Bloom and Grow: The Magical, Deep-Throated World of Tay Zonday

"You throw something cheesy up on YouTube, and you think it's just going to be watched by a couple people..." - Tay Zonday

Holy baritones, Batman.  How ever did I miss this?

Tay Zonday - Chocolate Rain (mp3) (via)

In case you're the other person who'd never ever seen this, before:  That's 25-year-old Minnesotan grad student Tay Zonday (myspace), who apparently shot to iFame after posting his sixth original composition on the YouTube.  Currently creeping towards two and a half million views, "Chocolate Rain" has gotten mainstream radio play and has inspired almost 600 response videos - remixes, covers, criticisms, parodies.

The song is a (circle one) monotonous/hypnotic deep-voiced recitation over a Tubular Bellsish piano part; serious-but-random-sounding stuff ("a baby will die before the sin," "raised your neighborhood insurance rates," "it's the fear your leaders call control") is alternated with/anchored by the titular phrase.

I think it's got something to do with The Man.

There's no chorus.  Just "Chocolate Rain/Blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blahblah/Chocolate Rain..." for, like, ever.  You can fill in the "blahs" however you'd like.  Zonday sticks with near-rhyming couplets, but you don't have to.

Biblical verses, dirty jokes, cooking instructions.  It all works.

This is YouTube stardom, though, and the attraction is less the predictable, catchy tune than the unprogrammed weirdness that comes along with it.  A single shot, the video starts with a shot of a microphone and nothing more than the crown of Zonday's head; he's seated, presumably starting the playback.  He then stands up into frame and waits a very long five seconds.  During this time, you ready yourself to hear sounds that might come from the mouth of a fit, pubescent, male.  Zonday - again, 25 - already looks much younger than he is; the shock comes when his starts belting like Bowzer.  The controlled video setting makes you over-examine his odd mannerisms:  He's staring intently off camera (at lyrics, possibly); he often starts singing out the side of his mouth; he rocks away from the mic, regularly (and early on, a graphic comes up to explain this, which is itself a bit odd:  "** I move away from the mic to breathe in").

Why is everything yellow?  Is that his real name, or is it Pig Latin?

But what makes "Chocolate Rain" so watchable is the incongruity between the sound and the picture.  (People have accused Zonday of distorting his voice, studied the fuzzy streaming vids for evidence of shenanigans; if you watch this video interview, you'll see that, no, it's real.)  The formula goes to Camp Kablooey when he does something like this:

Seriously?  "Edelweiss?"  "Bless my homeland forever?"  Seriously?

"In a nutshell, you are asking whether it is my goal to be an artist or to be an entertainer," Zonday replied when asked if any part of the videos were meant as a joke.  "Why does this matter?  There is no way I can ‘win' this question.  If I say I was trying to be serious, and everyone laughs at it, I lose.  If I say I was trying to make people laugh, but they only see a serious message, I lose.  People should not worry what I was trying to do with my videos.  They should just experience it in the way that is real to them."

A refreshing, level-headed response (especially considering that earlier in that same interview, his answer to "Are you single" involved a mention of Hurricane Katrina).  And it's probably best that Zonday keep a sense of humor about his situation.

That's the kind of stuff featured during the audition rounds of American Idol.  Zonday's vocals aren't trainwrecks; they're just sort of out of control.  If his range weren't so abnormal, his voice wouldn't warrant any attention.  But he's not just a singer, he's a writer.

Tay Zonday (with Elijah Lucian) - Demons on the Dance Floor (remix) (mp3) (via)

More incongruity:  The singer looks too stiff to know anything about dance floors and devils.  Zonday's original was reworked by Elijah Lucian, and it's not rocket science or anything, but I sort of like this.  I like the verse, "Dreams of French vanilla when she's in bed/Always superstitious when she wears red/Has a secret fetish for cartoon porn/Keeps a naked Martian in her top drawer."

[He's got a pretty unfortunate support the troops/protest song called "Blue on the Fourth of July."  That one features lyrics like "Soon he kisses Ma goodbye/Tastes her famous apple pie" and "Morning breeze of Uncle Sam/Blows heritage into his hand."  Um, no.]

I can't decide whether Tay Zonday's latest original is a brilliant, on-target bit of geekfunk or a scary shark jump.

Tay Zonday - Internet Dream (mp3) (via)

I guess it doesn't matter which, when the mock-grooviness of "Man, this Internet is somethin' else!" makes me buckle over every time I hear it.  I sort of hope Zonday doesn't ever graduate to anything beyond his safe little two-inch by three-inch video box.  This is probably the most confident and together he's looked and sounded (after, you know, all of three months)... and it's a song where the "chorus" is identical to the sung verses, where websites are mentioned, where he talks about how he loves his mother and father.  Isn't that fantastic?  Some things totally need to be taken on their own terms, and I think Tay Zonday is one of those things.  He's tagged his vids with "Barry White" and "Paul Robeson," but I don't want to see him held up against others.  I don't want to watch Simon Cowell roll his eyes at him.

 "So every day I swear I'm gonna go to bed at like, eleven.  And all of a sudden it's 4AM... And I was just watching YouTube and reading Wikipedia for five hours.  It's, like, MAN.  You ask me the next day, I can't even remember what I was doin'.  Crazy!"

Crazy!

He seems like good people.  He posts his songs with Creative Commons licenses;  he wonders how he can collect money for the CBS airplay he's gotten without joining ASCAP, because he hates what they do to independent radio and small businesses.  Also:  He hearts his ma and pa.

Zonday's home page isn't active, yet; it redirects you to his YouTube account.  He does have a myspace page.  And if you feel like making any kind of financial contribution to him, you can support Tay Zonday here.

*

Mostly, I wanted to talk about another baritone from the Midwest.

Harry Chapin - Mr. Tanner (mp3) (buy)

It's one of my favorite songs.

Chapin supposedly based it around a real New York Times review.  "Unbelievably cruel," he called it.  He made up the backstory, the aftermath.  It crushes, lifts.

You'd better be fucking listening to that.

There are so many specifics to love.  The early, scene-setting unpretentiousness of the line, "And of all the cleaning shops around, he'd made his the best."  Big John Wallace's  unshowy, haunting "O Holy Night."  The Irishness in the early delivery of "it made him feel s'happy, it made him feel s'good;" how rewarding it is when that "so" opens up in the last chorus.

"It made him feel so good."  So good.

It's perfect, how the cited review comes at exactly the point in the song where Tanner would be singing.  It replaces him, silences him.  "It only took four lines" sounds like something from a gunslinger's tale, "contemporary professional standards" becomes a phrase soaked in evil.  "Full-time consideration of another endeavor might be in order" is a death sentence.

If you ever want to watch me cry, really blubber buckets, you put "Mr. Tanner" on.  It's like Old Yeller and onions, that fucking song.  It gets at me in places I'd never let your spotlights shine, you nosy bastards.

Of course, I'm a vocal fan of stringent criticism (The two "buts" in the verse before the review really bother me.  And really, Harry:  rhyming "closed" and "clothes?"), especially in these dark times of hype and bullshit.  But the song's not really about that.  It's not called "New York Times Review," there's not a What at the center of the song.  There's a Why.

Music was his life, it was not his livelihood

And it made him feel so happy, it made him feel so good

And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul

He did not know how well he sang

It just made him whole

So here's to the late night Laundromat crooners, the shower singers, the top-down windows-open summer highway screamers.  Here's to keeping amateur hours, 24/7, to keeping all mics open and available.  To Numa Numa dancers and Pixies-synchers.  To - what the hell - Kelly Clarkson, and to you, too, Tay Zonday.  You all go out there and make yourselves happy.

tags: tay zonday  harry chapin  chocolate rain  youtube  internet dream  american idol  

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