You Didn’t Have to Like It to Know It

At a Padres playoff game, the stadium started singing “All the Small Things.” Tom DeLonge was in the crowd, watching thousands of baseball fans sing his own song back to him. He looked moved. It’s easy to understand why.

They didn’t buy tickets to see Blink-182. They came to watch baseball. Somewhere along the way, a song from 1999 became something that crowd could do together.

Decades later, the opening was enough. Nobody needed to send a link, explain which album it came from or ask whether anyone else knew it.

The song was already there.

That might be the strangest part of watching a moment like that now. A stadium full of people can still find a common song. Often, it’s one they learned when the same music was coming out of everyone’s television and car radio.

You Could Hate a Song and Still Know Every Word

There was a particular kind of confidence involved in announcing that the Backstreet Boys were terrible while knowing exactly when to come in on “I Want It That Way.”

The knowledge arrived whether you wanted it or not. A song played in the car on the way to school, in the store where your mother was buying towels, on MTV while you waited for something better. By the time somebody played it at a school dance, you knew the chorus.

Britney Spears wasn’t someone you had to discover. Neither were the Backstreet Boys or *NSYNC. Their fans knew the birthdays and favorite colors. Everyone else could recognize the faces, identify the songs and have an opinion about the hair.

Even disliking them gave people something to talk about. The kid in the Metallica shirt and the kid with a boy-band folder understood what the argument was about before it started.

Taste still divided people. There were different radio stations, different record-store sections and very serious disagreements about what counted as good music. But those differences existed inside a much larger collection of things people recognized.

You could choose your favorite. Escaping everyone else’s favorite took more effort.

Commercials came along for the ride. Nobody bought an album of advertising jingles, but a room full of kids could sing one anyway. The same toy ads interrupted the same cartoons. The same fast-food campaign turned up between the same shows. A phrase could become a joke before anyone in the group bought the thing it was selling.

That shared package included plenty of things nobody deliberately chose. Waiting for a music video meant seeing the one before it. Waiting for your show meant hearing the end of somebody else’s. Culture could reach you while you were waiting for something you actually wanted.

Thursday Night Came With a Friday Conversation

Television worked much the same way. The schedule gave the week a shape. Thursday meant NBC. Sunday could mean The Simpsons. A commercial told you when something was coming on, and that was when it happened.

Missing an episode had consequences beyond missing the episode. Somebody at school would bring it up. Somebody would repeat the best line badly. Somebody would spoil the ending before you could say you didn’t watch.

Friends averaged 24 million viewers in the late ’90s. Seinfeld drew more than 34 million.

Today, a successful network comedy can draw around five million viewers live or later that same day. More people catch it later. What’s harder to recreate is the enormous crowd that watched on the same night and woke up ready to discuss it.

Twenty million people watching a sitcom meant the jokes had somewhere to go the next morning.

You didn’t have to begin with the premise, the platform and a warning that it took three episodes to get good. You could say a character’s name and trust that someone at the table knew who you meant.

Even people who didn’t regularly watch Friends knew about Ross and Rachel. Recognition extended well beyond the audience keeping track of every episode.

For Two Weeks, There Was Regis

In August 1999, ABC put Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on for thirteen nights across two weeks. By the last night, roughly 22 million viewers were watching.

A summer game show became something people planned their evenings around.

The appeal didn’t require much explanation. There was Regis, there was a person in a chair, and there was an amount of money large enough to make the living room pay attention. The whole family could argue over the same four answers.

Someone knew it immediately. Someone was certain it was B. Someone who contributed nothing for twenty minutes suddenly became an expert on whether the contestant should walk away.

Then came the pause. Regis looked at the contestant. The music made a multiple-choice question feel like an international incident.

The following day, the conversation could resume somewhere else. A classroom. A break room. The checkout line. People watched separately, but the experience came with a shared ending.

For a little while, almost every night offered another chance to join in.

Now the Hit Might Be Happening Somewhere Else

There’s still popular music. There are still enormous television hits. There are people who know every detail of both.

But being a hit and becoming common knowledge are increasingly different achievements.

A song can sit at the top of a chart without becoming something you hear in the course of an ordinary week. A series can dominate conversation in one group and never come up in another. Two people can spend an evening watching television and emerge without having encountered a single thing in common.

The phone makes that separation particularly easy. The next video is selected for the person holding it. So is the one after that. A friend’s feed can feel like a different town, with its own celebrities, running jokes and major events.

Sometimes the first sign that something is supposedly everywhere is somebody asking how you haven’t heard of it.

There are real pleasures in having more choices. A strange little show can find the people who love it. Music that never would’ve survived a radio programmer’s decision can reach an audience. Nobody has to sit through a sitcom simply because it’s the least objectionable thing on at eight-thirty.

The old arrangement left plenty of people out. A handful of executives and programmers had enormous influence over what entered the room.

Still, when millions of people received the same limited package, they acquired things to talk about without having to arrange it themselves.

A Chorus Everyone Brought With Them

The Super Bowl can still produce that feeling. For one evening, people watch the same game, complain about the same commercial and argue about the same halftime show. The next morning requires less catching up.

Other shared moments appear in smaller places. A wedding DJ knows which opening notes will bring different generations onto the floor. A bar plays a song, and strangers suddenly know what to do with the chorus.

Sometimes the people singing weren’t even born when it came out. They learned it in somebody else’s car, at an earlier wedding or from an older sibling. The old shared culture keeps getting handed around.

That’s part of what makes the baseball stadium so affecting. Thousands of people arrive with different lives and different reasons for being there. A familiar song starts, and for a minute they have another thing in common.

There’s no need to explain how it found them. There’s no catching up to do.

The person beside you knows when to come in.

The chorus arrives, and you both do.