kind
Speaker 13: of sitting back like, oh yeah, it's kind of a joke,
Speaker 13: and let it be a joke. The deeper reason is
Speaker 13: that why a autism spectrum disorder is probably my most
Speaker 13: public and formal diagnosis. I probably also experienced dissociative identity disorder,
Speaker 13: also formerly known as multiple personality disorder, which is basically
Speaker 13: a trauma response that happens when you are, for whatever reason,
Speaker 13: not able to naturally develop and cohere a healthy individual
Speaker 13: identity in your childhood. That's not all it is, but
Speaker 13: that's what it is for me, And what happens in
Speaker 13: many experiences of dissociative identity disorder, including my own, is
Speaker 13: you end up being kind of a receiver of identity
Speaker 13: and you never built any infrastructure to push back on that.
Speaker 13: And so, with me receiving no autism diagnosis until I
Speaker 13: was a teenager, my parents, through emotional intuition, sort of
Speaker 13: improvised their own applied behavior analysis methodology for me to
Speaker 13: live I've never been a parent, and it's kind of
Speaker 13: like fighting in war. You shouldn't speak too authoritatively on
Speaker 13: it without actually doing it. But I think there's a
Speaker 13: day to day drudgery of it, of how do I
Speaker 13: get this sentient bag of liquids out the door someday
Speaker 13: and able to thrive. So, like I said before, my
Speaker 13: parents are passionate, loving, imperfect people. Part of their parenting
Speaker 13: was informed by their own traumas. But I was not
Speaker 13: an easy project to raise, and it's kind of amazing
Speaker 13: I developed into any type of functioning adult, regressed or not.
Speaker 13: So I can't take everything that I know in twenty
Speaker 13: twenty five and ask, well, hey, why wasn't that done
Speaker 13: in nineteen eighty five when I was two and three
Speaker 13: years old. All of this is important backstory for why
Speaker 13: I dodged and hemmed and hawed and did not talk
Speaker 13: about the intended meaning of chocolate rain for ten years.
Speaker 13: When I say I did not know how to be
Speaker 13: a person, while I believe I was trending worldwide on Google,
Speaker 13: his chocolate Rain was going by. That's not hyperbole, that's
Speaker 13: not metaphor. It's psychiatrically true. Now, imagine me not knowing
Speaker 13: this about myself at the time, when I'm appearing on
Speaker 13: Jimmy Kimmel, three out of the four major music labels
Speaker 13: at the time wanted to do deals with me. A
Speaker 13: random wealthy people were contacting me to like, please come
Speaker 13: sing of my kids bar Mitzvah. Publishers wanted to do
Speaker 13: book deals with me. I quickly began to feel like
Speaker 13: I was floating in space and just a spectator to
Speaker 13: this cult of personality called Taizon Day. Depersonalization derealization disorder
Speaker 13: DPDR is another psychiatric diagnosis that can be a co
Speaker 13: morbidity of autism. I feel like I should stop listing
Speaker 13: psychiatric diagnoses because I've often joked that the DSM five
Speaker 13: the prevailing authority on psychiatric conditions. It's just my memoir.
Speaker 13: But even as the momentum of Chocolate Rain and its
Speaker 13: attention continued that October, I opened for Girl Talk at
Speaker 13: First Avenue, which is made famous by prints in his
Speaker 13: Purple Rain song. I did a big remix with Doctor Pepper.
Speaker 13: The following spring, I was parodied on South Park. I
Speaker 13: did Weezer's Pork and Dads video that brought many viral
Speaker 13: stars together. The following summer two thousand and eight, I
Speaker 13: want a Webby award, all while neglecting my graduate studies
Speaker 13: and being politely asked to leave the PhD program after
Speaker 13: four years with a master's degree, and offered that I accepted.
Speaker 13: Notice how I describe this period of my life through
Speaker 13: headline grabbing events that I participated in, but that were
Speaker 13: largely initiated by other people, not myself, Because while I
Speaker 13: was twenty five and twenty six years old on the
Speaker 13: outside in two thousand and seven to two thousand and eight,
Speaker 13: on the inside, I was still six or seven years
Speaker 13: old and learning how to process being in contact with
Speaker 13: an over stimulating world that my parents had largely said, well,
Speaker 13: just don't be in contact with it, We're not allowed
Speaker 13: to be in contact with it. Well, you know, that
Speaker 13: life strategy kind of sort of worked until I accidentally
Speaker 13: went viral, And of course nobody knew what going viral was.
Speaker 13: It was kind of the first time, or one of
Speaker 13: the first times, like being launched with Spotnik, and we
Speaker 13: think it's going to automit the out within Becorde Saturday
Speaker 13: full Dubois another one with these greg that video if
Speaker 13: Russian dressing her that terrible action, I would pretend to
Speaker 13: be Aquafina. So while I was great at conceptualizing tas
Speaker 13: On Day as a recognizable and iconic brand, Adam Ponter,
Speaker 13: who I actually am outside of Tayson Day, lacked the
Speaker 13: developmental and life skills to hew that brand coherently out
Speaker 13: of a chaotic world. It's hard to describe the magnitude
Speaker 13: of just the sensory experience that overwhelmed me just walking
Speaker 13: around in public or being anywhere as chocolate rain blew
Speaker 13: up and you know, continued to become sort of a phenomenon,
Speaker 13: because you know, I'd be in the drive through at
Speaker 13: White Castle and the person practically falls out the window
Speaker 13: unto my lap, trying to take my picture as they're
Speaker 13: handing me my sliders. And it's not just my face
Speaker 13: that's recognizable, just my body and movement style and mannerisms
Speaker 13: stick out like big Bird. A DHL driver almost crashed
Speaker 13: his courier van rolling down his window Yella Chocolate Ride,
Speaker 13: and I was on my bike. I had my helmet on,
Speaker 13: I had sunglasses on. I did not have an inch
Speaker 13: of skin exposed if I robbed at seven to eleven,
Speaker 13: completely covering up the entire world that's days on day,
Speaker 13: even if they hadn't thought about me for fifteen years.
Speaker 13: Just put microphones in all the intersections. He'll be trapped
Speaker 13: because he moves away. I don't know if my jokes
Speaker 13: are funnier or this moment where I feel like I
Speaker 13: have to break the fourth wall and acknowledge each one
Speaker 13: like a three year old to just sas to show
Speaker 13: everybody the picture I drew. So I just described some
Speaker 13: of the magnitude of public attention that entered my life
Speaker 13: kind of permanently after chocolate rain blew up. Now keep
Speaker 13: that in mind. Now combine that with the fact that
Speaker 13: being unremarkable and blending in had been my life and
Speaker 13: heart and soul's passionate desire from the time I was
Speaker 13: very young, because it's exactly what I was forbidden to be.
Speaker 13: I could just be a kid. I had to be
Speaker 13: the teacher's son, the principal son. That I couldn't be
Speaker 13: my age. I was always surrounded by older families, so
Speaker 13: I had to be older. LUs My father might have
Speaker 13: some of my special needs diagnoses, but undiagnosed. Being a
Speaker 13: boomer who just mental health care wasn't acceptable when he
Speaker 13: came of age and he just never believed in it.
Speaker 13: I know in my own life experience that I've developed
Speaker 13: many maladaptive beliefs and behaviors to cope with being auxistic
Speaker 13: in a neurotypical world. My crude definition of a maladaptation
Speaker 13: is an adaptation that helps you survive a specific environmental hostility,
Speaker 13: but can itself be injurious or counterproductive. One maladaptive attitude
Speaker 13: of mine was that, hey, if I'm never allowed to
Speaker 13: be normal and never allowed to do normal things, well,
Speaker 13: my only permitted pathway to confidence and self esteem was
Speaker 13: to lean into being weird and bizarre. And that maladaptive
Speaker 13: behavior was very much modeled by my father, because my
Speaker 13: father can often be shy and or sensitive, but he
Speaker 13: is manic and confident when he has an opportunity to
Speaker 13: dramatic demonstrate both being weird and correct. Some of you
Speaker 13: going wow, tay, you don't say, But my point is
Speaker 13: that while during my childhood, proud weirdness was my only
Speaker 13: existential option and a behavior that was modeled for me
Speaker 13: that conflicted with my true desire, that all I wanted
Speaker 13: was to dump this affect and have some actual friends
Speaker 13: and consume some actual popular culture dabble in actual vice
Speaker 13: and have it all be unremarkable. So I obsessed over
Speaker 13: my heart just went pitter pat. My entire childhood, from
Speaker 13: the youngest ages I can remember, like three, all the
Speaker 13: way to like being nonverbal, and it taken five years
Speaker 13: to graduate high school at age nineteen. Like my entire
Speaker 13: childhood and even early adulthood, I just obsessed over this
Speaker 13: desire to be more normal. Now in practice, when I
Speaker 13: got a little bit older, got to know some more
Speaker 13: people and more intimate details and more people's lives, I
Speaker 13: kind of found out that a lot of people got
Speaker 13: some messed up stuff in their closets.
Speaker 3: I don't know if anybody's that normal.
Speaker 13: You ever had that experience where you believe that your
Speaker 13: family has all these problems and then you learn about
Speaker 13: somebody else's family.
Speaker 3: Like, oh, shoot.
Speaker 13: Okay, I guess we're okay. Sometimes. But I still to
Speaker 13: this day struggle with a limiting self belief. It's a
Speaker 13: belief that goes back to child the trauma that if
Speaker 13: I'm in a predicament or encountering adversity, the problem is
Speaker 13: that I need to be more normal, or be more conventional,
Speaker 13: more of what's expected. Because I lived my whole childhood
Speaker 13: and what felt like some upside down staring at oggling
Speaker 13: at normalcy, as if the world was in a cage
Speaker 13: and everything outside my parents' control was this menagerie. The
Speaker 13: truth is I was in the menagerie and often felt
Speaker 13: it when I got teased by or had to interact
Speaker 13: with other kids. A big takeaway of feeling involuntarily sh
Speaker 13: into an embrace of weird affect while actually wanting to
Speaker 13: be less remarkable is that independent of race, gender, sexuality, height,
Speaker 13: or any other personal attribute, I felt constantly marginalized as
Speaker 13: a child and harmed by that marginalization and resentful towards it.
Speaker 13: So even without sociological marginalization theory or critical race theory,
Speaker 13: I am feeling from ages barely beyond being a toddler,
Speaker 13: like I am missing things that are key to connecting
Speaker 13: with and belonging in the rest of the species. So
Speaker 13: you can bet that when I first encountered those types
Speaker 13: of theories in college, I took to them like a
Speaker 13: lawn mower, a dumpt In the battles of Brave Heart,
Speaker 13: I'm like, stop the movie, I am mowing all of this.
Speaker 13: I'm the main character now. I didn't even know grass existed.
Speaker 13: They told me I was a snowblower that one. I
Speaker 13: feel like I lost some people, not everybody, but I
Speaker 13: lost some people because y'all aren't overall that imaginative. Sometimes
Speaker 13: I really have to think, Am I staying within the
Speaker 13: abstraction bandwidth of my audience?
Speaker 2: And that's as good a place as I need to
Speaker 2: end the first part of our Tayzon Day series. He's
Speaker 2: the best, and this Thursday We're going to hear more
Speaker 2: from him. As Tay admits throughout this interview file, he
Speaker 2: does have a tendency to go on some real tangents.
Speaker 2: So I assembled what really amounts to the story of
Speaker 2: his political awakening, spurred on by this moment he just
Speaker 2: spoke about his father crying when hearing what Tay had
Speaker 2: discovered about writing and theory around race in America. So
Speaker 2: this Thursday, the Political World according to Tazon Day sixteenth
Speaker 2: minute as a production of fool Zone Media and iHeart
Speaker 2: rod Desk. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Speaker 2: Jamie Rostis. Our executive producers are Sophie Lickterman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer, and our
Speaker 2: editor are song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Speaker 2: from Grant Crater and pet. Shout outs to our dog
Speaker 2: producer Anderson, my cat's flee and Casper, and my pet Rockbert,
Speaker 2: who will outlive us all. Bye.