Tay Zonday: Dollar Dollar Bills, Y’all
Tay Zonday’s managed to snag an endorsement deal. I’m sure you’ve all heard about it already. From the heartlands of Ectomo to Wired’s hipster hovel blog The Underwire and beyond, it’s being talked about non-stop.
Chocolate Rain, that agitatingly infectious little ditty from a little while back, caught the attention of the Dr. Pepper marketing staff and they decided the way to go would be a remix. The 25-going-on-14 Adam Nyerere Bahner, aka Tay Zonday, managed to snag himself a tidy marketing deal with the song that had everyone mezmerised for a good few weeks several months back. I think it’s foolish for a major brand to jump on the Chocolate Rain meme now. It’s well past its prime at this point, surely. Based on my own observations, it would seem that wide-spread things like this have a tendency to start small, flare up within a community, die out a little, spread to a series of other communities, and then burst into the general public for a brief flare of upwards of a month, then slowly die out. Think of it like the female sexual cycle. There are often spikes of intense “oh god oh god” followed by almost a total reset bordering on disinterest. Eventually there’s the actual orgasm itself, a plateau of enjoyment, after which it cools down to nothing again in relatively short order. Yes, further peaks can be coaxed out after the initial plateau, but it’s not easy and not every meme is capable of such repeated overtures.
At any rate, while I’m not much of a fan of the thinly veiled viral marketing of a carbonated beverage that is Cherry Chocolate Rain, I did get the opportunity to catch another tune by Tay Zonday that I actually enjoyed. See below and weigh in your thoughts on memes, marketing, and how goofy this kid is.
