In their article about summer 2025’s lack of a zeitgeist-dominating “song of the summer,” NPR pointed out that one song, Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”, had dominated the Billboard Hot 100 with 10 weeks on the top of chart (and the longest stint atop the UK chart this decade), but it had failed to ignite the buzz and ubiquity of a true era-defining hit like Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” or Adele’s “Hello.” The Wikipedia entry for “Ordinary” lacks the customary “Critical Reception” section, suggesting that despite its chart performance nobody really cared enough about the song to publish a take.

People have had things to say about Warren’s hit. Reddit user TheBatemanFlex described the song as “imagine dragons with vocals like hozier,” and that framing captures the song’s millennial hipster indie stomp-clap vibe as filtered through the kind of contemporary Christian music I heard for example when attending a nondenominational Christmas service with family in the Midwest. Like many, many songs before it, “Ordinary”’s lyrics talk about a love that could be either interpersonal and romantic or metaphysical and divine, and the song’s quite-loud-quiet form gives it a general “uplifty” vibe.

But as Business Insider’s Callie Alghrim observes, these good vibes are “ideal for soundtracking a throwaway emotional moment on reality TV, but devoid of any real personality.” A former resident of TikTok influencer HypeHouse, Warren explicitly wrote the song so that it could be used to accompany media representations of any romantic relationship, from a wedding video to a TikTok montage to a performance on the reality dating show Love is Blind (which Warren made in that show’s 8th season). To succeed as licensable content, “Ordinary” had to be flexible enough to adapt and give voice to a wide array of private individual feelings and experiences; it lacked a strong personality so users could insert their own with audiovisual touches like montages, filters, and the like.

In this respect, “Ordinary” is different from a mass-produced commodity because it produces a different kind of flattening – not the normalizing homogenization of a mass or population, but the evacuation of shared feeling and experience into privatized self-management. This is not the fungibility of commodified of pop acts like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC or Britney and Christina that leads to a single shared standard; this is an adaptable formula that lends itself to infinite personalization. “Ordinary” can soundtrack an Insta story about my wedding anniversary equally well as it could soundtrack a TikTok of a beloved pet. If Adorno and Horkheimber criticized the mass commodified culture industry for making everyone and everything look and sound the same, content like “Ordinary” is about evacuating any shared sense of likes and preferences in favor of private individual experience.

In an earlier post I argued that AI slop and its regime of bad taste turns away from Enlightenment ideas of bourgeois good taste and their grounding in Classically liberal commitments to civil society and the public sphere. To exhibit bad taste is to show that one is not subordinated to emasculating dependence on things like a wife or, more importantly, society. To declare one’s bad taste is to declare that there is no such thing as society, just individual men. Specifically, these individual men adhere to an exceptionally reactionary gender ideology that reframes masculinity in Ancient Greek terms as “Puritanism about virility.” This style of masculinity is popular in right-wing subcultures like the manosphere and Silicon Valley, and it is part of the broader “alt-right” movement of the last decade.

If AI slop is explicitly reactionary, then the phenomenon I’m calling “ordinary slop” is its reactionary centrist counterpart. Just as ordinary slop softens the avowed bad taste of right-wing extremists like Matt Walsh into the merely bland vibes of Warren’s song, it dresses the rejection of sociality and common experience up in less extreme and explicitly reactionary terms. Instead of violently abjecting femininity and the (feminized) trappings of subordination to something like a social contract, ordinary slop offers the pleasures of personalization and platformed engagement while never asking users to open themselves to the possible friction of shared aesthetic experience. That sort of friction could include the tension of sharing aesthetic appreciation of a band or a film with people who have political views that oppose your own. For example, just before the COVID pandemic I went to see legendary Chicago industrial band Ministry open for Slayer (I think? I left after Ministry’s set) in Springfield, MA. Though Ministry’s frontman Al Jourgensen has long been associated with left-wing figures like Jello Biafra and they had a new single with an explicitly anti-Trump video, Slayer’s fans, especially in that part of the country, lean more to the right. While Ministry played the single with their anti-Trump video projected behind the band, a drunk white guy with a buzzcut sitting to my right jumped up, pumped his fist, and yelled “Fuck you Ministry, you queers!” Not only did this guy have zero sense of Ministry’s then 40-year history of baiting exactly that reaction from conservatives (see this episode of Donahue from 1984), but clearly he felt so much dissonance between what was happening onstage and his own political commitments that he couldn’t contain himself. Likewise, I had to deal with the fact of sharing space with this obvious homophobe. After some dirty looks from myself and several other people nearby, the dude sat down and grumbled. Sharing space with people means friction, and slop of both the AI and ordinary sort is designed to deliver Silicon Valley’s ideal of frictionless experience by absolving us of our need and obligation to participate in society.

It’s probably no coincidence that ordinary slop is what the pop music industry delivered us in the wake of the decade-long wave of popular feminist pop that started with Beyonce’s self-titled album drop in December 2013. During this time, the heated debates surrounding #MeToo and the ethics of enjoying art by serial abusers generated lots of friction in taste communities. Just this year the new Arcade Fire record flopped due to its misfired and possibly half-hearted attempt to address allegations that their frontman sexually abused several women. The band was correct that fans and critics expected some kind of accountability from the band and its frontman, but their blundered attempt at it produced an album that was neither socially nor aesthetically satisfying. By eliminating the issue of sociality and social obligation, ordinary slop greases over past sources of friction among artists, fans, and critics.

Ten years ago I wrote about how the reactionary centrists of the day used Adele’s “Hello” as a phenomenon that greased over political differences through the united appreciation of a shared cultural object. Sitting at the top of the Hot 100 for seven weeks at the time of my late-December 2015 writing, “Hello” was in some ways the “Ordinary” of its day. Analyzing fan and critical commentary on the song alongside an SNL skit about it, I argued that then-contemporary reception of the song “eschew[ed] appeals to knowledge in favor of immediate, friction-less emotional and intuitive identification.” In a world structured by patriarchal racial capitalism, such frictionlessness is a feature of gender, class, and especially racial privilege. “Hello”’s musical aesthetics evoked that frictionless through a semiotics of whiteness, and in that respect Adele’s single was not that different than the Trump campaign and its less-implicit appeals to white racial identity:

In both Trump’s and “Hello”’s case, fans experience an apparently immediate emotional identification with a performance, and assume that everyone does, or at least should, do the same, because everyone ought to share this white interpretive horizon.

The SNL “Hellosgiving” skit is the most widely-known and illustrative example of how the reactionary center used the common appreciation of Adele’s hit to misrepresent the supposedly universal appeal of white European culture as the supposedly liberal tolerance of difference (“music is another language” discourse strikes a-fucking-gain!). The skit depicts what I described as a “multicultural, quintessentially liberal group that tolerates even your racist (therefore white) Republican relatives” that gathered without division or polarization around the Thanksgiving table. But as I argued in that piece, “Hello” hails these individuals into common appreciation through its appeal to white and whitened musical devices. It’s that appeal to and centering of whiteness that makes this supposedly liberal centrism reactionary at its core.

In the ten years since “Hello,” the reactionary center has abandoned the strategy of common and shared experience; ordinary slop leverages the affordances of algorithmic personalization to produce listeners who engage music entirely privately, e.g. as ways of investing in their human capital. In this way, ordinary slop archives the same ends as “Hello” – misrepresenting white supremacy as liberal tolerance – without the expense or effort of producing a song people feel compelled to connect with. “Hello” worked in its original context because the lady can SING; her performance evokes relatable emotional experiences that draw listeners together in their shared humanness. “Ordinary”…saves everyone the need to invest emotional labor. The difference between “Hello” in 2015 and “Ordinary” in 2025 shows the degree to which the reactionary center has abandoned liberal ideas of the (supposedly) pluralist, multicultural public sphere and adopted “Family Values” and Silicon-Valley style privatization. Ordinary slop is ubiquitous but void of any common, shared experience. Billionaires and fascists want to create that void so they can slip in and subject us to even worse exploitation and subjection.