Are people really refusing ‘Choosin’ Texas’? Or is monoculture just dead?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Ella Langley’s country anthem “Choosin’ Texas” has spent nearly half the year atop the Billboard Hot 100. Its 24-week run has surpassed even Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” making it the longest-running No. 1 single in US history.

And lots and lots of people say they’ve never heard it. Are they merely snobs who want to show off their proud ignorance of country music, as a recent argument-provoking Rolling Stone article suggested? Or is it that a No.1 hit song no longer reliably reaches the ears of a broad portion of the public?

The argument over “Choosin’ Texas” and its apparent everywhere-and-nowhere quality, is about something larger than a single song, or even a genre. It’s the newest case of the ongoing, much-discussed death of the “monoculture.”

The monoculture is, or was, a collective frame of reference, a set of mass-cultural touchstones that everyone could assume everyone else knew about.

There was some indeterminate time in the past, the story goes, when a single piece of media could command the attention of everyone in the country: When everyone heard the same songs on the radio and MTV, watched the same few television networks and saw the same handful of movies playing in theaters, whether they liked them or not.

“When I was a brand manager, a hit that big was impossible to avoid because radio and TV put it in front of everyone whether you liked it or not,” said Maria Rodas, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Now you can be one of the millions who had it on repeat all summer, or your feed just never showed it to you.”

Cultural critics have been eulogizing this idea of monoculture since the dawn of the streaming era. What exactly constituted monoculture and when exactly it died, though, is less clear.

In a 2006 interview, rock critic Robert Christgau lamented the bygone era when “everybody listened to the same music on the radio.” In 2011, the music journalist Touré mourned what he called “Massive Music Moments,” something he declared that no one under 25 had experienced. The popularity and success of Lady Gaga, Adele and Kanye West, he wrote at the time, could not compare to the ubiquity once enjoyed by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”

If the cultural landscape seemed fragmented then, it would only become more so. With the benefit of hindsight, music journalists are now waxing nostalgic about more recent eras. Earlier this year, The Hollywood Reporter declared 2014 as “The Last Time Everyone Watched the Same Thing.” Another article this year from Rolling Stone proclaimed that monoculture ended in 2016.

“That was the last time it felt as though there was a coherent popular culture,” the magazine’s music editor, Jeff Ihaza, wrote, “before everything fractured into algorithmic bits spread across hours of screen time.”

The word “monoculture” comes from agriculture, referring to the practice of cultivating a single crop on a plot of land. In pre-industrial times, farmers planted an array of different crops in the same space, creating a diverse environment that mimicked natural ecosystems. When the Europeans colonized the Americas, they began planting single commercial crops such as sugar or tobacco over large areas, to sell overseas.

Though the technique was more economically efficient, it introduced new problems: A pest that infected one plant was likely to infect them all, threatening to wipe out entire harvests. Planting a single crop also led to faster depletion of nutrients in soil.

Plant monoculture also had aesthetic purposes. For generations, American streets and parks showcased the tall, stately pillars of rows and rows of elm trees. The arrival of Dutch elm disease not only ravaged these green spaces, but discredited the whole goal of aiming for such uniformity.

Like its agricultural and horticultural counterparts, the monoculture of era-defining music, TV and movies seemed alluring on the surface. Having common cultural references could bring people together, making society feel more cohesive and connected.

But on closer examination, the perils became clear. Pop culture in the pre-social internet, pre-streaming era was largely dictated top-down by industry gatekeepers, designed to appeal to as many people as possible. It might have been easier in those days to make small talk with coworkers, but it was harder to discover work without the backing of the industry machine.

“As comforting as it was in olden times to know that just about anyone you’d meet on the street would’ve heard the latest Madonna single or would know what happened on Dallas that week, if you were the sort of person who preferred The Young Ones and Hüsker Dü, you could feel pretty excluded from the cultural conversation,” Noel Murray wrote for the AV Club in 2009.

And even culture that seemed ubiquitous could be inconsequential or ignored in some circles. People longing for the days of monoculture often point to sitcoms such as “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” which drew millions of viewers. But those shows were less universal than people now make them seem.

“Everybody did not watch ‘Seinfeld.’ Everybody did not watch ‘Friends,’” NPR pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes wrote in 2024. “In fact, some ‘everybodies’ pointed out that it owed an awful lot to ‘Living Single.’”

Today, popular culture is produced from the bottom up, propelled by social media recommendation algorithms, said Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.” Theoretically, this means that smaller, independent artists can release their work on social media platforms and directly reach the audiences most inclined to appreciate it. It also means that users can more easily access media that better aligns with their tastes.

But this creates a fragmented landscape where people are consuming media in line with their own interests, while fewer and fewer people seem to be consuming the same things as one another.

Meanwhile, algorithms are vulnerable to manipulation. Certain features can help songs or videos achieve maximum success on social media platforms, giving creators and artists incentive to engineer those features into their work.

Paradoxically, then, this system of individual artists pursuing individual success creates a new kind of sameness, which Chayka and others also describe as monoculture. The same phenomenon applies to minimalist interiors in independent coffee shops, all-neutral home decorating schemes and the uniformity of facial features and bodies on screen. The old monoculture might be dead, if it ever existed, but a new one has taken its place.

“We’re not all watching the same exact TV show, but there are a hundred versions of ‘Love Is Blind’ and ‘Love Island’ or ‘Real Housewives,’ and we’re all watching slightly different versions of the same genre of thing,” Chayka said.

Rodas added, “Culture has splintered into a thousand niches, and inside each niche the safe, familiar thing wins.”

There are big events that still seem to command widespread attention — the World Cup, the New York Knicks’ NBA championship run, Taylor Swift’s wedding, the cyclosporiasis outbreak affecting iceberg lettuce — and this summer in particular inspired a flurry of commentary wondering whether the old monoculture had returned. But depending on one’s interests and algorithm, it’s still easier than ever to miss out on something popular.

What does it mean, then, that 2026’s biggest hit didn’t even register for a vast swath of listeners?

“You can pay close attention to music for every day of your life, and still miss the overwhelming majority of what’s out there to be heard,” rock critic Steven Hyden wrote in a recent Substack column. “Even really, really big songs like ‘Choosin’ Texas.’”

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