Choosin’ Texas Is A Gift From The Gods

Sometimes the universe aligns in your favor.

Last Thursday, I published my new book, Welcome To The Age Of Feudal Media: What Happens When The Monoculture Collapses.

So far, response has been quite favorable, as evidenced by this Tweet storm from Mediaocean CMO Aaron Goldman. 

But then something even better happened: a song called Choosin’ Texas by a country singer named Ella Langley spent 26 weeks at the top of the US Billboard  Hot 100 charts, displacing Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas as the longest running song on the U.S. Billboard charts.

And if you are reading this and wondering how it could be that you have never even heard of this song, let alone actually heard it with your own ears, then that is Feudal Media in action: we are all so trapped in our bubbles that it’s possible that a song could spend half a year at number one and millions of people never even knew it existed.

That’s not pure speculation on my part either: there have been articles and podcasts about this phenomenon, not to mention numerous social media posts.

This is not, at some level, all that surprising in that the chattering classes are the folks most likely to have not heard a popular country song.

OTOH, it’s still shocking for people to learn that a song they’d been completely unaware of could have spent that long at the top of the Billboard charts.

In monoculture days it was all but impossible to avoid a hit song.

Radio was the primary discovery device for music and the limited number of radio stations meant that it was likely you’d have stumbled on the song as you flipped through the dials.

And in the rare case you had not discovered it on your own, your friends and family likely had and were talking about it.

In the even rarer case that your friends and family were also living under a rock, a hit of that magnitude was sure to have been covered in any of the major magazines of the day, been referenced or mocked on late night TV and sketch comedy shows.

In other words, it would have been inconceivable to have never heard of it.

So the fact that it is entirely possible today to have completely avoided any knowledge of this song is a most excellent indicator of how far into our Feudal Media bubbles we’ve crawled. 

More than that, though, it is a brilliant example of what a stellar job the algorithms have done of ensuring that we do not ever see anything new or different, that we are continually served up a diet of content it knows we won’t mind…versus something we might actually love.

Which is not to say Choosin’ Texas is a brilliant song that will redefine music for the 2020s. 

Rather, if a song is already that popular with millions of people, there are sure to be millions more who will be equally as enchanted.

But who, thanks to the tyranny of their algorithms, will never get the chance.

This in and of itself is not the end of the world.

It’s one somewhat-better-than-mediocre song.

What it is though, is a great example of how we’ve gone from a world where entire generations had shared cultural experiences to draw on, to one where everyone’s experience of pop culture is unique.

On the one hand, there is now more opportunity for people who would previously never have made it past the gatekeepers to create not just music, but books, film and art.

On the flip side, we’ve lost the unifying experience of a shared national culture and all that entails.

That’s a minor casualty though compared to the loss of serendipity, the ability to discover things we never realized we might like.

A country song with a catchy hook being one of them.

That loss is important though because without serendipity, we are at the mercy of the algorithm. And the algorithm is optimized to show you things it knows you won’t mind versus things you might love.

That ultimately leads to boredom—those big hits of dopamine we get when we hear a song or see a movie that excites us are gone and while “more of the same” isn’t deadly, it’s not all that interesting.

Which may lead people to revolt, to rely more on AI to try and find something new, or to just drop out.

All three are very real possibilities and the likely reality will be a combination of all three. None of which will serve to bring the monoculture back.

That is not, as I noted, necessarily a bad thing. But what we need in its place is something that brings back joy, something that allows us to discover things we didn’t know we wanted, things that surprise and delight us.

That some of those things will, over time, escape their bubbles and become more universally recognized will be a side effect of the return to serendipity, one that will help bring back the sense that we are all on the same page, if only for one three-minute and fifty-one second song.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are one of the people writing about how the monoculture is dead, as if it just dawned on you, then I have a book for you.

If you are one of the social platforms and your goal is to increase retention, then it is in your interest to tweak your algorithm some to allow for some surprises. Or at least something a little unexpected.

If you are Ella Langley, take a bow. Achieving that kind of success, especially at a time when musical tastes are so divided, takes a special talent. So kudos and here’s hoping your next hit becomes more widely known.