Q&A with Tay Zonday

To 12 million YouTube viewers, Tay Zonday is, “that guy on the internet with the weird, deep voice.” This is pretty much how he was introduced before his appearances on Jimmy Kimmel or Good Morning, America, too. Before “Chocolate Rain,” Tay Zonday was Adam Nyerere Bahner, a twenty-five-year-old American Studies doctoral student at the University of Minnesota. He hails from the northern suburbs of Chicago—his mom is a high school principal who didn’t let him listen to pop music. Now he’s a pop music phenomenon peculiar to the twenty-first century, and he just released “Chocolate Cherry Rain,” the sequel to “Chocolate Rain,” in collaboration with Dr. Pepper.

I read your interview with the Strib, and it sounds like you don’t understand the concept of selling out.
No, I don’t know what it means.

No?
I don’t know what people mean by that.

I think people mean exploiting your art for crass, commercial payoff.
No, I don’t think so. The subtext of that is that this somehow relates to social justice. That’s what’s behind that. The implication is there is a social justice politic, and somehow a piece of art undermines the social justice politic. And I don’t believe an image can cause social oppression. I don’t think it can be the origin of social injustice. And that’s been said many, many times. Ralph Ellison, in Shadow and Act, in the titular essay—he was writing in the 1940s about Hollywood—wrote about how Hollywood embodied these stereotypes of the Negro—the servant, the mammy, the jezebel, and whatnot. He was addressing this concern among black activists or liberals in the NAACP or really “white progressives” in the 1940s who were saying that stereotypical imagery in Hollywood causes racism. And some black and white leaders saying we have to get these stereotypes out of these movies. What Ralph Ellison was saying, echoing other black intellectuals like Zora Neal Hurston and his mentor, Richard Wright, was, “No, no, it’s not that simple. Hollywood is really the shadow, and society is the act.” It’s a fallacy that if there’s a stereotype in Hollywood, the people will go, “Gosh, that really does reflect what black people are like.” How can that stereotype be effective unless people are actually watching that, consuming that, in a life situation where they are not encountering other black people to begin with? And if you look at how that life situation comes about, well, they’re living in an isolated class situation, an isolated neighborhood. So it’s kind of like a kid here sitting in a cul-de-sac where they don’t really encounter a diverse community of people, and they’re sitting and watching a video on the Internet and saying, “Gosh, that’s what black people are.” That’s not a problem with the video, that’s a problem with the cul-de-sac.

Well, I’m a James Baldwin man. And he was a conspiracy theorist that argued that there are forces stronger than you that are out to destroy you.
Yeah, well, James Baldwin has this very masculinist, heterosexual way of doing that.

Sure, but what do you think he would say about selling corn-sweetened soda that gives black people diabetes? “Chocolate Rain” wasn’t about selling sucrose, was it?
So where do you see this impacting?

Well, I’m asking if you perverted your message for money.
Well, I don’t see “[Chocolate Cherry Rain]” as connected to “Chocolate Rain” whatsoever.

What?
No. I think that each artistic work is its own song, its own work. It happens in its own space. I think that in each work’s own context, each is a fantastic work of art. I think that one is a fantastic work of cinema, and it should be taken in the context of comedy or humor.

Don’t you think that humor is based on a self-reference?
No. None whatsoever. I don’t believe that they are connected. Because you know, the media is all about this need to create narrative or connect dots. It’s like subject, verb, object. And journalists all need a clear narrative. This happened, and then this happened. That’s not how life is. You have to look at each data point as its own thing. And kinda let things marinate. And not be so closed to say, “This causes this, and this is connected to this.”

Well, I don’t have the amount of space that Proust had.
Well, that’s what you asked of me. And that’s what you have to do for social justice and critical thinking. And I agree that the conventions of contemporary journalism are prohibitive in that regard, but that’s a whole other issue. And I’m coming from a place where I’m not constrained. I think that each work of art is its own work of it—something that can be taken relatively as an island. And I also think it’s very questionable sometimes in the media about how there seems to be such a rush to withdraw compassion from a subject.

To judge.
Yes, “you are this” or “you are that.”

Or like, “You sold out, Tay.” Or something.
It’s not even that. I’m speaking in the abstract. I’m never so conceited or self-interested to limit any example to myself. Because, ultimately, I’m not that concerned with what happens to me. But the critique of the media is I think there’s this need to create a demand for the product whether it’s a magazine or whatever else by naming this is bad, this is good. And if you look at journalism, there’s something called the objectivity precept. You have two sides to every story, and you never actually settle on any particular point of view.