Alex Warren, a former influencer who was one of the founders of the TikTok content house known as the Hype House, is one of music's rising stars at the moment. Rolling Stone noted that Warren is one of several ascendant male pop stars who basically sounds like a contestant on The Voice, while the Switched On Pop podcast designated him as part of a wave of worship-influenced artists peppering the charts right now. "Burning House," Warren's song about his negative experience at the Hype House, is all over pop radio. His power ballad "Ordinary" is even bigger. In fact, as of today it has become Warren's first #1 hit.
As Billboard reports, "Ordinary," which previously peaked at #2, rises from #4 to the top of the Hot 100 this week. It looks like radio (up 15%) and track sales (up 24%) were what pushed him over the top, knocking off last week's chart-topper "What I Am" by Morgan Wallen and Tate McRae down to #2. "Ordinary" hit #1 in its 16th week on the chart, a relatively lengthy climb to the summit. Billboard notes that other songs with long paths to the top this year, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars' "Die With A Smile" and Kendrick Lamar and SZA's "luther," both stuck around at #1 for quite a while, and "Ordinary" is generic radio manna, so we may be in for a lot more weeks of this song battling it out with the Wallen/McRae song. Yeesh.
