Many of the most explosive and virulent online videos - think: "Star Wars Kid," "Numa Numa" and the recent interpretation of "Thriller" by Filipino prisoners - manage to be at once bizarre, hypnotic and borderline upsetting. Tay Zonday's new hit YouTube song, "Chocolate Rain," is no exception.
"Chocolate raiiiiiin," belts Zonday again and again, in a voice so cavernously deep that it couldn't possibly be coming from the skinny, sweet-faced young boy on the screen (he's 25). "Some stay dry and others feel the pain. Chocolate raaaiiiin."
Helping this refrain to super-glue itself into your mind is the short, looping piano phrase that is the song's musical backbone. The riff is replayed, with minor variations, something like 50 times - the same number of times that Zonday chants "chocolate rain."
But the video's most unforgettable element, and perhaps its viral tipping point, is the message that flashes across the screen during the first minute: "**I move away from the mic to breathe in." Then, true to his word, Zonday jerks his head back every 10 seconds for the rest of the song.
As the initial puzzlement wears off and you begin to listen to the lyrics, you quickly become aware of "Chocolate Rain's" central contradiction: "Some stay dry and others feel the pain"? This is a song about racism. But ... racism is not funny. But "Chocolate Rain" is funny ... or ... maybe it's not. But isn't it?
Either way, "Chocolate Rain" has become a force of nature. The video has earned more than 6 million YouTube views and is close to breaking into the YouTube music category's top 100 of all time. When it does so, "Chocolate Rain" will be one of only a handful of self-produced songs on the list - and the only one that's not an instrumental.
Yet there are even better measures of "Chocolate Rain's" reverberations around the Net. Not only do its 74,000 comments make it YouTube's ninth-most-discussed video ever, but "Chocolate Rain" has spawned such a tidal wave of remixes, riffs, covers, mash-ups, cartoons and spoofs that only "Numa Numa" and "Star Wars Kid" may have more imitators.
Nor is Zonday a one-hit wonder. All 17 of his YouTube videos have achieved success. As of late yesterday afternoon, his karaoke version of Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" had scored 1,130,000 hits. In "Canon in Z," Zonday, clearly a skilled pianist, performs an original arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon, to the tune of 137,000 hits. Even a video of Zonday reading sonorously from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried had drawn 200,000 views.
