The best-selling single so far this year in the UK is Californian singer Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”. It stayed at the top of the charts longer than any song this decade. If you’re not familiar, imagine the lyrical mood and production of Hosier’s “Take Me to Church” filtered through the bombast of early Bastille, and supercharged with Warren’s Christian faith and love for “worship music”. The rest of his album is equally overblown and icky.
At the start of the 1960s, one of the twists that made pop blossom to greatness was gospel singers applying their craft to secular love songs. In the 2020s one of the twists that makes pop shrivel to enfeeblement is singers applying saccharine, hands-in-the-air megachurch anthem stylings to secular love songs. Warren, accompanied by a choir, his earnest, grating voice to the fore, and an armada of stomping plastic studio euphoria at his back, is the new emperor of this wretched terrain.
Where did he come from? A harsh, poverty-stricken family background one can only admire him for escaping (the title track is a letter to his younger self). Then social media success. Host of Awesomeness TV’s Youtube show Next Influencer, Wiki informs, and of Netflix “reality show” Hype House where his role “primarily revolved around his struggles to maintain his popularity on social media”. Well, he needn’t worry anymore. These 21 plastic joy-turds should see to that. It’s a double album too. It takes a long, long time.
More description? Clap-along TikTok campfire pop so sugary and so tritely loaded with blunt self-empowerment doggerel, it makes Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” sound deep. Each number starts soft and slightly country, some even sound promising, then they burst into an explosive, primary school assembly version of euphoria. His voice becomes akin to light constipatory straining, with a quaver for the vulnerability factor.
Yes, I’m an old fart. It’s de rigeur for a certain sort of media ancient to align themselves with pop youth. But pop youth, sparkly and exciting as it always looks, isn’t always wonderful. On this occasion, a young man has produced an album that contains a good chunk of what’s awful in contemporary pop.
Below: Watch the video for "On My Mind" by Alex Warren and ROSÉ (from Blackpink)
