"The Charbor Chronicles": Listening To "Ordinary World" By Duran Duran With Very Different Ears After All Of These Years

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Listening To "Ordinary World" By Duran Duran With Very Different Ears After All Of These Years

Recently, I suddenly began listening to an old song that first became very popular early in 1993.

I remember it well. The song is "Ordinary World" by Duran Duran, and I think it first started to get really popular early in 1993. That was a good time in my life, as I was recovering from a very depressing year in 1992. I started college, and it felt so refreshingly different than high school. There were new friends, and I got far more exposure to the blossoming music scene that existed at the time than ever before. It felt like there were far more interesting and often like-minded young people around me, and that anything was possible. I really miss those times, even if a lot of this impression was admittedly based on naïveté.

Back then, I was a recovering metal head, who was really only beginning to get into the "grunge" scene from Seattle. Like everybody else, I really liked Nirvana almost from the first, when I heard them late in 1991. But also like most everybody else, it was hard not to pay attention to the other Seattle bands. In time, I became a big Pearl Jam fan. Later in life, Soundgarden - and almost anything which Chris Cornell was involved with - appealed to me a bit more.

In any case, I like heavy, hard rocking stuff at the time. So I doubt that I would admit too loudly to anyone that I really liked the new Duran Duran album, and particularly that son "Ordinary World." Yet I did, enough to go out and buy the album. And listen to it relatively frequently, to boot. I did not advertise that fact, but yes, I enjoyed it immensely.

Here's the thing, though: as much as I liked it, I'm not entirely sure it was on a deep enough level. When I recently "rediscovered" the song, I found that it not only appealed to me musically, like it always has since I first heard it all those years ago, but that the lyrics meant much, much more than they did back then. Don't get me wrong, I liked the lyrics back then. They were vaguely mysterious, and held appeal. But I don't think that I "got" the lyrics.

Hearing it again after all of these years, the song hit me very differently. Isn't that the magic of music, and of art more generally? You can hear the same son - or see the same movie or television show, or read the same book - after many years. And while it is familiar on some level, it also sometimes can feel like an entirely different piece of art altogether.

That is what happened when listening to this song. I noticed things that I had never really noticed before. It appealed to me because it was nostalgic, as well as just being a damn good song. Yet, it also added something entirely new, which I had never really fully noticed or appreciated back then. Having been through loss in the intervening years since, the lyrics felt like they hit me much, much harder than they had in the past.

So it seemed like something worth sharing here. Below are some videos of the song. There is the official music video version, but there is also a beautiful rendition of it on piano by Marie Digby, who lends this familiar song an entirely different feel altogether. Also, I added a video with the history behind this song by the Professor of Rock, and it is a rather fascinating story. Finally, there is an interesting video of the song being performed live in concert, and with Luciano Pavarotti of "The Three Tenors."

Enjoy.

Duran Duran - Ordinary World (Official Music Video)