If anyone’s career is at risk from the coming AI jobpocalypse, it would seem to be Bruno Mars’.
For close to two decades, this crowd-pleasing pop superstar has been topping charts and gobbling up Grammys with detailed recreations of an ever-expanding array of past musical styles. Think of him as a large language model trained on the complete works of the Isley Brothers and James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire and Lionel Richie and New Edition, among many other pathbreakers. Mars goes into the studio equipped with his vast knowledge base and comes out with an exquisitely crafted tune like the 1970s Philly soul homage “Leave the Door Open” or the Police-ish reggae-rock of “Locked Out of Heaven,” to name just two of the 22 hits he’s put inside the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 since 2010.
At the moment, of course, he’s generously rewarded for his talent. But surely the folks at Suno and Udio — prompt-based AI apps that spit out “newly” “created” “songs” to a user’s specifications — could do what Mars does for a fraction of the cost, right?
“This ain’t sweat — it’s tears,” the singer said as he dabbed his face with a towel midway through his concert Wednesday night at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium. Mars was playing up the lover man’s dejection in his song “Why You Wanna Fight?,” which he neatly segued into a medley of R&B classics including the Chi-Lites’ “Oh Girl” and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” Yet you could imagine him weeping over the future that might be in store for old-school record makers like him (not least given that Udio recently struck a licensing deal with Mars’ own record company).
Except that Mars, unlike an app, can also do it live.
The first of five SoFi dates on a yearlong world tour behind his album “The Romantic,” Wednesday’s show was a breezy master class by a veteran entertainer whose understanding of an audience’s needs — our desire to laugh and to swoon and to scrunch up our face when a saxophone player hits a note so wrong that it’s right — has the feel of a treasured natural resource that we’re all watching slowly disappear. In an age of soulless AI slop, Mars comes onstage, eyes burning with the determination to wow; even (or especially) at his corniest — “Marry You,” for instance, or “Just the Way You Are” — his belief in himself is downright inspiring.
On Wednesday he opened with a beefed-up rendition of “Risk It All,” the delicate bolero that also introduces “The Romantic,” then played a few more cuts from the new LP, which emphasizes his Puerto Rican heritage with elaborate Latin-pop arrangements that grew even brassier and more muscular in the hands of his large backing band. After that he started dropping in the vintage hits — “24K Magic,” “Treasure,” “That’s What I Like” — before bringing out his pal Anderson .Paak for a mini-set by their retro-soul duo Silk Sonic. There was pyro, there were video screens, there was a succession of gorgeously tailored floral-pattern suits. More than that, though, there was the person-to-person interplay: jokes about who’s taller, jokes about who’s the better singer, jokes about who knows the difference between La Cienega and La Brea. Had every comedic bit been rehearsed (and re-rehearsed)? Obviously. Yet that’s precisely what was moving about it — the duo’s dedication to finding their groove and sticking with it.
The final third of the show went rat-a-tat with songs from the last gasp of the Top 40 monoculture: “Grenade” and “Uptown Funk” and the like. Mars took our familiarity with the material as an opportunity to deconstruct “When I Was Your Man,” turning over each part of the song to show us the emotional conviction it requires.
My only quibble with the concert was that, for all the humanity the size of the room allowed for, a stadium is probably not the best place to see Mars do his thing. An arena lets you get closer to the fine-grain texture in his songs; better still is a theater like the one he regularly plays at Park MGM in Las Vegas. But I suppose I can’t laud the valuable healing qualities of his music and then wish that fewer people had shown up to get a taste.
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