Chocolate Rain — Tay Zonday (2007)

Adam Bahner, performing as Tay Zonday, was a graduate student in Minneapolis when he uploaded Chocolate Rain on 22 April 2007. He wrote and produced it himself on a home setup, and the lyrics are unambiguous: 'chocolate rain' is a metaphor for systemic racism, running through verses about incarceration, schooling, housing and the way institutions distribute harm. It is a protest song delivered with complete sincerity.

The internet received it as an anomaly. A slight man leans into a microphone and an extraordinarily deep baritone emerges, entirely at odds with his appearance. Then, at intervals, he turns his head sharply away from the mic, annotated on screen with the caption 'I move away from the mic to breathe in'. That single line of text — a technical explanation, offered helpfully — became one of the most quoted phrases of 2007.

The remix wave was immediate and enormous. There were metal covers, chipmunk edits, John McCain versions, Boom Goes the Dynamite mashups and thousands of re-performances. Tay Zonday appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live and on Opie and Anthony, was referenced by Oprah, and was parodied on South Park's 'Canada on Strike' episode, which folded him into a storyline about internet celebrities who receive fame instead of money. Cherry Chocolate Rain, a Dr Pepper-sponsored sequel, followed in 2008 — an early and awkward experiment in monetising a meme.

What separates Chocolate Rain from disposable 2007 content is how Bahner handled it. He never disowned the song, never performed embarrassment about it, and has spent years patiently restating what the lyrics were about while the internet laughed at his voice. In interviews across the following decade he described the strange position of being simultaneously widely known and rarely heard — a specific form of internet fame where the joke about you is more famous than anything you said.

The video's climb from roughly 5 million views in its first year to 142 million by 2026 — a 28x expansion — reflects the meme's canonisation. It is now a fixed reference point in every retrospective of Web 2.0 culture, and a case study in how audiences of that era converted earnest work into raw material without asking.