April 17, 2025 • 31 mins
In part two of our Tay Zonday series, Adam Bahner gets into his political awakening, and how it affected his relationship to his family, his creative work, and himself. Wanna get radicalized? Wanna get radicalized AGAIN? This is the episode for you.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cold Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Say it you mail.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Six sixteen.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Character.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
to the main characters of the Internet see how their
moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says
about us and the Internet. And today we're continuing our
series with the one and only Tayzon Day of Chocolate
Rain fame. And if you've been living happily in the
Wi Fi signal as woods up until yesterday, maybe you're
(01:19):
unfamiliar with Tay and his most famous work, which has
been going viral every year or so since two thousand
goddamn seven, But you might not know the deep anti
racist roots of that same song, something that was pretty
obscured for the first decade or so of Chocolate Rain's history.
And for all that, and for Tazon Day aka Adam
(01:41):
Bonner's origin story as a young autistic, mixed race guy
who started posting on YouTube and unwittingly became an online
superstar just shy of the US recession and in conjunction
of vin Senator Barack Obama, becoming a national star. For
a full look at what Tay's rise to fame looked
like in the moment, head back to the first episode
(02:01):
of this series, where we cover it in detail and
Tay himself gives us some insight into his early life.
But today, for this minisode, I'm going to hand the
mic off to the incomparable Tayson Day to tell you
about his political education specifically. Maybe this sounds a little weird,
but go with me here. When we left off in
(02:23):
our first episode, Tay had just begun to be educated
on the consequences American systemic racism had well into the present,
something his mixed race family hadn't talked to him about
as a kid as he grew up in the eighties
and nineties. And when he told his white dad about
beginning to learn this with some excitement and enthusiasm, his
(02:45):
dad began to cry. I guess I'll just add here
that this material, while the kind of conversations that I'm
really into, are not necessarily canon to the Tazon Day's story,
and it might not be for everybody. However, I was
really touched at how open Day was with sharing how
he reached both the place he was in his political
(03:08):
consciousness and how that formed Chocolate Rain, and how he's
grown since. So if you're into that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
I think you'll really like this episode.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
If you just want to hear the rest of his
story in terms of his linear viral experience, definitely tune
in to our concluding part on Tuesday. The following episode
is the process that Tay went through to try to
get to the root of his father's behavior, and they're
still close to this day, but getting to a satisfying
conclusion required that Tay go through a thorough history of
(03:41):
activism and academia that he was largely unfamiliar with. And
that's where we're picking up today. So if you're in
the mood to be radicalized or re radicalized, gather round.
Here's tay'son day.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I'm going to unpack this for almost thirty minutes, but
it is a journey that should have familiar scenery for
a lot of people. I'll crudely defined critical race theory
is the idea that historical racial injustice manifests as present
day racial oppression, even if people in the present day
are not deliberately or consciously being racist. I'll crudely define
(04:20):
sociological marginalization theory as the idea that race, class, gender,
physical ability, religion. All of these are axes of oppression
that have favored and less favored groups. So critical race
theory would argue that white supremacy creates unacceptable injustice in
a person's life the moment they are conceived, so it
(04:41):
says a baby born will die before the sin. Sorry,
that was low hanging fruit. Sociological marginalization theory would argue
that if your white, male, Christian, able bodied, heterosexual property class,
you are conferred advantages in society that you would not
be conferred if the playing field was level. Critical race
theory and sociological marginalization theory are both what would be
called structuralist theories. So what does structuralism mean, of which
(05:05):
these structuralist theories are apart. I'll crudely define structuralism as
the idea that your theory of how the world operates
in terms of power or knowledge also determines the motivations, morals,
and identities of groups of human beings. Famous structuralists include
Charles Darwin, the evolution Guy, Karl Marx, the communism Guy,
(05:28):
Milton Friedman, and other economists, Betty free Dan, and a
lot of second wave feminist epistemology. There are many critiques
in schools of thought that point out the shortcomings of structuralism,
and we call those post structuralists. We're not done with theory,
but real quickly, let's check back on this moment with
my father where twenty one year old me just excitedly
repeated structuralist terminology that Bell Hooks uses white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,
(05:52):
and my father started to cry. A post structuralist like
Dereda might say that my father was crying and thinking
nah to me and receiving my structural observation as a
very personal accusation, because my father believed, in the goodness
of his heart and the sacredness with which he had
(06:13):
lived his life, that the structuralist term white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy did not apply to him, and that he had
lived his life differently, or in the post structuralist critique
of Dereta, my father believed that he had repeated the
structure differently. A common criticism that post structuralism has of
structuralism is that structuralism confiscates choice from individuals in order
(06:39):
to render people as dominoes. And it's almost like just
the words of Belle Hooks without any other context, white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy made my father feel like a domino
that I had suddenly started to render in a certain way.
And some people are listening to this and thinking, yeah,
but Bell Hooks was not making a personal accusation against
(06:59):
your father in using structuralist terminologies, and many of you
thinking that way. We'll also say, well, the truth is
just the truth, and we've got to be able to
speak about the truth. And if that's traumatic for some people,
then that's work they have to do. That's not on
the person speaking the truth. What's interesting is that almost
every person I encounter who advances that perspective and I
(07:19):
point four fingers back at me because it's a perspective
I have held many waking days of my own life.
As soon as I turn the tables and start listing
the myriad ways their life has been enabled by plunder, genocide, oligarchy,
et cetera, they react much as my father did. It's
hurtful and makes them defensive if I point out, hey, yeah,
that iPhone that you posted all that fire and brimstone
(07:42):
ad hominem humanist outrage with online probably contains Mineral's mind
by child slaves and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
was probably manufactured under very questionable human rights conditions in Asia,
and those things were both partly enabled by technocratic currency
manipulation that eugenically devalues African born in Asian bodies relative
to your body using the exact currency that you pay
(08:04):
your car note with and bought your lunch with. Nobody
likes to be called up like that, even if the
accusations are true. They like to think of themselves as
Derridah thinks of the individual. They like to believe they
are the exception to the rule. They are repeating the
structure differently and it does not apply to them. So
(08:26):
before anybody is too hard on my father, really think
about yourself, because, especially if your life is derived from
Western civilization, you have never experienced nor acted upon anything
from your cradle to your grave that is morally sacrosanct.
In a structuralist interrogation of power and plunder, and in
(08:49):
my experience, when policy discussion gets reduced to personal absolution olympics,
that's almost always mutual assured destruction, which, as a I'll
get into it a little bit, is kind of the
point of today's social media. By the way, I love
bell Hooks and I love my iPhone. But I can
love them and still acknowledge reality. I can love them
(09:10):
and still powerfully win policy arguments and powerfully lead a
revolution with no invocation of my personal moral absolution. We're
still unpacking this moment with my father. I told you
would be here a while. Put another marshmallow on the fire.
I don't think my father's sadness and hurt in this
moment was simply him believing Belle Hooks had taught me
(09:33):
to accuse him of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. But also
he desired for me to feel as though I lived
freely in a world where I did not have to
be constrained by racial identity. I think another part of
that tearful reaction was part of his realization that I'm
(09:55):
not living in that world, that these things are very,
very salient concerns for me, and that the post racial
utopia family life that emerged from his and my mother's
dreams did not extend beyond our household, and that I
had somehow, almost like eve bit the Apple, I had
become corrupted by Oh wait, there's this whole other world
(10:18):
out here, and is this is now adult son? And
just like I'm exiting the matrix and realizing, wait, I
feel wet, I feel cold. Nobody told me about these things.
I don't feel placated anymore. And so that's how I
wrote Chocolate Rain to find a way to talk about
race that didn't make my father cry. No, we're getting
way ahead in the story, but recording this is the
first time I ever made that connection, I will say,
(10:51):
and this is the meat of why I did that.
Theoretical breakdown that we'll get back to revolutionary and resistance
dialogue has become a little bit too enamorous with structuralist
language in twenty twenty five. We're kind of in love
with structuralism being the path to revolution. I have at
times been guilty of that, and part of the reason
for that is just social media is very very structuralist
(11:14):
in how it organizes our public discourse. You could even
go so far as to say that Chocolate Rain was
a post structuralist piece of content on a post structuralist
wild wild West Internet. So you had this perfect alignment
of stars. Today, the Internet is much more regimented. In
(11:34):
two thousand and seven, you did not have algorithmic feeds monitoring,
spying on thousands of pieces of user telemetry to try
to predict what would keep the user on the platform
as long as possible. YouTube was actually curated by human
editors at that time. So yeah, there's this whole viral
video era from around what i'd say, die Coca and
(11:56):
mentos in two thousand and six, all the way through
maybe Gonggam style in twenty eleven, where these massively our
videos were possible on a post structuralist Internet, where eventually
companies like Google and Facebook learned they would make more
money by imposing more structure. And that's where we get
recommendation engines and feeds and these ads and platforms that
spy on all of our behavior to try to predict
(12:18):
what will addict us. And so a phenomenon like chocolate
Rain that had vague and flexible meaning that could be
widely appropriated that's not allowed on today's Internet. That's profane.
Ads can't predict human behavior in that type of ecosystem.
Today's Internet needs content to be what capitalists would call
a fixed asset. That also means it must have a
(12:42):
fixed meaning and a fixed audience response. The viral video
era in which chocolate Rain went viral was completely different.
It was all about reframing, reappropriating, lampooning meaning the top
content creators like Venetian Princess or barely pull it out
on YouTube, they would parody the music videos of gigantic
(13:05):
artists like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, and their parodies
would get tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of
millions of views. And if young people today take away
one thing about how the Internet used to be and
how it is different than what we have today, it's
that it used to be possible to completely reframe the
(13:27):
meaning of a mainstream content asset and have your reframe
reach a gigantic audience, not a pre vetted and partisan
audience whose confirmation biases are just validated by the way
that you reframe a piece of content. No, you could
reach an undecided, undifferentiated majority, completely outside of your thought
(13:51):
bubble or thought ecosystem, with the content you uploaded in
the past organically. And this all circles back to my
earlier statement that revolutionary Discourson you could maybe sometimes call
it leftism, bread tube, you could go by many names,
has fallen a bit too much in love with structuralism
because passionate young activists have grown up in this fake
(14:12):
oligarchic information regime, where it is impossible for layered meaning,
symbolic meaning, metaphorical meaning, liminal meaning to access undecided eyeballs
and grow an audience. They'll sometimes attack positions that introduce
complexity as though that complexity is motivated by malice and
a rejection of their through line narrative that they want
(14:35):
to reach an audience with the problem when a passionate
revolutionary responds that way is that it is conflating the
algorithm's active speech with the individual's active speech. The late
great Michael Brooks was right. We must be ruthless to
systems and kind to individuals. Audrey Lord was right, The
master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. World history
(14:55):
is filled with endless revolutionary actors who introduced complexity. Dota
introduced complexity as it lampooned and critiqued fascism, using the
optics that fascism put forth itself. Young people will watch
Chocolate Rain today and be like, I can't believe that
people missed with the meaning of this was in two
thousand and seven, and I'm like, oh, okay yet, Because
(15:17):
we operated in an information ecosystem that did not corral
us into self destructive literalism. Everybody was accustomed to regularly
encountering online content that had not been free sorted to
validate their most vulnerable biases and go to them into
a codependent, voracious consumption experience around time, sucking content related
(15:40):
to each bias. Some people will ask, well, why didn't
you speak out more clearly at that time that you
had this vision of chocolate rain being a ballad about
institutional racism. And it's partly, not entirely, but partly because
I knew it could be a trojan horse, and I
knew that people making comedic parodies and saying, oh gosh,
it's a fun silly song that I sing to my
kid at bedtime was part of the penetration phase for
(16:02):
that trojan horse, and it was not time for the
soldiers to jump out. And by the way, because we
live in extremely estranged and balkanized times now, that trojan
horse approach is one of the only ways to raise
the political consciousness of somebody who is a good person
but who is not personally nor spiritually prepared to understand
your worldview. The fact that social algorithms banning metaphor and
(16:26):
nuance also serves to ban that slow crawl trojan horsing,
which is literally the anthropological process by which new coalitions
and new societies and new cultural meetings evolve. Needs that
today's private sectors, search and social network oligarchies are injurious
(16:46):
to humanity and how they operate. So if you are
young and your entire life has been lived with this
boot on your neck, this boot of engagement optimized algorithmic
information feeds driven by search engine optimism, metadata and telemetry,
you face an extra challenge in pursuing intellectual and creative liberation.
(17:08):
As Ralph Ellison puts it, live in New York, but
don't let New York live in you. As Henry Lewis
Gates Junior writes about sophisticated African literary criticism through the
signifying monkey and the Ruba trickster, signification is the performance
of metaphor and lampooning established meaning and established power, the
(17:29):
same way Noam Chomsky talks about how human beings themselves
are wired for generative grammar and creating a structure whose
meaning is not beholding to itself.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
And we'll be back soon with more from Taizon Day
become back to sixteenth minute. I love my listeners so much,
(18:03):
and by that I mean I was able to find
someone to make an earn for my dad's ashes after
putting out a call two weeks ago. Really impressive stuff,
you guys. And here's more political theory from Tazon Day.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
You're just like that song. The revolution will not be televised. Well,
today's revolution will not be hashtagged. It will not be trending,
at least not uncentralized for profit engagement optimized search and
social media. And let's pause a little bit. Let's back off,
because I just made a bold claim. I said the
revolution is impossible using today's privatized, centralized, oligarthic search and
(18:43):
social media. The easiest counterpoint to that assertion is what
about Occupy Wall Street? What about Black Lives Matter? What
about me too? Those are fantastic counterpoints. And I want
to go on a bit of a detour, and we
are already in a detour, so it's kind of a
detour inside of the detour. But this topic of movements,
(19:04):
meanings and the structure of algorithmic social media sort of
being like a goalie who intercepts every scoring kick in
the effort to start revolution. It's worth exploring with real
world examples. It's important to acknowledge that people have lived
many different and oftentimes heroic stories, and that one perspective
(19:26):
does not seek to steal valor nor confiscate well deserved
praise for many different life arcs. I have to put
that asterisk out there now before I even suggest that
things might have an additional layer of meaning, because Internet
algorithms mutilate any assertion that is part of an interrogative
and misrepresents curiosity and exploration and dialectic as declarative and
(19:52):
gospel in order to gaslight and agitate. By the way,
a lot of y'all talk about representation as a social
justice concept, and rightly so, but I'll just put out
there as an aside that santactic misrepresentation might be the
most consequential type of misrepresentation determining your future, because santactic
(20:12):
misrepresentation by Internet algorithms acting on textual metadata is so
insidious and the only way you can inoculate yourself against
it is to be so educated that you can argue
every position you agree with and disagree with better than
its most passionate and educated and devoted acolyte. You got
(20:34):
to intellectually be like Yoda from Star Wars. That's a
part of Attack of the Clones that you missed if
you didn't read the novelization is that Douk who had
studied the dark side for ten years, and Yoda's like, surprise, motherfuck,
I know the dark side better than you do. So say, hypothetically,
you disagree with the libertarian, you disagree with the neoliberal,
you better know the dark side better. So when they
throw Hegel and John Locke and Adam Smith and John
(20:56):
Stuart Mill and Iron Rand and Milton Friedman and other
astrology in your face, you can say, hey, I have
that whole collection of tarot cards. I didn't realize we
were having a horoscope battle today. But you are going down.
That's the aside. I'm like Olive Garden. Sometimes the sides
fill you up more than the main course. So keeping
our eye on the ball, I said, the revolution will
(21:18):
not be hashtagged, It will not be trending. A lot
of these terms that trend on social media and become
the names of movements are sort of euphemistic. They are
integrationist euphemisms to describe revolutionary causes. To me, Integrationist means
that justice will be achieved by augmenting, remodeling established power,
usually without changing its stakeholders. Revolutionary means we've got to
(21:41):
re imagine established power in its stakeholders, which is often
state power, the power of government. Martin Luther King Junior
is a revolutionary who got backpedaled and celebrated as an integrationist.
He was condemned around the time of his death by
a lot of persisting media brands that you've engaged with.
They call them a trader and a communist in a while,
relic for talking about oligarchy and militarism. That's not what
(22:03):
you learned in grade school. You learned that he had
a dream and did the March on Washington where he
dreamed of integrating consumerism and public access, and then the
curriculaments until you go to college. That integrationist caricature of
Martin Luther King Junior has other lies that piggyback on it,
like the only black revolutionary discourse during the Civil Rights
movement was militants black panthers, sometimes the black nationalists. I
(22:25):
call attention to that false binary because it gets carried
forward into the overten window of acceptability of what is
allowed to trend on social media. Just replace Martin Luther
King and the Black Panthers with the term Occupy Wall
Street and the lyrics of Boots Riley, We've got the guillotine,
you better run. I love Occupy Wall Street, I love
Boots Riley. But in between them, are we questioning meritocracy?
(22:48):
Are we questioning perpetual growth? Are we questioning corporate personhood?
Are we questioning fractional reserve banking? And I'm not discounting
that acolytes are, But I'm talking about what trends widely,
And many will point out that there's more specific critiques
concerns that are kind of implied by Occupy Wall Street
are not themselves trending more widely because they're more niche.
I would say, thank you, that's exactly my point. Do
you think Chris Crocker screaming and leave Brittany alone was
(23:10):
not niche when it trended in the summer of two
thousand and seven. The knowledge ecosystem in which chocolate Rain
trended was one in which niche content and niche concepts
were allowed to reach a large, undifferentiated audience. But more
than that, Occupy Wall Street is also quite literal. Its
politics are not hidden. It's the santactic pineapples on pizza,
(23:34):
you know it when you see it, and you love
it or you hate it metaphor and having soldiers to
jump out of your conceptual trojan horse once it penetrates.
That requires figurative and widely discordant meaning, which is the
antithesis of literal meaning. So, in summary, between the literal
and broad trend of Occupy Wall Street and the militant
(23:57):
revolutionary literalism of Boots Riley, there is niche and figurative
meeting that is not as able to trend on algorithmic
social media. Black Lives Matter is a wonderful example of
literal meeting, as well as important heroic historic accomplishments in
public education, policy implementation, and policy discourse now zooming out.
(24:20):
Speaking about race is always this sort of awkward cohabitation
because you are speaking about socioeconomic reality that correlates with
biological fiction. I especially think that Black Lives Matter makes
a great juxtaposition with Chocolate Rain because they exist on
opposite sides of this divide where algorithmic social media took
(24:43):
over the world. Chocolate Rain could not have thrived in
the social media ecosystem six years later, and Black Lives
Matter could not have thrived in the social media ecosystem
six years before. Both Chocolate Rain and Black Lives Matter
are so of torch, bearing of a very established discourse
(25:05):
and even disagreement about black identity and black activism. I
mentioned Ralph Ellison earlier, and I think that conceptualizing Chocolate
Rain as a trojan horse, as something that was not
averse to reframing and appropriation as its spread its message,
is very in line with an Elisonian perspective on racial identity.
(25:28):
This perspective is captured in Ralph Ellison's best known novel
Invisible Man, and we'll come back to that in a minute.
In contrast to Chocolate Rain and Ralph Ellison, Black Lives
Matter makes me think of Richard Wright's Native Son, another
legendary essential work of American literature. One way that a
black life matters to Richard Wright, through his protagonist Bigger Thomas,
(25:50):
is to tell a racist society, you need to see
a rational actor who is responding intelligently and logically within
that you pathologize, because that is the only way to
complete the consciousness journey of seeing yourselves. Richard Wright might
even say that pathology satirizes the pathologizer. The way a
(26:11):
black life matters to Ralph Ellison is very different because
he believes being black gives you one side of an
important Hegelian dialectic that exposes the world to you through juxtaposition.
Crudely put, a dialectic is arriving at truth through an
argument between opposites. The outsiderness of blackness, being the opposite
(26:33):
of presumption, gets deployed by Ellison as a destoue feel
like ethnographic superpower. Ralph Ellison would say that all of
these identities that people ascribe to themselves, racial identity, political identity,
they're all like imaginary friends, and all of you people
who reduce your identity to a monolithic dogma, are like
(26:57):
children sucking on different flavors of as a fire. And
it is intellectually exhausting to be around you. And the
only liberation for an enlightened individual is to understand that
the human species is like an ongoing aluminum fire between
structuralist identities held by passionate, dogmatic, and misinformed individuals. You
(27:23):
can't put out an aluminum fire. All you can do
is stay far enough away and maybe get a long
pole to make some s'mores. Now here's the takeaway. The
other thing, I'll notice that regardless of what one believes
on any topic, they are always going to be able
to find individual cases, individual stories that bolster their position
and discredit the opposition. That's the case with all three
(27:44):
of these. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Me too.
Everybody can build or find a feed that cherry picks
truthful content that confirms their biases, regardless of proportion. One
reason it is so important that revolutionary messaging that creates
Tiak's power is not gate kept from reaching a wide
audience is that the more characters you put in the
(28:07):
story of a critique, for example, Everybody, the harder facts
are to discredit. Okay, I'm done. That's the button, the
theoretical button on the interaction I had with my father
at age twenty one and my answer to the question
of why did the language of Belle Hooks white supremacist,
capitalist patriarchy make my father cry in that moment, I
(28:28):
think that groundwork helps contextualize a lot of the rest
of the story. Holy moly, I'm looking back, that's like
twenty nine minutes of groundwork for when I was twelve
minutes into this. This is why I cannot make friends,
because that's exactly who I am on dating apps, and
if you get to know me, I am the four
thousand word message. I just had a thought or two
with citations. They should add that to the matchmaking criteria.
(28:49):
Sperm banks. No he's not six feet tall. No he's
not a millionaire. Yeah, he sends really long text messages
that are widely cited, and he does it at the
least appropriate times, like during the middle of movies and
at birthday parties. I should totally put that in my
hinge bio. Now, my biggest problem with the dating apps
is that questioning is not a category. Asexually, romatic is
(29:09):
not a category, and this kind of goes along with
being questioning. I've been publicly questioning for all of my
public life, and I've had a partner too, though not
really any lasting relationships. I used to think that having
a high partner count was somehow this clarifying thing, but
I know people who are on the hundreds from all
over the human and situational buffet and they still have
no clue what they're into. I'm definitely sapey as sexual.
(29:30):
I'm attracted to intellect, although I'm also not like a
lot of career intellectuals. You know that term interdisciplinary. I'm
enter undisciplinary. I'm supposed to be getting back to the
story of my career, aren't I. You can tell when
my ADHD medication does like fuck. Therefore we left the bloodstream.
He's on his own.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Thank you so much again to Taizon Day, whose social
media you can find in the description. And now that
you're fully dialed in, now that you are well aware
that in the context of Tay Or Adam Bonner's life,
that Chocolate Rain was but a chapter in his larger
political education. Next week he's gonna share his story up
(30:07):
until today. And if you're a person on the internet,
which face it you are, you too could unwittingly become
a main character. And Tay's insight and wisdom on the
topic twenty years on is well worth hearing. That's next
week on. Sixteenth Minute.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Radios. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Jamie Lostus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
He amazing. Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Brant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
producer Anderson, my Kats Flee and Casper and my pet Rockbird,
who will outlive us all Bye.
Cold Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Say it you mail.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Six sixteen.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Character.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
to the main characters of the Internet see how their
moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says
about us and the Internet. And today we're continuing our
series with the one and only Tayzon Day of Chocolate
Rain fame. And if you've been living happily in the
Wi Fi signal as woods up until yesterday, maybe you're
(01:19):
unfamiliar with Tay and his most famous work, which has
been going viral every year or so since two thousand
goddamn seven, But you might not know the deep anti
racist roots of that same song, something that was pretty
obscured for the first decade or so of Chocolate Rain's history.
And for all that, and for Tazon Day aka Adam
(01:41):
Bonner's origin story as a young autistic, mixed race guy
who started posting on YouTube and unwittingly became an online
superstar just shy of the US recession and in conjunction
of vin Senator Barack Obama, becoming a national star. For
a full look at what Tay's rise to fame looked
like in the moment, head back to the first episode
(02:01):
of this series, where we cover it in detail and
Tay himself gives us some insight into his early life.
But today, for this minisode, I'm going to hand the
mic off to the incomparable Tayson Day to tell you
about his political education specifically. Maybe this sounds a little weird,
but go with me here. When we left off in
(02:23):
our first episode, Tay had just begun to be educated
on the consequences American systemic racism had well into the present,
something his mixed race family hadn't talked to him about
as a kid as he grew up in the eighties
and nineties. And when he told his white dad about
beginning to learn this with some excitement and enthusiasm, his
(02:45):
dad began to cry. I guess I'll just add here
that this material, while the kind of conversations that I'm
really into, are not necessarily canon to the Tazon Day's story,
and it might not be for everybody. However, I was
really touched at how open Day was with sharing how
he reached both the place he was in his political
(03:08):
consciousness and how that formed Chocolate Rain, and how he's
grown since. So if you're into that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
I think you'll really like this episode.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
If you just want to hear the rest of his
story in terms of his linear viral experience, definitely tune
in to our concluding part on Tuesday. The following episode
is the process that Tay went through to try to
get to the root of his father's behavior, and they're
still close to this day, but getting to a satisfying
conclusion required that Tay go through a thorough history of
(03:41):
activism and academia that he was largely unfamiliar with. And
that's where we're picking up today. So if you're in
the mood to be radicalized or re radicalized, gather round.
Here's tay'son day.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I'm going to unpack this for almost thirty minutes, but
it is a journey that should have familiar scenery for
a lot of people. I'll crudely defined critical race theory
is the idea that historical racial injustice manifests as present
day racial oppression, even if people in the present day
are not deliberately or consciously being racist. I'll crudely define
(04:20):
sociological marginalization theory as the idea that race, class, gender,
physical ability, religion. All of these are axes of oppression
that have favored and less favored groups. So critical race
theory would argue that white supremacy creates unacceptable injustice in
a person's life the moment they are conceived, so it
(04:41):
says a baby born will die before the sin. Sorry,
that was low hanging fruit. Sociological marginalization theory would argue
that if your white, male, Christian, able bodied, heterosexual property class,
you are conferred advantages in society that you would not
be conferred if the playing field was level. Critical race
theory and sociological marginalization theory are both what would be
called structuralist theories. So what does structuralism mean, of which
(05:05):
these structuralist theories are apart. I'll crudely define structuralism as
the idea that your theory of how the world operates
in terms of power or knowledge also determines the motivations, morals,
and identities of groups of human beings. Famous structuralists include
Charles Darwin, the evolution Guy, Karl Marx, the communism Guy,
(05:28):
Milton Friedman, and other economists, Betty free Dan, and a
lot of second wave feminist epistemology. There are many critiques
in schools of thought that point out the shortcomings of structuralism,
and we call those post structuralists. We're not done with theory,
but real quickly, let's check back on this moment with
my father where twenty one year old me just excitedly
repeated structuralist terminology that Bell Hooks uses white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,
(05:52):
and my father started to cry. A post structuralist like
Dereda might say that my father was crying and thinking
nah to me and receiving my structural observation as a
very personal accusation, because my father believed, in the goodness
of his heart and the sacredness with which he had
(06:13):
lived his life, that the structuralist term white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy did not apply to him, and that he had
lived his life differently, or in the post structuralist critique
of Dereta, my father believed that he had repeated the
structure differently. A common criticism that post structuralism has of
structuralism is that structuralism confiscates choice from individuals in order
(06:39):
to render people as dominoes. And it's almost like just
the words of Belle Hooks without any other context, white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy made my father feel like a domino
that I had suddenly started to render in a certain way.
And some people are listening to this and thinking, yeah,
but Bell Hooks was not making a personal accusation against
(06:59):
your father in using structuralist terminologies, and many of you
thinking that way. We'll also say, well, the truth is
just the truth, and we've got to be able to
speak about the truth. And if that's traumatic for some people,
then that's work they have to do. That's not on
the person speaking the truth. What's interesting is that almost
every person I encounter who advances that perspective and I
(07:19):
point four fingers back at me because it's a perspective
I have held many waking days of my own life.
As soon as I turn the tables and start listing
the myriad ways their life has been enabled by plunder, genocide, oligarchy,
et cetera, they react much as my father did. It's
hurtful and makes them defensive if I point out, hey, yeah,
that iPhone that you posted all that fire and brimstone
(07:42):
ad hominem humanist outrage with online probably contains Mineral's mind
by child slaves and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
was probably manufactured under very questionable human rights conditions in Asia,
and those things were both partly enabled by technocratic currency
manipulation that eugenically devalues African born in Asian bodies relative
to your body using the exact currency that you pay
(08:04):
your car note with and bought your lunch with. Nobody
likes to be called up like that, even if the
accusations are true. They like to think of themselves as
Derridah thinks of the individual. They like to believe they
are the exception to the rule. They are repeating the
structure differently and it does not apply to them. So
(08:26):
before anybody is too hard on my father, really think
about yourself, because, especially if your life is derived from
Western civilization, you have never experienced nor acted upon anything
from your cradle to your grave that is morally sacrosanct.
In a structuralist interrogation of power and plunder, and in
(08:49):
my experience, when policy discussion gets reduced to personal absolution olympics,
that's almost always mutual assured destruction, which, as a I'll
get into it a little bit, is kind of the
point of today's social media. By the way, I love
bell Hooks and I love my iPhone. But I can
love them and still acknowledge reality. I can love them
(09:10):
and still powerfully win policy arguments and powerfully lead a
revolution with no invocation of my personal moral absolution. We're
still unpacking this moment with my father. I told you
would be here a while. Put another marshmallow on the fire.
I don't think my father's sadness and hurt in this
moment was simply him believing Belle Hooks had taught me
(09:33):
to accuse him of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. But also
he desired for me to feel as though I lived
freely in a world where I did not have to
be constrained by racial identity. I think another part of
that tearful reaction was part of his realization that I'm
(09:55):
not living in that world, that these things are very,
very salient concerns for me, and that the post racial
utopia family life that emerged from his and my mother's
dreams did not extend beyond our household, and that I
had somehow, almost like eve bit the Apple, I had
become corrupted by Oh wait, there's this whole other world
(10:18):
out here, and is this is now adult son? And
just like I'm exiting the matrix and realizing, wait, I
feel wet, I feel cold. Nobody told me about these things.
I don't feel placated anymore. And so that's how I
wrote Chocolate Rain to find a way to talk about
race that didn't make my father cry. No, we're getting
way ahead in the story, but recording this is the
first time I ever made that connection, I will say,
(10:51):
and this is the meat of why I did that.
Theoretical breakdown that we'll get back to revolutionary and resistance
dialogue has become a little bit too enamorous with structuralist
language in twenty twenty five. We're kind of in love
with structuralism being the path to revolution. I have at
times been guilty of that, and part of the reason
for that is just social media is very very structuralist
(11:14):
in how it organizes our public discourse. You could even
go so far as to say that Chocolate Rain was
a post structuralist piece of content on a post structuralist
wild wild West Internet. So you had this perfect alignment
of stars. Today, the Internet is much more regimented. In
(11:34):
two thousand and seven, you did not have algorithmic feeds monitoring,
spying on thousands of pieces of user telemetry to try
to predict what would keep the user on the platform
as long as possible. YouTube was actually curated by human
editors at that time. So yeah, there's this whole viral
video era from around what i'd say, die Coca and
(11:56):
mentos in two thousand and six, all the way through
maybe Gonggam style in twenty eleven, where these massively our
videos were possible on a post structuralist Internet, where eventually
companies like Google and Facebook learned they would make more
money by imposing more structure. And that's where we get
recommendation engines and feeds and these ads and platforms that
spy on all of our behavior to try to predict
(12:18):
what will addict us. And so a phenomenon like chocolate
Rain that had vague and flexible meaning that could be
widely appropriated that's not allowed on today's Internet. That's profane.
Ads can't predict human behavior in that type of ecosystem.
Today's Internet needs content to be what capitalists would call
a fixed asset. That also means it must have a
(12:42):
fixed meaning and a fixed audience response. The viral video
era in which chocolate Rain went viral was completely different.
It was all about reframing, reappropriating, lampooning meaning the top
content creators like Venetian Princess or barely pull it out
on YouTube, they would parody the music videos of gigantic
(13:05):
artists like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, and their parodies
would get tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of
millions of views. And if young people today take away
one thing about how the Internet used to be and
how it is different than what we have today, it's
that it used to be possible to completely reframe the
(13:27):
meaning of a mainstream content asset and have your reframe
reach a gigantic audience, not a pre vetted and partisan
audience whose confirmation biases are just validated by the way
that you reframe a piece of content. No, you could
reach an undecided, undifferentiated majority, completely outside of your thought
(13:51):
bubble or thought ecosystem, with the content you uploaded in
the past organically. And this all circles back to my
earlier statement that revolutionary Discourson you could maybe sometimes call
it leftism, bread tube, you could go by many names,
has fallen a bit too much in love with structuralism
because passionate young activists have grown up in this fake
(14:12):
oligarchic information regime, where it is impossible for layered meaning,
symbolic meaning, metaphorical meaning, liminal meaning to access undecided eyeballs
and grow an audience. They'll sometimes attack positions that introduce
complexity as though that complexity is motivated by malice and
a rejection of their through line narrative that they want
(14:35):
to reach an audience with the problem when a passionate
revolutionary responds that way is that it is conflating the
algorithm's active speech with the individual's active speech. The late
great Michael Brooks was right. We must be ruthless to
systems and kind to individuals. Audrey Lord was right, The
master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. World history
(14:55):
is filled with endless revolutionary actors who introduced complexity. Dota
introduced complexity as it lampooned and critiqued fascism, using the
optics that fascism put forth itself. Young people will watch
Chocolate Rain today and be like, I can't believe that
people missed with the meaning of this was in two
thousand and seven, and I'm like, oh, okay yet, Because
(15:17):
we operated in an information ecosystem that did not corral
us into self destructive literalism. Everybody was accustomed to regularly
encountering online content that had not been free sorted to
validate their most vulnerable biases and go to them into
a codependent, voracious consumption experience around time, sucking content related
(15:40):
to each bias. Some people will ask, well, why didn't
you speak out more clearly at that time that you
had this vision of chocolate rain being a ballad about
institutional racism. And it's partly, not entirely, but partly because
I knew it could be a trojan horse, and I
knew that people making comedic parodies and saying, oh gosh,
it's a fun silly song that I sing to my
kid at bedtime was part of the penetration phase for
(16:02):
that trojan horse, and it was not time for the
soldiers to jump out. And by the way, because we
live in extremely estranged and balkanized times now, that trojan
horse approach is one of the only ways to raise
the political consciousness of somebody who is a good person
but who is not personally nor spiritually prepared to understand
your worldview. The fact that social algorithms banning metaphor and
(16:26):
nuance also serves to ban that slow crawl trojan horsing,
which is literally the anthropological process by which new coalitions
and new societies and new cultural meetings evolve. Needs that
today's private sectors, search and social network oligarchies are injurious
(16:46):
to humanity and how they operate. So if you are
young and your entire life has been lived with this
boot on your neck, this boot of engagement optimized algorithmic
information feeds driven by search engine optimism, metadata and telemetry,
you face an extra challenge in pursuing intellectual and creative liberation.
(17:08):
As Ralph Ellison puts it, live in New York, but
don't let New York live in you. As Henry Lewis
Gates Junior writes about sophisticated African literary criticism through the
signifying monkey and the Ruba trickster, signification is the performance
of metaphor and lampooning established meaning and established power, the
(17:29):
same way Noam Chomsky talks about how human beings themselves
are wired for generative grammar and creating a structure whose
meaning is not beholding to itself.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
And we'll be back soon with more from Taizon Day
become back to sixteenth minute. I love my listeners so much,
(18:03):
and by that I mean I was able to find
someone to make an earn for my dad's ashes after
putting out a call two weeks ago. Really impressive stuff,
you guys. And here's more political theory from Tazon Day.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
You're just like that song. The revolution will not be televised. Well,
today's revolution will not be hashtagged. It will not be trending,
at least not uncentralized for profit engagement optimized search and
social media. And let's pause a little bit. Let's back off,
because I just made a bold claim. I said the
revolution is impossible using today's privatized, centralized, oligarthic search and
(18:43):
social media. The easiest counterpoint to that assertion is what
about Occupy Wall Street? What about Black Lives Matter? What
about me too? Those are fantastic counterpoints. And I want
to go on a bit of a detour, and we
are already in a detour, so it's kind of a
detour inside of the detour. But this topic of movements,
(19:04):
meanings and the structure of algorithmic social media sort of
being like a goalie who intercepts every scoring kick in
the effort to start revolution. It's worth exploring with real
world examples. It's important to acknowledge that people have lived
many different and oftentimes heroic stories, and that one perspective
(19:26):
does not seek to steal valor nor confiscate well deserved
praise for many different life arcs. I have to put
that asterisk out there now before I even suggest that
things might have an additional layer of meaning, because Internet
algorithms mutilate any assertion that is part of an interrogative
and misrepresents curiosity and exploration and dialectic as declarative and
(19:52):
gospel in order to gaslight and agitate. By the way,
a lot of y'all talk about representation as a social
justice concept, and rightly so, but I'll just put out
there as an aside that santactic misrepresentation might be the
most consequential type of misrepresentation determining your future, because santactic
(20:12):
misrepresentation by Internet algorithms acting on textual metadata is so
insidious and the only way you can inoculate yourself against
it is to be so educated that you can argue
every position you agree with and disagree with better than
its most passionate and educated and devoted acolyte. You got
(20:34):
to intellectually be like Yoda from Star Wars. That's a
part of Attack of the Clones that you missed if
you didn't read the novelization is that Douk who had
studied the dark side for ten years, and Yoda's like, surprise, motherfuck,
I know the dark side better than you do. So say, hypothetically,
you disagree with the libertarian, you disagree with the neoliberal,
you better know the dark side better. So when they
throw Hegel and John Locke and Adam Smith and John
(20:56):
Stuart Mill and Iron Rand and Milton Friedman and other
astrology in your face, you can say, hey, I have
that whole collection of tarot cards. I didn't realize we
were having a horoscope battle today. But you are going down.
That's the aside. I'm like Olive Garden. Sometimes the sides
fill you up more than the main course. So keeping
our eye on the ball, I said, the revolution will
(21:18):
not be hashtagged, It will not be trending. A lot
of these terms that trend on social media and become
the names of movements are sort of euphemistic. They are
integrationist euphemisms to describe revolutionary causes. To me, Integrationist means
that justice will be achieved by augmenting, remodeling established power,
usually without changing its stakeholders. Revolutionary means we've got to
(21:41):
re imagine established power in its stakeholders, which is often
state power, the power of government. Martin Luther King Junior
is a revolutionary who got backpedaled and celebrated as an integrationist.
He was condemned around the time of his death by
a lot of persisting media brands that you've engaged with.
They call them a trader and a communist in a while,
relic for talking about oligarchy and militarism. That's not what
(22:03):
you learned in grade school. You learned that he had
a dream and did the March on Washington where he
dreamed of integrating consumerism and public access, and then the
curriculaments until you go to college. That integrationist caricature of
Martin Luther King Junior has other lies that piggyback on it,
like the only black revolutionary discourse during the Civil Rights
movement was militants black panthers, sometimes the black nationalists. I
(22:25):
call attention to that false binary because it gets carried
forward into the overten window of acceptability of what is
allowed to trend on social media. Just replace Martin Luther
King and the Black Panthers with the term Occupy Wall
Street and the lyrics of Boots Riley, We've got the guillotine,
you better run. I love Occupy Wall Street, I love
Boots Riley. But in between them, are we questioning meritocracy?
(22:48):
Are we questioning perpetual growth? Are we questioning corporate personhood?
Are we questioning fractional reserve banking? And I'm not discounting
that acolytes are, But I'm talking about what trends widely,
And many will point out that there's more specific critiques
concerns that are kind of implied by Occupy Wall Street
are not themselves trending more widely because they're more niche.
I would say, thank you, that's exactly my point. Do
you think Chris Crocker screaming and leave Brittany alone was
(23:10):
not niche when it trended in the summer of two
thousand and seven. The knowledge ecosystem in which chocolate Rain
trended was one in which niche content and niche concepts
were allowed to reach a large, undifferentiated audience. But more
than that, Occupy Wall Street is also quite literal. Its
politics are not hidden. It's the santactic pineapples on pizza,
(23:34):
you know it when you see it, and you love
it or you hate it metaphor and having soldiers to
jump out of your conceptual trojan horse once it penetrates.
That requires figurative and widely discordant meaning, which is the
antithesis of literal meaning. So, in summary, between the literal
and broad trend of Occupy Wall Street and the militant
(23:57):
revolutionary literalism of Boots Riley, there is niche and figurative
meeting that is not as able to trend on algorithmic
social media. Black Lives Matter is a wonderful example of
literal meeting, as well as important heroic historic accomplishments in
public education, policy implementation, and policy discourse now zooming out.
(24:20):
Speaking about race is always this sort of awkward cohabitation
because you are speaking about socioeconomic reality that correlates with
biological fiction. I especially think that Black Lives Matter makes
a great juxtaposition with Chocolate Rain because they exist on
opposite sides of this divide where algorithmic social media took
(24:43):
over the world. Chocolate Rain could not have thrived in
the social media ecosystem six years later, and Black Lives
Matter could not have thrived in the social media ecosystem
six years before. Both Chocolate Rain and Black Lives Matter
are so of torch, bearing of a very established discourse
(25:05):
and even disagreement about black identity and black activism. I
mentioned Ralph Ellison earlier, and I think that conceptualizing Chocolate
Rain as a trojan horse, as something that was not
averse to reframing and appropriation as its spread its message,
is very in line with an Elisonian perspective on racial identity.
(25:28):
This perspective is captured in Ralph Ellison's best known novel
Invisible Man, and we'll come back to that in a minute.
In contrast to Chocolate Rain and Ralph Ellison, Black Lives
Matter makes me think of Richard Wright's Native Son, another
legendary essential work of American literature. One way that a
black life matters to Richard Wright, through his protagonist Bigger Thomas,
(25:50):
is to tell a racist society, you need to see
a rational actor who is responding intelligently and logically within
that you pathologize, because that is the only way to
complete the consciousness journey of seeing yourselves. Richard Wright might
even say that pathology satirizes the pathologizer. The way a
(26:11):
black life matters to Ralph Ellison is very different because
he believes being black gives you one side of an
important Hegelian dialectic that exposes the world to you through juxtaposition.
Crudely put, a dialectic is arriving at truth through an
argument between opposites. The outsiderness of blackness, being the opposite
(26:33):
of presumption, gets deployed by Ellison as a destoue feel
like ethnographic superpower. Ralph Ellison would say that all of
these identities that people ascribe to themselves, racial identity, political identity,
they're all like imaginary friends, and all of you people
who reduce your identity to a monolithic dogma, are like
(26:57):
children sucking on different flavors of as a fire. And
it is intellectually exhausting to be around you. And the
only liberation for an enlightened individual is to understand that
the human species is like an ongoing aluminum fire between
structuralist identities held by passionate, dogmatic, and misinformed individuals. You
(27:23):
can't put out an aluminum fire. All you can do
is stay far enough away and maybe get a long
pole to make some s'mores. Now here's the takeaway. The
other thing, I'll notice that regardless of what one believes
on any topic, they are always going to be able
to find individual cases, individual stories that bolster their position
and discredit the opposition. That's the case with all three
(27:44):
of these. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Me too.
Everybody can build or find a feed that cherry picks
truthful content that confirms their biases, regardless of proportion. One
reason it is so important that revolutionary messaging that creates
Tiak's power is not gate kept from reaching a wide
audience is that the more characters you put in the
(28:07):
story of a critique, for example, Everybody, the harder facts
are to discredit. Okay, I'm done. That's the button, the
theoretical button on the interaction I had with my father
at age twenty one and my answer to the question
of why did the language of Belle Hooks white supremacist,
capitalist patriarchy make my father cry in that moment, I
(28:28):
think that groundwork helps contextualize a lot of the rest
of the story. Holy moly, I'm looking back, that's like
twenty nine minutes of groundwork for when I was twelve
minutes into this. This is why I cannot make friends,
because that's exactly who I am on dating apps, and
if you get to know me, I am the four
thousand word message. I just had a thought or two
with citations. They should add that to the matchmaking criteria.
(28:49):
Sperm banks. No he's not six feet tall. No he's
not a millionaire. Yeah, he sends really long text messages
that are widely cited, and he does it at the
least appropriate times, like during the middle of movies and
at birthday parties. I should totally put that in my
hinge bio. Now, my biggest problem with the dating apps
is that questioning is not a category. Asexually, romatic is
(29:09):
not a category, and this kind of goes along with
being questioning. I've been publicly questioning for all of my
public life, and I've had a partner too, though not
really any lasting relationships. I used to think that having
a high partner count was somehow this clarifying thing, but
I know people who are on the hundreds from all
over the human and situational buffet and they still have
no clue what they're into. I'm definitely sapey as sexual.
(29:30):
I'm attracted to intellect, although I'm also not like a
lot of career intellectuals. You know that term interdisciplinary. I'm
enter undisciplinary. I'm supposed to be getting back to the
story of my career, aren't I. You can tell when
my ADHD medication does like fuck. Therefore we left the bloodstream.
He's on his own.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Thank you so much again to Taizon Day, whose social
media you can find in the description. And now that
you're fully dialed in, now that you are well aware
that in the context of Tay Or Adam Bonner's life,
that Chocolate Rain was but a chapter in his larger
political education. Next week he's gonna share his story up
(30:07):
until today. And if you're a person on the internet,
which face it you are, you too could unwittingly become
a main character. And Tay's insight and wisdom on the
topic twenty years on is well worth hearing. That's next
week on. Sixteenth Minute.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Radios. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Jamie Lostus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
He amazing. Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Brant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
producer Anderson, my Kats Flee and Casper and my pet Rockbird,
who will outlive us all Bye.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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