Gracie Johnson, contributor

I don’t know if it’s just the age of the people whose weddings I’ve gone to, or the gestalt and mass compartmentalization of music taste through streaming, but early 2000s music prevails on the dance floor. Maybe there’s something freeing about playing a song everybody knows? Maybe the millennials are just nostalgic? Perhaps it allows us to hide our music taste and individuality, folded neatly into playlists far away from the scrutiny of our most ruthless of friends and family members, behind the safety of the timelessly appealing Justin Timberlake and Destiny’s Child. Or maybe it’s just the millennials being nostalgic. 

I do think there’s a strange cultural death of, or molting from, a shared and “popular” music. I’m not saying this death is a bad thing either. I love my little personalized Spotify playlists with silly names that feel like inside jokes with my past self and being able to track my music taste through flirtations with genres over time. I love my “Discover Weekly” and having an algorithm that seems to know me better than I’m comfortable dwelling on for too long. And, I love early 2000s music and feeling comfy enough to dance to said music at my second cousin (twice removed)’s dog-walker’s wedding. 

However, I did have a weird moment of… loss? Nostalgia? Who knows… after hearing Beyoncé’s new single “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Upon initially hearing it, I thought it would be a soon-to-be classic that I’d hope to hear on the dance floor of future weddings (or, at least the ones that wouldn’t surely end in divorce). But, I don’t know if it’ll be popularized on a large enough scale to reach the wedding playlists with the recent disinterest in the radio for its younger, customizing counterpart. Maybe, since streaming services are taking the place of the radio, tucked away in little pockets of playlists of those the algorithm reached is where “Texas Hold ‘Em” will stay… 

However! A beacon of hope shines in the not-so-modest, nevertheless, ever-so sacrilegious grail of social media. Mainly, TikTok. I asked a friend if they’d listened to Beyoncé’s newest single and they said that they’d heard glimpses of it on the social media platform. It would seem the mass dissemination of music that once was, through the medium of the radio, is replicated through another ubiquitous algorithm of the “For-You-Page” (FYP). 

Oh, All Knowing, Great and Powerful Algorithm — I have no idea how you work. To be honest, I don’t want to know. But please, Algorithm, don’t kill your up and coming musical artists, or (excuse the pun) Ratio-Star them. I worry that it’s much harder to popularize newer music when the streaming isn’t standardized by KDWB. 

We’re at a strange point of inflection in our timeline, a point of intersection of music and social media platforms — their rise and fall and what we do with that culturally. Will “Texas Hold ‘Em” make its way to my old babysitter’s wedding? Only time will tell; tik tok, I suppose…