Hunky actor Joe Keery was a member of the band Post Animal when he was cast as Steve Harrington on Stranger Things in 2016. Since 2019, Keery has been making music under the name Djo. He released his song “End Of Beginning” in 2022, and it became a viral hit and reached the Hot 100 two years later. (My kids informed me that the track, released independently on AWAL, was pretty much the only song on TikTok during the Universal ban.) In the wake of the Stranger Things finale, “End Of Beginning” is suddenly more popular than ever, even though it wasn’t actually featured in the episode.
The Stranger Things bump is nothing new; it’s what turned Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” into a global chart phenomenon in 2022. The final episode went up on Netflix on New Year’s Eve, and it included a ton of big ’80s needledrops, including a couple of difficult-to-license Prince classics. Those needledrops did make a chart impact, with Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” reaching the Hot 100 for the first time. But the biggest bump went to “End Of Beginning” even though the song has never actually played during a Stranger Things episode.
This week, “End Of Beginning” the #6 song in America, surpassing its previous chart peak of #11. In the UK, it’s at #1. A couple of days ago, Billboard published a staff roundtable discussion about how the hell this might’ve happened. The main answer seems to be: People just really like Steve Harrington.
Many of those same people did not think much of the Stranger Things finale, a turgid and self-important 128-minute onslaught of CGI goo and forced sentimentality. Some fans have accused the Duffer Brothers, the show’s creators, of using ChatGPT to finish their script. Others have put forward a theory that there’s really a secret final episode on the way. Joe Keery would like you to know that no, sorry, it’s over.
Keery isn’t the only person associated with Stranger Things who’s debunked the secret-episode theory, but he did it pretty definitively in a recent BBC interview. Keery says that the theory is “so interesting” but “not true… People were sad to see it go. But unfortunately, I’m here to absolutely squash your dreams. There’s no ninth episode.” End of ending.
