Chocolate Rain

Chocolate Rain is a song and performance video by Tay Zonday, the stage name of Adam Bahner. Zonday's channel identifies the upload as the original song; his lyrics turn the repeated title phrase into a refrain for a ballad about institutional racism. The listed YouTube date and dates reported by some later accounts differ by a day, so the origin is best placed in 2007 rather than assigned a disputed upload date.

The song's online spread carried Zonday into mainstream attention. In March 2008, ABC News reported that it had won YouTube's best music video award; MPR News also records the award and the sudden public attention that followed. At the same time, many viewers treated the performance as a joke, and the song became a template for parody rather than only a song to replay.

By July 2007, the song was being used as bait in a Tay'Roll, a Rickroll-style switch that redirected viewers to Zonday's performance. An Internet Archive record separately documents a July 28 upload titled Chocolate Rain - 4chan Remix. These examples show distinct early mutations, but neither establishes the first remix or the first use of the format.

Zonday also reworked the song himself. His November 2007 Cherry Chocolate Rain turns the refrain into a Dr Pepper-themed version, making the meme's recognizable musical identity a vehicle for a creator-led commercial follow-up rather than only a target for outside parody.

The reference crossed into scripted television in South Park's episode Canada on Strike. More than a decade later, VICE reported that videos allegedly showed Chicago police scanners playing the song during protests in 2020; the article noted uncertainty over who caused the interference. Zonday answered with a variation on the familiar microphone line: “I move away from the mic to demand justice.”

The format has a compact musical hook: the title phrase returns again and again, while the lyrics range across social institutions and consequences. That structure makes the song easy to quote and gives parodies a ready-made scaffold. Its serious subject and striking performance could be treated as novelty by viewers, but Zonday later described the song as a ballad about institutional racism; the gap between those readings became part of its history.