Alex Warren – Ordinary

There’s probably no outage we could have had that would have outlived this thing’s chart run…

[Video]
[3.21]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A musical anti-meme; despite this being, at worst, the second-biggest song in the world right now, I’ve not been able to retain a single fact about the experience of listening to it. There are guitars, unless there are ukeleles or pianos. There is a man singing — I am almost certain he does not rap. He sounds like Hozier but is likely not to be Hozier. You could get married to it, possibly. It is 186 seconds long. It is recorded sound. What are we talking about, anyways?
[3]

Claire Davidson: I thought we had left this kind of song in the 2010s, but no, it appears there is an endless market for music that attempts to approximate bombast through the use of thunderous percussion and overwrought choral vocals. Worse still, in the case of Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” that approach is in service of lyrics that, despite evoking a love that’s supposedly transcendent, employ the most basic religious metaphors possible and still manage to garble that throughline. (I’d hazard a guess that the line “You got me kissin’ the ground of your sanctuary” is meant to refer to oral sex, but that would be far too erotic for a song this neutered.) That iconography is appropriate in a slanted way, because the grayscale grandeur of “Ordinary” would sound more at home on a Christian rock station than anything resembling a Top 40 playlist. I can hardly think of a more damning criticism.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Inactive; drags on. (And if that seems dismissive, this could have just said “Dozier.”)
[5]

Jel Bugle: No fair, you can’t wear a kick-me sign like this. “Ordinary,” indeed. Is this a powerful voice? It’s the kind of singing I just can’t stand, a sort of theatre school, boo-hoo but I am strong, I’m marching up that hill in the rain! I’m fixing your car! I’ve done the dishes! I’ve trodden on a Lego brick, but I won’t let it show! 
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: Alex Warren is the sin-eater who was ritually assigned to take on the worst qualities of Imagine Dragons in order that they might finally have a 6/10 album. 
[1]

Nortey Dowuona: To be frank, if you told me this dude was black, I would’ve have believed you. I hear it. Then I’d hear him sing “breathe and take my breath away,” and I’d immediately peg him as a Hozier wannabe (whom I’d have also thought was black if I’d ever seen him). I’d keep listening, hearing the limp way his voice sings the last chorus, and think, “Why did you tell me this dude was black? What kind of racial essentialism do you subscribe to?” We’d then get into a misbegotten argument about the influence of the blues on English, Irish and Scottish music and forget about the song entirely. After we’d both gotten home, I’d look Alex Warren up and find out he’s actually American and Catholic. That must have been why it sounded like that. Huh. (The song is fine.)
[5]

Mark Sinker: The Narnia books are easy-read allegory, of course. Everyone knows this: a family of normie English kids escapes boring real-world war-time sojourn for magical adventures — except the Christ-Lion is there too! You don’t escape Him so easily! For Alex, the adventure is you: yes YOU’RE the ordinary, you’re the MARVELLOUS IN THE ORDINARY! The intensities in Narnia are when the author loses control and his schoolgirls shed their uniforms to gambol with fauns and satyrs and the Greek God of Intoxication. And here too religious love-song transport can turn faintly kinkster-horny, St Teresa-style: you’re my sculptor! I’m the clay on your knife! I’m the drunken grape on your vine! Except when Alex gazes out through the wide-open back of the wardrobe, all he sees gazing back is his own silly little face, to be super-mean about it. You don’t escape the quotidian so easily! He’s the ordinary, he’s the ordinary in the ordinary…
[4]

Ian Mathers: Normally either I’ve already heard the songs we cover here or have never heard of them. “Ordinary” is an outlier: the only thing I know about it is that every single music-loving person I know who’s said anything about it appears to range from mild distaste at its success to outright loathing. This is Pop FlavourMush (now available in a tube!), and Alex Warren is a transcendentally tepid example of the form. I can’t even be mad about it. I’d have to care to do that.
[0]

Alfred Soto: I heard this song in 2014 when the Lumineers made clap-happy massed-vocal pop. I heard it in 2006 when Daniel Powter briefly terrorized a badly frightened people.
[1]

Julian Axelrod: My heart goes out to anyone who has to hear this at a million weddings this summer. Remember: if you hear this song during the ceremony, it’s your civic duty to object to their union.
[4]

Aaron Bergstrom: According to the paper of record, Warren personally coined the term “Hype House,” so he has far greater crimes to answer for than making unremarkable wedding music.
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: Alex Warren is basically the Gen Z equivalent of the millennial ambition psycho — for more on why, please refer to my April Stereogum column — but despite his constant calculations of how he can best achieve synergy between musicality and metrics, I believe “Ordinary” is probably sincere. Warren was born in 2000, meaning that this stuff was last in the zeitgeist during his formative tweenage years. Before he was socialized by influencers, he was raised on Christian worship music, and the only thing that fans of the genre like more than worship music is pop music that sounds plausibly like it. I have no doubt “Ordinary” is exactly the kind of song Warren enjoys making. And the harp — though it’s not actually a harp — is nice too.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Look, it’s not that I have any particular objections to heterosexuality. Get married, make mushy songs, reinforce gender roles, whatever! What irritates me is the facade of transgression built around a song that is traditional and conservative to its core. (I don’t mean in the political sense, though I don’t not mean that.) The lyrics’ sanitized nods toward drug use, sacrilege, and femdom could be fun without the twinkly harps or the gospel choir. I mean, they’re fun as is, but the sonic choices and Alex Warren’s rather wet performance seem calibrated to defuse the interesting possibilities those ideas imply. Everything here is boxed and ordered just so, designed to reintegrate the messiness and confusion of actual love into a perfect and sanitized love-image: a hypernormal song for the hypernormalization age. It’s possible I’m just being a big hater, and I don’t begrudge anyone for whom this song does actually work. If this helps some family make it through another day without burning down their neighborhood, I guess that’s alright. But at the same time… shouldn’t we all be burning down our neighborhoods? Shouldn’t the social order change?
[3]

Will Adams: To misquote Sade, this is an ordinary love.
[3]