Here's a true story: Ofer, our beloved product manager was in the room and his phone was ringing. The ringtone was pretty weird. He turned it off before I could understand what exactly I was hearing, but fortunately, our webmaster told me what it was. "This is something you have to see", he said, so I headed over to Youtube and entered "Chocolate Rain".

What I discovered there was a teenage afro-american kid, singing into a microphone with a remarkably deep voice. In the background I heard an electric piano, which could also be seen briefly throughout the video. The first thing I said was, "that's not him that is singing, right?". But Omer, our webmaster, said that it's him and added, "amazing, isn't it?".

Well, when a 15 year old kid sounds like Louie Armstrong, then yeah, it's pretty amazing. Even the fact that the "teenage kid" is actually 25 didn't really ruin my amazement. Some further researching provided the following facts: the video for "Chocolate Rain" by Tay Zonday has been watched more than 7 million since it debuted on April 22; He has more than 12000 friends on MySpace; his biggest hit to date (hint: it's the same song) has already been covered by such big names as John Mayer and Tre Cool (of Green Day).

Another interesting fact is that the song was released under a Creative Commons license. That means you can't buy it in your favorite music store (not even iTunes) but you can download it for free from Youtube or his MySpace page. This song is so big that I'm actually surprised I haven't heard it until now.

This kind of popularity makes me wonder what are the ingredients of a cult song. This is not a proper radio hit. It's quite long (almost 5 minutes) and doesn't really progress at all. The song doesn't have verses and a chorus, and the melody in the background is a never-ending loop. If I didn't see the singer's young appearance I probably wouldn't be so amazed by the song, perhaps even a little annoyed after a minute or two.

I think that the song's charm comes from its video. It's very lo-fi and relies heavily on the artist's visual performance. Tay Zonday has "unique mannerisms while singing" (as Wikipedia calls it), one of them is the way his mouth is turned to the side, which produces a somewhat strange face. This "novelty quality" of the song works great in the virtual environment of the internet, but will it make the challenging cross-over to the real world? That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Tay Zonday has the biggest viral song of this summer.

As any major hit, "Chocolate Rain" has been parodied and spoofed by almost everyone. My favorite so far is the white comeback entitled "Vanilla Snow". It captures the feel of the original video in the right way, mimicking the weird faces, the low voice, the subtitle about moving away from the mic and the pair of hands playing the piano. You can also find versions by Chad Vader, John Mayer, Tre Cool and some remixes and lots and lots of others.