Songs in my Book - Ordinary World
How on Earth did this Duran Duran banger end up in Call Me Maybe?
This song features only at the very beginning of Call Me Maybe as the plot device that kicks off the whole story.
It’s Ordinary World by Duran Duran and it’s Dana, Jesse’s mum’s, favourite song. She listens to it in the kitchen whilst making grilled cheese. She listens to it in the car when she drops her boys off at school. She puts the cassette on whilst she’s doing the hoovering. She wishes she was Yasmin Le Bon.
I mean, it’s not specifically mentioned that she listens to it whilst going about her business, but she just does, you know?
It is, however, mentioned that she quite fancies Simon Le Bon because girls fancying boys in bands is a tale as old as time.
So, the story begins with Dana and Mike Franklin, a housewife and a car salesman from Omaha, Nebraska, returning home from a trip to Hawaii, bringing ukuleles home with them as gifts for their sons; Adam, Jesse, Travis and Brandon. All four take to them immediately, but from the very beginning it’s Jesse who displays a real aptitude for music, and later on, we learn he was always more interested in the makeup of the songs; the chords and the cadence, than Adam’s lyrics. When the band imploded, and it was mooted Jesse was replaceable, it was Dana who put her foot down and insisted he wasn’t - an act of kindness on her part, albeit one that came a bit too late.
But back to 1993. It’s Thanksgiving. The extended family are visiting. They’re about to sit down to eat, but before all that the boys have a short performance. Out come the ukuleles, and a rendition of Ordinary World, and Dana is very moved. She loves it. And this gives Mike the lightbulb moment about forming a band that he can manage, because why wouldn’t a car salesman with zero experience in the music industry be equipped to manage a band of four adolescents? Who needs Simon Cowell anyway?
In any case, soon after this performance, they graduate from ukes to drums, guitars, keys and, in Jesse’s case, bass, and from the get go Mike sees them as an escape from his unsatisfactory life in the Midwest.
You can take it at face value and leave it there, and that’s A-OK. But I didn’t just pick this song randomly. I picked it because it’s good for foreshadowing.
(Go with me here, I can be deeper than a puddle. Not always, but, when it counts.)
Later in the book, when sweet, sensitive, musical little Jesse is all grown up, we learn that although they live reasonably close to each other in California, the relationship he has with his parents is fractured. We learn that he was once very close to his mum, and was deeply hurt by the fact that she knew how unhappy he was in this life he had no control over, and appeared to do nothing about it until it was too late.
We learn that Mike is strong willed and focused, and had no qualms about using his children as a cash cow. We can assume that Dana would have struggled with this, but ultimately decided to show a united front with her husband.
Ordinary World is widely accepted to be about the death of one of Simon Le Bon’s friends, and whilst that exact meaning doesn’t apply here, the lyrics still work, detailing a longing for a time past. The ‘pride will tear us both apart’ lyric aligns with the reasons behind Jesse’s fragmented relationship with his parents and the entire bridge serves as a reminder that once upon a time, they were an ordinary family, living an ordinary life in an ordinary city. And, it’s clear throughout, and foreshadowed in chapter one, that all Jesse ever wanted was his own ordinary world.
What has happened to it all?/ Crazy, some'd say / Where is the life that I recognise / Gone away