Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century: No. 20 — Bruno Mars

September 7, 2024 E Jazz Reporter

Entertainment
With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. We’ve already named our Honorable Mentions and our No. 25, No. 24, No. 23, No. 22 and No. 21 stars, and now we remember the century in Bruno Mars — one of the century’s great writers, performers and hitmakers, who essentially arrived to early-’10s pop already on top of the world and has scarcely left his perch since.

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Before Bruno Mars became synonymous with near-flawless Grammy track records and surefire Billboard Hot 100 smashes, the 21st century’s preeminent old-school musical showman was cutting his teeth in the pop songwriting trenches. By racking up hits and placements across pop and R&B on both sides of the pond, Mars set a sturdy foundation for one of the most towering male pop careers of the 21st century.

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Born Peter Gene Hernandez – “Bruno” comes from a childhood nickname and “Mars” is because he’s “out of this world,” and wouldn’t you agree? — and hailing from Hawai’i, Mars grew up in a family of musicians and began his performance career at the ripe age of four years old. That Mars got his start performing in his family’s band, The Love Notes, and developed an early reputation as his Hawai’i’s own Little Elvis is nothing short of cosmically poetic given how his career and positioning in the American pop ecosystem is informed by that of both Elvis and Michael Jackson.

After four years of false starts with a failed label deal and a slow-burner of a publishing deal, Mars began to hit his stride in 2008. By then, Mars had cracked the code of his personal twist on pop songwriting in collaboration with Philip Lawrence and Ari Levine, collectively known as The Smeezingtons: explorations of love and pain rooted in grand, sweeping metaphors and live instrumentation steeped in cross-genre ‘80s influences. Just two months into 2009, Mars netted his breakthrough hit as a songwriter: Flo Rida and Kesha’s 2009 Billboard Hot 100-topper “Right Round.”

That anthem arrived in the first month of the last year of the ‘00s decade, and Mars quickly followed it up with a pair of tracks – K’Naan’s “Wavin’ Flag,” Coca-Cola’s 2010 FIFA World Cup anthem, and Sugababes’ “Get Sexy” — that both hit No. 2 in the U.K. the following year. Recognized and respected for his songwriting chops, Mars closed out 2009 with the release of the song that would launch him into pop’s mainstream as a vocalist and artist in his own right: B.o.B.’s bubbly Hot 100-topping “Nothin’ On You.”

Positioned as the lead single from B.o.B.’s — then a buzzy Blog Era emcee – major label debut LP, “Nothin’ on You” still stands an era-defining rap&B love ballad, and its success foretold the hip-hop collaboration template Mars would return to throughout his navigation of Top 40’s zenith. Mars would release another pop-rap collab — “Billionaire” (with Travie McCoy) just three months later, earning him another Hot 100 top five hit (No. 4) and more good will with Top 40 radio, while helping usher in 2010s social media’s obsession with speaking things into existence.

Two months after “Nothin’ on You” topped the Hot 100 in May 2010, Mars properly launched his recording career with “Just the Way You Are,” his debut solo single and lead single from his career-launching Doo-Wops & Hooligans LP. Although some critics initially discounted the song’s sappy lyrics, “Just the Way You Are” eventually became Mars’ first solo Hot 100 chart-topper and earned him his first Grammy, for best male pop vocal performance. That sappiness – which is often just a dual heavy-handed dose of earnestness and appreciation for eras of pop music’s past – is what drew listeners to Mars’ heart-on-your-sleeve anthems throughout the 2010s, especially as the decade began its descent into the kind of cynicism that now derides such displays of ardor.

Bruno Mars

Kevin Mazur/BBMA18/WireImage

Bruno Mars

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for iHeartMedia

Doo-Wops & Hooligans peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and has since spent nearly 700 weeks on the ranking. In addition to “Just the Way You Are,” the set also spawned the No. 1 hit “Grenade,” while third single “The Lazy Song” hit No. 4. Doo-Wops, a whimsical debut that melded Mars’ love of R&B and reggae with his pop appeal, found Mars taking his trademark tenor to soaring new heights, delivering feel-good anthems and love-proclaiming power ballads in one fell swoop. The spirit of Elvis shined through his look – hipster era fedora-toting artsy guy who occasionally sports a pompadour-inspired haircut – and his stage show.

Mars’ music didn’t yet call for the physicality of funk, so he found a sweet medium playing a coy multi-instrumentalist heartthrob who wasn’t afraid to bust out a few hip thrusts to get some pulses racing. His debut LP was the kind of smash album that spun gold out of deep cuts: Though they weren’t officially promoted as U.S. radio singles, you’d be hard pressed to find an American over the age of 15 who doesn’t know “Runaway Baby,” “Count on Me” or “Marry You.” Even “Talking to the Moon” got an unexpected TikTok-led resurgence in 2021.

Though Mars went straight for pop music’s zeitgeist with Doo-Wops, he always kept several toes in the worlds of hip-hop and R&B. For one of the tours he went on to promote the album, he co-headlined a 29-date joint trek with Janelle Monáe — who also released her debut LP in 2010, cementing herself and Mars as the decade’s mainstream torchbearers of funk. In 2011, the year between his debut and sophomore efforts, Mars also scored three consecutive Hot 100 top 20 hits alongside rappers: Bad Meets Evil’s “Lighters” (No. 4), Lil Wayne’s “Mirror” (No. 16) and Snoop Dogg & Wiz Khalifa’s “Young, Wild & Free” (No. 7).

By 2012, Mars had morphed into a more evolved synthesis of his inspirations as opposed to just a 2010s-tinted reflection of them. Unorthodox Jukebox, which featured his first collaborations with one Mark Ronson (wink wink), effortlessly cemented Mars’ status as one of the most commercially dependable male pop stars of his time. Lead single “Locked Out of Heaven,” ushered in a friskier Mars, who had traded the saccharine doe-eyed glimmer of Doo-Wops for the more explicit musings of an embattled lothario. Just over a year removed from notching one of the young decade’s earliest surefire wedding anthems with “Marry You,” Mars brought a chorus of “your sex takes me to paradise” all the way to the top of the Hot 100.

With influences ranging from Jackson to The Police, Unorthodox Jukebox appropriately cast a wider sonic net than its predecessor, but the piano-and-vocal ballad “When I Was Your Man” proved to be the album’s most enduring hit. A heart-wrenching beg-on-your-knees ballad, “When I Was Your Man” became just the second exclusively piano-and-vocal song in Billboard history top the Hot 100. The first track? None other than Adele’s “Someone Like You” the year prior, a neat chart stat that reveals Mars as something of a parallel to Adele – two 2010s commercial juggernauts whose old-school affects and robust vocals made them pop music powerhouses in the aftermath of the EDM takeover. With “When I Was Your Man,” Mars racked up his first five Hot 100 No.1s faster than any male soloist since Elvis. How’s that for a guy who spent his childhood professionally impersonating The King of Rock ‘N’ Roll? “Treasure” — whose funky disco synths laid the foundation for Mars’ next sonic evolution – was the final hit single from Unorthodox Jukebox (No. 5) and remains a staple in his live shows.

Bruno Mars

Ethan Miller/WireImage

Bruno Mars

Steve Granitz/WireImage

Unorthodox Jukebox was another triumphant era for Mars, so much so that it helped launch him to one of pop music’s biggest stages: the Super Bowl halftime show. Yes, Mars had netted a Grammy for both of his LPs, alongside a hefty bag of hit singles, but it was still borderline unfathomable that a pop artist under the age of 30 with just two studio albums was asked to headline Super Bowl halftime . Mars wasn’t just one of pop’s biggest stars, he arguably had the widest appeal of any musician at the time – thanks to his diverse background and the fondness for both the classic and modern, he’s been embraced by audiences across generations and genres — and if the 2010s have taught us anything, it’s that those two things aren’t always synonymous. (Of course, it also helped his Super Bowl gig that his special guests were Red Hot Chili Peppers.)

Mars’ halftime show – which was the highest-rated at the time and drew more viewers than the game itself – found him powering through his small, but mighty, discography, flaunting his chops as a vocalist, dancer and instrumentalist. This era also spawned Mars’ first and only theatrical role: Roberto in the $500 million-grossing animated film Rio 2. The modern pop star template normally includes flashy relationships, major brand deals, and flirtations with other lanes of the entertainment industry, but Mars has avoided all of that for pretty much his entire career. Yes, he has a handful of brand deals and endorsements under his belt, but Mars’ stardom is almost uniquely tied to his music and not much else. Nobody really cares who Bruno Mars might be dating or what he might be wearing or what products he might use. We care about the hits, and few can deliver them as consistently as he does.

Mars would take four years to drop off his third studio album, but the years in the interim between Unorthodox Jukebox and 24K Magic were anything but quiet. After opening the year with his Super Bowl performance, Mars closed it out with the release of “Uptown Funk!” As Billboard’s No. 1 Hot 100 Song of the 2010s, “Uptown Funk” is the kind of genuine cultural phenomenon and musical juggernaut that feels damn near impossible in this age of hyper-fragmented social media silos. From Mars’ annoyingly charming vocal performance to an irresistible brass breakdown, “Uptown Funk” was simply inescapable. Mars’ presence on the track was also so outsized that many forget it’s not even his song. “Uptown Funk,” the lead single from Ronson’s Grammy-nominated 2015 Uptown Special LP, gifted the famed producer his biggest hit in close to a decade. The song was such a big hit that it didn’t even really feel like Mars was between album cycles — a period that also found him co-writing “All I Ask” from Adele’s 25 album and staging an epic dance battle alongside Beyoncé during Coldplay’s Super Bowl halftime show.

To usher in 2016’s 24K Magic era, Mars traded in the snazzy slightly unbuttoned sex appeal of Unorthodox Jukebox for matching silk sets and gold rings galore. After dropping heavier hints with each subsequent release, Mars’ R&B era was finally here in full effect. 24K Magic – a lovingly crafted ode to funk and new jack swing – arrived during something of a transitional period for mainstream R&B. The genre’s future stars – SZA, Summer Walker, etc. — hadn’t yet made their major label debut, while The Weeknd’s rise to stardom thrusted murky blogosphere soundscapes to pop’s mainstream, upending expectations for what male R&B crossover stars could and should sound like. Enter Bruno Mars doubling down on some of R&B’s most vocally and physically intensive styles in the face of an era that all but formally rejected classic entertainers in favor of Internet mystique. It’s no wonder 24K Magic landed the way it did; here was someone making classic R&B jams during a time when we were debating whether half the stuff labeled as “R&B” even belonged under that umbrella.

24K Magic launched three Hot 100 top five hits: the title track (No. 4), “That’s What I Like” (No. 1) and “Finesse” (No. 3). Now six years into his recording career, Mars was able to bend top 40 radio to his will, sending some genuine R&B jams to the top of Pop Airplay in an era where hip-hop had all but eclipsed R&B as far as Top 40 was concerned. Though he himself still side-stepped becoming an all-around cultural figure, Mars showed off his eye and ear for what makes the interwebs buzz by tapping Zendaya for the “Versace on the Floor” music video and Cardi B – in the midst of her breakout year – for the “Finesse” remix and its accompanying In Living Color-themed music video.

At the 2017 BET Awards, Mars opened the show with “Perm,” a 1960s James Brown-indebted funk track in which he sings, “Throw some perm on your attitude/ Girl, you gotta relax.” It was quite the sight to watch a non-Black man open a Black awards show using a perm metaphor to tell (presumably Black) women to calm down. That performance perfectly encapsulated the tension that lay at the heart of the 24K Magic era: What were we to do with this non-Black pop star taking overtly Black sounds and styles to the apex of mainstream music while actual black R&B artists struggle to get a second look? Claims of cultural appropriation hounded Mars throughout this era, and Black music elders (somewhat unsurprisingly) came to his defense.

Mars himself would address the discourse years later in a 2021 Breakfast Club interview where he said, “The only reason why I’m here is because of James Brown, is because of Prince, Michael [Jackson] … that’s it. This music comes from love and if you can’t hear that, then I don’t know what to tell you.” To a degree, he’s right. Mars’ case isn’t like Iggy Azalea’s or Miley Cyrus’ or Post Malone’s, but it’s still one of the more uncomfortable byproducts of a music industry constructed with the building blocks of racial capitalism. Just as his inspiration Elvis proved decades prior, it’s always easier to sell Black music to America with a non-Black face.

By the end of the album cycle, 24K Magic netted five Soul Train Music Awards, his first two BET Awards, his first three NAACP Image Awards and seven Grammys – including album, record and song of the year, as well as his first wins in the R&B field. Moreover, the set’s supporting tour earned Mars his first $300 million-grossing trek. If it wasn’t clear already, anything Bruno Mars touched turned into 24k gold.

In the period following 24K Magic, Mars laid low – and there was no “Uptown Funk”-level hit to blow his cover. Anderson .Paak served as the opening act on the European leg of the 24K Magic World Tour, beginning a fruitful period of collaboration between the two funk and R&B aficionados. Meanwhile, he dropped “Please Me” with Cardi B (one of the more forgettable singles in both of their catalogs), dipped his toes into hard rock alongside Chris Stapleton on Ed Sheeran’s “Blow,” and earned a rhythmic radio smash with “Wake Up in the Sky” (with Gucci Mane & Kodak Black).

After spending the majority of the pandemic’s first year writing, Bruno emerged in 2021 alongside .Paak as the superduo Silk Sonic. The move was as left-field as Mars gets: He was undoubtedly the bigger star of the two, but the slightly edgier .Paak held the key to the kind of critical acclaim that sometimes evaded him as a more crowd-pleasing entertainer. .Paak — who is half-Black – also helped cover that base as Mars moved into his most R&B-indebted era yet. Zeroing in on Philadelphia soul, Mars and .Paak effectively became a tribute act, from their sultry falsetto-laden harmonies to their snazzy earth toned costumes. “Leave the Door Open,” the lead single from An Evening With Silk Sonic, was met with near-universal acclaim, earning the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 and four Grammys. For many listeners, “real” R&B was back on top after years of vibey trap&B dominating the airwaves and streaming playlists alike.

To an extent, “Leave the Door Open” was lightning in a bottle: Between the hype of Mars’ comeback, the promise of a new musical superduo and the strength of its melody, “Leave the Door Open” reached heights unmatched by any of its follow-up singles. “Smokin Out the Window” was the album’s lone additional top 10 hit, reaching No. 5. Silk Sonic’s debut LP entered the Billboard 200 at No. 2, shifting 104,000 units in its first week with 42,000 copies sold in traditional album sales – a solid showing for what could have easily been written off as a side project, but still somewhat eyebrow-raising considering Mars’ past opening week totals.

Now over a decade into his recording career, Mars has once again returned to the top of the charts. This time, he tapped Lady Gaga for “Die With a Smile,” a soaring ballad that blends pop, soul, country and rock. Already both artists’ first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Global 200, it wouldn’t be surprising in the slightlest if the Grammy-contending duet soon notched both superstars their latest Hot 100 chart-topper.

In addition to his breathless catalog of hit singles and smash albums, Bruno Mars also has some of the century’s biggest tours and residencies under his belt. In many ways, Mars is a true songwriter’s pop star. Sure, there are jokes about his past cocaine use and alleged (and debunked) Vegas debt, but the vast majority of his cultural pull comes from his dependability as a commercially successful pop singer and prodigious pop songwriter. Who needs a cult of personality or a decade’s worth of lore to sustain a 21st century pop career when you’ve got that level of talent and charm, and a hefty bag of enduring wedding-level classics to boot? Bruno Mars is complete proof that the pop templates of past eras can still thrive in the 21st century – as long as they come in the form of a curly-headed and superhumanly talented short king.

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here and check back on Tuesday when our No. 19 artist is revealed!