Tay Zonday/Chocolate Rain (2007)NSFW

About

Chocolate Rain is the breakout video created by Tay Zonday that launched him into Internet fame. The video has been parodied and remixed in thousands of instances, eventually leading to Tay himself appearing on a number of television shows and being parodied on South Park. At over 47 million views, Chocolate rain is among the top 50 most viewed videos on Youtube of all time.

Origin

Tay Zonday (given name, Adam Nyerere Bahner) was a grad student from Minneapolis, Minnesota when he uploaded Chocolate Rain on April 22nd, 2007.

At first, the unlikely baritone’s videos went largely unnoticed. But on July 11th, 2007, Chocolate Rain seemed to catch the attention of Anonymous.

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On July 18th, Tay responded to his newfound audience by covering another of their favorites, Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, then dubbed “The Tay Roll”

Tay Roll on 4chanarchive

By July 26th, Chocolate Rain was featured on Youtube’s front page, further popularizing the video. According to Dramatica, moot also “, Moot showed that he still cares about Anon, and decked out /b/ in honor of ZonDay, adding Chocolate Rain references everywhere, including an embedded remix of the song.”

Further information about Tay’s subsequent appearances in other media have been documented at length on both Dramatica and Wikipedia. Links are available in the sidebar.

Derivatives

Nearly immediately after Tay’s first appearances on 4chan, parodies of his videos began appearing on Youtube. Many of these parodies were able to break at least 1 million views, seemingly by association alone.

July 19, 2007 – Chocolate Rain Anon Remix

July 21, 2007 – VANILLA SNOW (CHOCOLATE RAIN PARODY)

July 23, 2007 – Chocolate Rain 8Bit Remix

August 14, 2007 – Chocolate Rain by Chad Vader

Google Insights

Searches for Chocolate Rain spiked their highest in August of 2007, as the rest of the web was already catching on to what Anonymous already knew; that Tay Zonday’s unexpectedly low voice was attention-grabbing enough to become an overnight internet sensation.