It’s 6:32 in the morning, you have dragged yourself out of bed and onto the bus once again, despite being so tired. As you go to sit, you start to shuffle through your backpack for your airpods and phone, only to realise both are dead. You are now at the whims of the bus radio.
Just as the current song ends, and you can only think, ‘Today cannot get any worse,’ a sound you know all too well emerges from the bus speakers: “The angels up in the clouds are jealous knowin’ we found.” You can only help to think of the ear trauma you will be subjected to for the next few minutes, helpless to fight against the sound of Alex Warren’s song “Ordinary”.
Each year there has been a new popular song that has topped the billboard list for an obscenely long time but has never seemed to be listened to.
Right now it is “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, which has been on the Billboard Top 10 for over a year, 56 weeks and counting… as of right now. But, in South Windsor, it seems like no one has ever heard of this crazy popular song.
So what is really behind this Billboard topping song?
“I have never heard it,” SWHS English teacher Mr. Hawie stated.
This isn’t uncommon as a lot of songs on the Billboard are songs mostly listened to by students instead of teachers, but it seems like many students have also never heard it.
“Who is listening to that?” senior Nolan Hathorn exclaimed. A statement of sheer bewilderment of who even listens to that song.
In a social media poll students were asked if they frequently listened to the song regularly only 18% did out of 38; 11% listened to it sometimes, and 71% never listened to it.
Furthermore, when asking students if they even liked the song, out of the 42 votes only 24% of voters even liked the song. 40% of voters had a neutral opinion and 36% of voters disliked it.
A very surprising response as the song “Ordinary” is supposed to be the biggest song in the entire country right now. But when asking about how the students even hear the song in the first place it becomes more apparent why the song is so popular.
“I heard it yesterday,” Nei’Jhaly Bones, a freshman at South Windsor High School said. “Most of the time when I hear the song on TikTok in YouTube ads.”
It seems that most students in SWHS are not putting on the song to listen directly, but rather hearing it via a third party source like ads, social media or even music being played in public.
It makes sense why it’s so widely used in public and in ads as across several combined social media sites it has over 11 million videos made with the song, with over 10.2 billion views.
The song has also seen a lot of success on radio stations, with the song currently being played around 7-10 times a day on popular radio stations like KISS-95.7. Nationally, it reached a peak on the radio with 70-75 million impressions each week. Furthermore, it reached 1.7 billion streams on Spotify, making it one of the top 15 most streamed songs in Spotify history.
With all of these numbers it starts to become more clear why the song is so popular. When the song first released in 2025, it was very popular, and it was marketed heavily on social media leading to its widespread popularity on social media and Spotify.
This has often been seen with many other songs, most recently with the songs like “They Not Like Us”, “Dance Monkey”, “Anxiety”, and many more popular songs that have come out in the last few years. It seems like the song “Ordinary” has become yet just another victim of the radio station, stores, and advertisers playing the same popular songs over and over again until they get tired out and make it ordinary.
