A Hard "Chocolate Rain" Falls

Adam Elenbaas

In 1979 the Waldorf educated, German fantasy writer Michael Ende wrote the international best-selling Never Ending Story. The book went on to be adapted for the big screen in 1984 and has been a family classic film ever since. In the story, the magical world of Fantasia is threatened by a menacing force called the Nothing. The servant of the Nothing, a giant werewolf named Gmork, describes the Nothing as a terrible force released by humanity's indifference and lack of imagination, a power that can kill unicorns, talking trees and magical rivers.

A recent YouTube phenomenon has put the spotlight on strange songwriter who is singing about "the Nothing" as a cultural metaphor from the basement of his Minneapolis home. Instead of calling it The Nothing, Adam Bohner, aka Tay Zonday, calls it "Chocolate Rain." His song, "Chocolate Rain" started off as a homemade music video that Bohner wrote in his basement. After netting nearly 5 million hits on YouTube, and now after a recent Jimmy Kimmel performance, people are flocking to hear the strange phenomenon that is "Chocolate Rain."

The four and a half minute song features 12 choruses and 48 refrains of the words "chocolate rain." When interviewed recently for Yahoo News, Zonday was asked about the meaning of the mantra. His response: "I like to compare it to that 1980s movie, The Never Ending Story. There's a character called the Nothing...Chocolate rain is like a cryptic antagonist. Somehow you know it's there."

Upon first listen, the lyrics seem ridiculous within the context of the repeated "chocolate rain" mantra, the deep voice doesn't seem to be coming from the young body sitting in front of the camera, and it's difficult to determine whether the hook is neruotic and annoying or the catchiest thing you've heard in a long time.

Perhaps its the exact time for bizarre musicians and artistic phenomenon like Tay Zonday and Chocolate Rain. A recent Time Magazine article, entitled "Sell it to the Psyche," discusses the way in which major corporations are now hiring marketing programs such as one called LifeMatrix to do its dirty work. LifeMatrix employs highly advanced marketing researchers that approach sales like automaton reapers, boxing people into the tightest and most highly specialized categories according to age, gender, race, sexuality, religion, sports, hobbies, television watched, stores shopped at, Internet searches performed, websites visited, on and on. The goal of the marketing is to drive high-speed, manipulative advertisements deep into the psyche of a consumer. The streaming world of media-marketing isn't dissimilar from "the nothing."

In the past this kind of marketing included MTV, major record labels and dominated popular music, but with the advent of venues like YouTube and MySpace music, it's like Radiohead once sang when they first started: "anyone can play guitar."

Zonday is doing just that:

Chocolate Rain
Build a tent and say the world is dry
Chocolate Rain
Zoom the camera out and see the lie

Chocolate Rain
Forecast to be falling yesterday
Chocolate Rain
Only in the past is what they say

Chocolate Rain
Raised your neighborhood insurance rates
Chocolate Rain
Makes us happy 'livin in a gate

Chocolate Rain
History quickly crashing through your veins
Chocolate Rain
Using you to fall back down again

(full lyrics)

A 25-year-old PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, Zonday is no idiot. The mantra penetrates the heart of business-as-usual popular culture. Perhaps, in a media and market-driven culture where advertising and sales boil us down into nobody-niches, we should seriously consider Zonday's claim about the presence of a cryptic antagonist. His voice may be strange and his song stranger, but we shouldn't be too quick to discard Zonday, lest we forget that, historically, many prophetic voices have been strikingly similar in their unlikeliness.