The Uncomfortable Appeal of Bruno Mars

There’s a scene in Ryan Coogler’s social horror movie, Sinners, where the baddies, led by Irish vampire Remmick, try to gain access to a Black-owned house of blues. Nobody knows that they’re blood-sucking monsters quite yet, let alone a metaphor for cultural appropriation, but they’re white and suspicious, and in Jim Crow Mississippi, that’s enough. The vampires are told to try one of the white barrelhouses in town.

“How’d she get in?” a disappointed Remmick asks, pointing at Mary, a white-passing Black woman standing inside.

“She here,” says cook and Hoodoo priestess Annie, “’cause she family.”

I think about Sinners whenever I hear Bruno Mars.

Sometimes I forget that he’s not even Black. I suppose that’s to his credit. The “Uptown Funk” singer’s greatest gift may be his incredible versatility, not only as a multi-instrumentalist and three-octave tenor, but as a racialized musician. Filipino, Puerto Rican and Jewish, Mars exists in the liminal space of American racial discourse — neither Black nor white, and therefore free to move about the barrelhouses, so to speak.

This privilege has never been clearer than over the past year, as Mars has struck gold with a trio of duets from all over the musical map. First came the August 2024 single “Die with a Smile” alongside Lady Gaga, a classic country ballad that remains a Billboard Top 10 hit some 49 weeks later, due in large part to its genre-agnostic appeal. “Die With a Smile” is a fixture on pop, country, rock and adult contemporary radio stations. If Mars is lucky and it stays that way for two more months, it’ll be the longest-charting hit of his career.

A few months after that duet came “Apt.,” a catchy K-pop/punk rock track with Rosé, a member of South Korean girl group Blackpink, that spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 before it was surpassed by Mars and Gaga in the spring. This one has impressive longevity too, having spent 40 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, not to mention even more cross-cultural appeal: “Apt.” was the first Western song to top the Billboard Japan Hot 100 in over a decade.

These two songs have made a lot of money for Mars amid (publicly denied) rumours that he recently managed to rack up a $50 million gambling debt with the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. After appearing onstage with Blackpink in Los Angeles last week, Mars poked fun at himself when he posted a clip to his Instagram.

“Almost out of debt BehhhhhBehhhhh!!! Preciate You ROSAAAAYYYYYY!!!!” he wrote.

This brings us, at last, to “Fat, Juicy and Wet,” the genuinely filthy January 2025 strip club anthem Mars released alongside “Pound Town” rapper Sexyy Red. In a sense, Mars returned to his roots with this one, circling back to Black music after successful forays into markets that actual Black artists struggle to access.

It’s a misstep. Mars does a serviceable job of matching the carnality and cadence of his hip-hop counterpart, but in doing so — code switching harder than just about anyone I’ve ever seen — he draws attention to the artifice that powers his success.

Mary in Sinners comes back too. She follows the baddies outside just to talk, convinced her light-skinned privilege will protect her. But they’re vampires, not Klansmen, and after they turn her, the privilege that permits her to move between worlds is a weapon they can use against the Black folks at the door — a means to gain access to Black spaces, and make off with the blues.

After all, if we learned anything from the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, it’s that one can be racialized — ethnically Black, even — and still be considered less colleague than colonizer.

Performing Blackness

The music of Bruno Mars is, as the writer Niela Orr succinctly described it on the New York Times’ Cannonball podcast, “a sort of drag performance of Black vernacular.”

Mars is far from the only musician to rise to superstardom in this manner. Born Peter Gene Hernandez, the hitmaker first gained recognition in Hawaii as a child for his impersonation of Elvis Presley.

Presley is, of course, the prototype. White people loved Elvis because he could ably imitate Black musicianship without being a Black musician. This is a kind of cultural currency available to non-Black artists: imitating Blackness is impressive. Actually being Black, not so much.

In this respect, few artists in my lifetime have been as impressive as Bruno Mars. Many have charted the same course: Justin Timberlake. Robin Thicke. Iggy Azalea, whose uncanny imitation of a Black southern rapper was enough to make her one of the bestselling female rappers ever.

Other acts have employed this same method as a means of reinvention. After leaving the rock band No Doubt, Gwen Stefani established herself as a solo artist by leaning into hip-hop trends.

Her only No. 1 single, “Hollaback Girl,” was produced by the Neptunes and wouldn’t sound out of place on a N.E.R.D. album.

And how about Nelly Furtado, the breakout Portuguese Canadian singer-songwriter from Victoria, B.C. whose 2000 single “I’m Like a Bird” was a smash hit?

She hit a sophomore slump, and returned to the top of the charts six years later with “Promiscuous,” a single that the African American producer and songwriter Timbaland produced. That was weird.

It was obvious, too. Few have been able to make this transition as smoothly as Mars — in part, due to his talent. Regardless of his complicated racial politics, the man is a consummate professional and notorious perfectionist.

A lot of cultural appropriation feels like laziness. In performances, Mars has never once seemed lazy — not even on “The Lazy Song,” his 2010 single from his debut studio album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans.

Neither has he seemed ungrateful. Asked about his tendency to draw from (or benefit from) Black music, Mars never once failed to acknowledge his musical forefathers.

“You can’t find an interview where I haven’t talked about the entertainers who have come before me. The only reason I’m here is because of James Brown, Prince, Michael,” he told syndicated radio show The Breakfast Club in 2021.

“This music comes from love and if you can’t hear that, I don’t know what to tell you.”

It’s a fair point. It’s also beside the point. Cultural appropriators don’t do it because they hate us.

They do it because they can — because it’s lucrative, because our culture has created the conditions for success based on impersonating Blackness at the same time it’s made Black musicians play by a different set of rules.

Code switching at a cost

Mars has done incredibly well to navigate this hornet’s nest to date — on Cannonball, Orr and host Wesley Morris compare him to fellow Hawaiian and former U.S. president Barack Obama, describing both men as “many-voiced.”

Obama and Mars are gifted code switchers; code switching itself is a necessity for just about any racialized person who hopes to succeed in the global marketplace these days.

“It comes with the gig,” Mars told The Breakfast Club. “There’s real merit to what people are saying about Black entertainers not getting their flowers.”

The man has seen this firsthand. He’s been behind the curtain. In a 2013 interview with Entertainment Weekly, he discussed the double standard in the music industry.

“We write this song ‘Nothin’ on You’, and I feel so happy with it. It’s so cool, with the Motown feel and the live instruments, and I love this hook,” he said. “And we’re shopping it around and the guy we played it for — I’m not going to say who it was, but he goes, ‘Oh man, oh man, what a song. You know what kind of white artist we could break with this? Blond hair, blue eyes, we could make this kid the next thing!’

“It made me feel like, ‘Jeez, I must be a mutant.’”

In American music, he basically is; it’s a testament to his incredible musicianship that Mars has been able to break through despite being non-white as well as non-Black. It speaks, as well, to what he’s tried to do with his persona, threading the line between acting Black and seeming Black with staggering aplomb.

This was never clearer than on “24K Magic,” the title track from Mars’ most recent full-length LP.

“24K Magic” thrived on irony — a sort of wink-wink, jokey take on Black musicianship and braggadocio. “24K Magic” was basically a sequel to “Uptown Funk,” the 2014 single officially credited to frequent Mars collaborator, Mark Ronson.

But let’s be clear: it’s a Bruno Mars song. Admittedly, it sounds like the uncanny lovechild of The Gap Band’s “Oops Upside Your Head” and Zapp’s “More Bounce to the Ounce,” but it was a bop, and it felt like a nod to the greats, not a theft from the greats.

On the flipside, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” — essentially Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up” by way of blue-eyed soul — got him sued.

With “24K Magic,” Mars tried to do it again. I would argue that he didn’t quite succeed.

“Everywhere I go they be like, ‘Ooh, so player’.” Mars sings, at one point.

No, they don’t.

That’s not to say I didn’t like it. How can you not love that song? But I didn’t feel good about it.

As culture critic Wesley Morris asked on Cannonball: “What am I really confessing when I say that I love Bruno Mars? I think it’s that I should know better.”

The music ‘comes from love.’ But love of what?

If the seams were beginning to show for Mars then, it was hard to see his next act, 2021’s An Evening With Silk Sonic, as anything but an attempt to restore equilibrium. With Silk Sonic, Mars shared centre stage with singer and rapper Anderson .Paak. The album was a throwback, full of ’60s and ’70s R&B, quiet storm, funk and Memphis soul. Thundercat played the bass. Bootsy Collins played the narrator.

White and white-adjacent artists often have the luxury of trading a co-sign from a Black artist (street cred, in short) for exposure to white audiences, and this is the clear devil’s bargain struck between Mars and his counterpart .Paak. Sure enough, Silk Sonic was .Paak’s first record to enter the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, let alone to debut at No. 1. For Mars, it was his second.

It worked, with the lead single, “Leave the Door Open,” winning Record of the Year at the 2022 Grammy Awards, along with three others. But it didn’t work for long — diminishing returns even Mars and .Paak seemed to acknowledge when they declined to submit the ensuing LP for additional Grammys. On Cannonball with Wesley Morris, the hosts pointed to “Smoking Out the Window,” the album’s third single, as the moment the bubble burst.

For me, it was “After Last Night,” which evokes Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake’s “Dick in a Box.” A friend of mine pointed it out, and I couldn’t unhear it. Suddenly, the enterprise screamed “comedy album.” Listening to it now, it feels weird and disingenuous.

Worse, it feels like Blackness is the butt of the joke.

Mars may claim his music comes from love, but love of what, and love of whom?

And either way, is that why people buy it?

After 15 years on top, and 20 Top 10 hits, it’s hard not to see Mars as the textbook example of what director Coogler is trying to tell us with Sinners.

“See, white folks, they like the blues just fine,” says Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim, early in the film.

“They just don’t like the people who make it.”