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 actually 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 that Zonday chants "Chocolate rain." This repetition is such that a single viewing will have you twitchily blurting these two words for hours afterward, disconcerting friends and strangers alike.
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, the earnest-looking Zonday jerks his head back every 10 seconds for the rest of the song. The result is more than amusing.
As the initial puzzlement wears off and you begin to actually listen to the lyrics, you quickly become aware of "Chocolate Rain's" central contradiction: Hold on a second -- "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. As of this writing, the video has earned 4.2 million YouTube views. In the likely case that it scores an additional 250,000 hits, the song will break 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 50,000 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.
