Obituary

Chocolate Rain was a song written and performed by Tay Zonday, a then-graduate student who recorded himself singing into a cheap microphone in a way that sounded like a low-register anthem about an unspecified catastrophe. 'Chocolate rain. Some stay dry and others feel the pain.' The internet was hypnotized — by the voice, by the dead-serious delivery, by the fact that Zonday kept his face perfectly still. It became one of the first great YouTube original-video phenomena, covered, remixed, and parodied into oblivion. The meme died in 2008. The song's meaning, which Zonday later explained was about racism, survived the joke.

Portrait: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Born

April 2007

Died

2008

Cause of death

Died of staying a little too on pitch

Last sighting

A YouTube search result, 2008

Resting place

Section Z, Row 13 — the ancestral plot

Category

audio