The 2020s File Feature
End Of Beginning
End Of Beginning — Djo's Slow-Burn Rocket to the 2020s Charts An Actor Who Refused to Stay in His Lane Before most people outside certain internet circles ha…
01 The Story
End Of Beginning — Djo's Slow-Burn Rocket to the 2020s Charts
An Actor Who Refused to Stay in His Lane
Before most people outside certain internet circles had heard the name Djo, they already knew his face. Joe Keery had spent years on one of television's most beloved ensemble casts, playing a lovable, big-haired teenager in a show that turned 1980s nostalgia into a global phenomenon. The natural assumption was that any musical side project would be exactly that: a hobby, a vanity exercise, something to keep a restless creative occupied between filming seasons. End Of Beginning proved that assumption spectacularly wrong.
A Song That Took Its Time
Djo had already released two albums before End Of Beginning found its audience. The track lived quietly on his 2022 album DECIDE, the kind of deep cut that devoted listeners knew but that hadn't cracked any mainstream conversation. Then something genuinely strange and lovely happened: the algorithm caught up with the song. On TikTok, users began stitching the track to bittersweet montages of city skylines at dusk, blurry photographs from past chapters of life, the feeling of leaving somewhere familiar forever. The sound itself encouraged that mood. The production layers dreamy, slightly hazy synthesizers over a melodic structure that feels perpetually on the verge of resolving into something warmer, something complete. It never quite does, and that suspended quality became the point.
The Chart Run That Redefined the Song
When End Of Beginning finally entered the Billboard Hot 100 in early 2024, it moved with unusual purpose. Debuting at number 51 on March 2, 2024, it climbed fast: 35, then 23, then 21 within three weeks. By the chart dated March 30, 2024, it had reached number 11 on the Hot 100, a position that would have seemed outlandish for a two-year-old album track by an actor-musician with no traditional promotional machinery running behind him. The song spent 21 weeks on the chart in total. That long tail was built on organic enthusiasm rather than radio pushes or playlist payola. It spread because people found it, felt something, and immediately sent it to someone else.
Why the Song Landed When It Did
There is a specific melancholy that belongs to the early 2020s: a generation working through collective disorientation, a sense that the before and after of recent years had left most people somewhere between who they were and who they were trying to become. End Of Beginning speaks to that in-between space. Its lyrics circle around the feeling of standing at the edge of one era and looking back at what is already receding, a farewell to a version of yourself rather than to a person. The song arrived as an artifact of 2022 but functioned, two years later, as an anthem for anyone navigating that particular emotional weather.
The Legacy of an Unlikely Crossover
What Djo demonstrated with this trajectory is something the music industry keeps rediscovering: the calendar matters less than the moment of personal discovery. Over 2.2 million YouTube views accumulated not through a single viral spike but through a slow, sustained accumulation of listeners finding the song at exactly the right moment in their own lives. For an actor from a prestige television franchise to crack the top 15 of the Hot 100 two years after an album's release, with no new project to promote, represents one of the more genuinely surprising chart stories of the decade so far. Keery's instinct to take the music seriously, to make something layered and strange rather than something commercially legible, turned out to be the correct bet.
Put on headphones, find a window, and let it do its quiet work.
“End Of Beginning” — Djo's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What End Of Beginning Is Actually About
The Geography of Change
The emotional core of End Of Beginning sits at a very specific kind of crossroads: the moment when you understand that a chapter is over and the next one hasn't declared itself yet. The lyrics map this feeling through the recurring image of a city, a place that holds accumulated history and specific memories, viewed from the moment of departure. The title itself plays with the paradox that endings and beginnings are not separate events but the same event observed from different angles.
A Farewell to Former Selves
Most breakup songs are about losing another person. End Of Beginning is more interested in the grief that comes from leaving behind a version of yourself: the person you were in a particular apartment, in a particular city, during a particular run of years. That kind of loss is harder to name, which may be precisely why the song resonated so widely. People are not always looking for someone to articulate the end of a relationship; sometimes they need someone to articulate the end of a self, and Djo offers that with unusual directness.
Suspended and Unresolved
The production reinforces the emotional argument. The synthesizers hover without quite landing; the melodic phrase that sounds like it will resolve holds just slightly too long before moving on. This sonic quality is intentional by design. A song about being caught between what was and what comes next should probably feel caught too, and End Of Beginning sounds like standing in a doorway: neither fully inside the old thing nor comfortably outside it.
The Social-Media Mirror
The wave of TikTok videos that carried this song into the charts tells you as much about its meaning as the lyrics do. Viewers consistently paired it with images of transition: last days in a city, old photographs, sunset drives out of somewhere familiar. That collective interpretation converged on the song's real subject without any promotional guidance. When an audience independently and repeatedly assigns the same meaning to a piece of music, that is a signal that the song found something true. End Of Beginning found the bittersweet gap between chapters, and in the early 2020s, nearly everyone was living in that gap.
Why It Endures
The songs that outlast their release window tend to describe feelings that don't have cleaner articulations elsewhere. Nostalgia has a thousand anthems; ambivalent forward motion, the specific texture of starting over while still mourning what came before, has considerably fewer. Djo wrote toward that feeling, and the result is a song people return to whenever a transition arrives. Its staying power is built into its subject matter.
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