I'm just an ordinary girl
The most random connections & thoughts on the song 'Ordinary Girl'
Have you ever heard the first few seconds of a song and been overwhelmed by the rush of emotions bursting through because of the season of your life attached to that song?
Music is one of the greatest sources of nostalgia. It’s the reason why one moment you’re walking down the street, having an uneventful day, then you hear the first few notes of Yahooze playing and you’re in a whole other world. It’s 2007 and you’re trying to prove to your friends that you know how to do the Yahooze dance.
Some days ago, I was watching Starstruck (if you started singing ‘starstruck, camera flashes, cover of magazines, oh-oh!’ you know the vibes) and the love interest, played by Sterling Knight (or Chad Dylan Cooper to a lot of us), tells the main character, played by Danielle Campbell (or that annoying girl from The Originals), that she’s “just an ordinary girl.”
After hearing that line, with immediate effect, I hit pause because the lyrics of Ordinary Girl by Hannah Montana were flooding my mind and I had to sing it out to the audience of zero in my room.
It’s no secret that old Disney did its thing when it came to music, dropping bops and hit after hit, and Hannah Montana was up there with the best of them.
Ordinary Girl was one of those songs that they wrung out. I remember watching the music video over and over again on TV. The lyrics are tattooed to a part of my brain.
The song starts with Hannah’s famous vocalising and then she’s lamenting about how she doesn’t want it to seem as if she’s ungrateful about the life she has. I’ve always felt like this part of the song has the potential for an excellent karaoke performance. The perfect opportunity to be melodramatic; clutch your chest, close your eyes, and sing like you’re the only one with problems in the world.
Hannah sings about being an ordinary girl underneath all the fame and stardom. It reminds me of two things.
First, the princesses in Mulan 2 singing about how they want to be like other girls. The problematic nature of fame (or in their case, royalty) and how it keeps you from doing things ‘normal’ people do. Although, Hannah emphasises normal-ness in this song.
It also reminds me of that thing artists do when they write a song that reinforces and calls attention to their humanity. They complain about fame and remind their fans that they are not their saviour, only mere humans. Like Hayley Williams of Paramore did in Idle Worship, Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance did in Blood, Our Lorde and saviour did in The Path and Kendrick Lamar did in Saviour.
In a way, Ordinary Girl was Hannah’s more subtle version of that. Whereas theirs was more like, I am not your saviour, I am a human being, please stop putting me on a pedestal, I can’t stand it anymore, I hate this, leave me alone. Hannah’s was more like, I’m just like you, you’re just like me, we’re all ordinary, haha.
It’s a good reminder for a society that reveres celebrities and makes them god-like. A reminder in a world where it’s easy to forget that regardless of their fame, they are still human and deserve to live human lives.
When I listened to Ordinary Girl as a child, it was just another Hannah Montana classic to sing along to. But it’s as if with age, we’re constantly trying to find meaning in life and trying to connect with things.
Because tell me why when I listened to the song recently, I paid more attention to the lyrics and realised she sang about believing that anything could happen to ordinary girls and it resonated with me.
The dynamic nature of life and the way it can be upturned and changed for the better in seconds. Tomorrow, you can find yourself somewhere you never expected doing something you never imagined you would but loving every second of it and being grateful the wind of life blew you that way.
Anything can happen for an ordinary girl. Extraordinary, marvelous, incredible things can happen, for an ordinary girl. Like you, like meeee.
Listen to Ordinary Girl (and all the other songs I name-dropped) in the Nostalgia Trip playlist below where I’m compiling songs I talk about here, or that simply fit the vibe of the newsletter. #HannahMontanaforever and all that. See you soon!