Frequently Asked Questions

I’m Tay Zonday. This article is a list of questions I commonly get asked. I plan to update the questions and answers as-needed. If you’re looking for a press bio or milquetoast sizzle information about me, that’s more what my website is for.

Q: What is the meaning of Chocolate Rain?

A: I wrote Chocolate Rain in 2007 as a ballad about systemic racism. It became popular as a viral meme that was heavily tied to enjoyment of my deep voice, my small/feminine stature, and my unusual way of moving and singing vowels. Thousands of parodies were created with alternative lyrics. Youtube embraced me and the song as being more brand-friendly than other viral videos and creators at the time. It is remembered as a significant moment in the history of Youtube, 4Chan, nerd culture, viral video and the internet.

I declined to speak on Chocolate Rain’s intended meaning for approximately one decade. This is partly because I’m autistic and struggle to be verbal in general. It’s also not my style to dictate how my art is experienced. As I’ve often said in interviews, “I sing about what I can’t say about.” By the year 2018 and beyond — especially 2020 — popular understanding had more frames of reference to access a deeper assessment of “Chocolate Rain” lyrics. During this decade after Chocolate Rain, social media also changed the terms on which information is permitted to have organic reach. This forced all of humanity to adopt search-engine-optimized literalism in how they expressed ideas in order to kowtow to the business ambitions of platforms.

Q: What was it like to be parodied on South Park? Do you know you were mentioned on . . . (Saturday Night Live, Robot Chicken, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Good Place)

A: I’m flattered by most pop culture parodies. But so far, these things are not operationally useful in my life. As a highly sensitive person, many aspects of public exposure both confused me and contributed to debilitating anxiety. Somebody else may have gotten more mileage or benefit from this type of exposure. As someone who has struggled with financial insecurity my entire adult life, witnessing my level of exposure sometimes makes me sad because thousands of artists with lesser exposure have made better, higher-functioning lives for themselves.

Q: What is Daniel Tosh like in real life? (Or Lily Allen, Rivers Cuomo, Jimmy Kimmel, Anthony Padilla, Rhett & Link or others I have been seen working with).

A: Creative people I meet who are shy, sensitive and withdrawn in real life — yet manage to not completely fail at business and content creation — fascinate me. I’d definitely put Daniel Tosh, Rivers Cuomo, Bo Burnham and a few others in that category. For sure, it helps to evolve a format and a team. Tosh.0 is a team of dozens of people. Beyond that broad insight, I don’t have deep thoughts about other creatives. None of them have my combination of adversities to an extent that I can reference their lives to usefully inform mine.

Q: Are you autistic?

A: Yes. I was first diagnosed with Aspergers, now called Autism Spectrum Disorder, at the age of fifteen in 1997. I was a Special Education student and took five years to complete high-school, 2.5 of those at a therapeutic day school. However, I did not internalize nor fully understand my autism diagnosis until resuming psychiatric care in 2019 at the age of thirty-six. I specifically have autistic hyperacusis, allodynia and photophobia — an involuntary neurological pain and fear response to sound, touch and light. Singing is largely a stim of mine (repetitive, stimulating behavior that an autistic person performs to operate in the world). For the majority of fourteen years since Chocolate Rain, I have not been able to afford a creative environment where I am able to stim in privacy and safety.

Q: When will you release new music?

A: In many ways, this continues the prior answer: I struggle with debilitating autistic hyperacusis. I was late in life to understanding the scope of my mental health needs, especially because overnight public attention interacted badly with my mental health in ways that had previously been easier to cope with. I’d like nothing more than to afford a private environment to create music and other content in peace, safety and relative anonymity. That hasn’t been my life. It might never be. I’m stuck living in apartments like tens of millions who are priced out of housing through anti-market practices, and it’s not adaptable to my sensory needs. So far I’m not homeless/housing-insecure, partly from being bailed-out by family repeatedly. This isn’t a call-to-action or cry for help, just my sharing facts of my life.

Kulture City is a leading charity that advocates for sensory accessibility and acceptance. I experience a lot of environments as sensory-debilitating. Unlike policy as it relates to persons with visible disabilities, there is an overall lack of standards-and-practices that address sensory disability. There is no regulation or certification to define sensory accommodations in construction, product manufacturing, education, attire or other daily outcomes of civil society.

Q: Why did you follow/unfollow me on Twitter?

A: There was a period of time when I attempted to use Twitter direct-messaging as a mailing list. For example: if I participated in an event in Berlin, it would be possible to message people in Germany. At the time, public direct messaging was not a Twitter feature and therefore required mutual following.

As time passed, Twitter changed the design of its platform. It added more API restrictions for how third-party services (like ManageFlitter, the service I used) could manage accounts. Therefore, it was not necessary to follow the same number of people. My direct messages have generally stayed open and I have always explained this to anyone who asks.

Q: Do you plan to stream on Twitch (or other platforms) in the future?

A: Perhaps. I always wished that I had a goofy, likable streaming personality like Markiplier or Dashie Games. At my peak performance, I can be entertaining, but I’ve also learned that I can’t force that if I’m not mentally well or “feeling it.” Twitch Sings was a wonderful karaoke game that brought me back to Twitch in 2019 and 2020, but unfortunately Twitch canceled it despite the tremendous benefit it had for thousands of people. If I’m able to be well and live my best life, things like streaming and delivering entertainment value flow naturally.

Q: Are you making NFTs?

A: Yes. I am following in the footsteps of millions of artists, many of whom are marginalized and/or disabled, in participating in the cryptocurrency economy. Favorite NFT artists of mine include Itzel Yard a.k.a IX Shells, Mig Mora a.k.a. Spottie Wifi, Tyler Gordon, Latashá, NFTipi, SassyBlack, Ed Balloon and Brittany Pierre.

Like many topics on social media, there has sometimes been misinformation about the relative environmental impact of the cryptocurrency economy. This often happens in tandem with fiat economy apologetics and falsehoods about the environmental impact of personal conduct — falsehoods initially promoted by the petrol industry. I have both voted for — and proposed policies — to reduce the environmental impact of human activity my entire adult life. I actively participate in both proof-of-work (Ethereum) and proof-of-stake (Solana, Tezos) NFT economies. I also carbon-offset my cryptocurrency activities many times over. These activities are insignificant compared to the carbon impact of my fiat activity as an American consumer.

To reduce my consumer carbon footprint, we need global living wage parity to disincentivize import of manufactured goods from a subjugated global south. We need an American government that appoints collective bargaining groups for W2 tax payees just like courts appoint public defenders. We need rigorous antitrust enforcement to break up big-tech, big-agriculture and other generational-wealth beneficiaries of fiat inequality. We need to liberate the American public from the Federal Reserve because printing currency is the most consequential power that a government has to enact policy. This list can go on, but suffice it to say that our species salvation will not trickle-up from individual conduct that does anything besides undo the prevailing order of political and economic power.

Q: Are you a socialist? Are you a capitalist?

A: I reject the cold war articulation of socialism and capitalism on a linear spectrum. Like Michel Foucault, I’m inclined to believe that there’s cultural realpolitik determining the power structure of modern nation states that is more impactful than the economic theory romanced by leadership. That being said, it’s probably safe to say that I’m a post-structuralist humanist who believes that modern monetary theory when combined with abolition of corporate personhood, private printing of public money, fractional reserve banking and other absurdities — can contribute to equitable outcomes without the complete abolition of market dynamics.

Some would argue that my policy goals are tantamount to the abolition of market dynamics, to which I’d argue that they are merely an affirmation of public and human rights. I find semantic litmuses (e.g. deciding that one isn’t a loyal socialist if they seek to reform capitalism, or that one isn’t a loyal capitalist if they seek public regulation) to be generally counterproductive. Coalition building around specific policy goals and direct action is more impactful than search-engine-optimizing balkanized theoretical identities. Extremely granular semantic balkanization (and time-sucking engagement-labor around it) is a grammatical artifact of engagement-optimized social media platforms. We must be broad in our cause recruitment and granular in our advocacy to maximize impact — not granular in our cause recruitment and broad in our advocacy. The tendency of social platforms to organize human beings into bias-bubbles — bubbles that make it easiest to predict their behavior and sell them ads — makes critical-mass-building around human interest unintelligible.