Perhaps surprisingly, Bruno Mars\u2019 third album chooses to build on his huge 2014 collaborative hit \u201cUptown Funk\u201d (with Mark Ronson) instead of his multiplatinum sophomore disc Unorthodox Jukebox<\/i>, which showed the artist expanding his musical horizons and limiting his lyrical ones. In deference to its gold-plated title, 24K Magic <\/i>is all superficial gloss, a funky, retro R&B\/soul\/pop disc that barely exceeds half an hour in its runtime.<\/p>\n
\u201cUptown Funk\u201d also updated classic tropes for the modern era and scored a massive hit, and that seemed to spur Mars to create more music in that same vein. He enforced a dress code in the studio, wrote lyrics about as deep as a kiddie pool (\u201cPretty girls all around me \/ And they keep waking up the rocket\u201d is typical) and posed for the most ridiculous cover of the year.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t believe any of this is real, but as a put-on it\u2019s hilarious, a rap video with bling \u2018n\u2019 hoes brought to life and time-warped back to 1990. There\u2019s little in common with modern R&B here, but you can hear Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey in \u201cVersace On The Floor,\u201d James Brown in \u201cPerm,\u201d new jack swing and Bobby Brown all over the place. 24K Magic <\/i>is lush and overproduced, full of male bragging (\u201cI got too many girls on hold \/ For you to be so bold\u201d he croons coldly in \u201cCalling All My Lovelies\u201d) and endless odes to upscale, rich-dude partying, the kind normal people can never relate to.<\/p>\n
This may prove to be the album\u2019s undoing when it\u2019s all said and done. Lyrically problematic as it was, Unorthodox Jukebox <\/i>mined a rich vein of songwriting on \u201cTreasure,\u201d \u201cMoonshine,\u201d \u201cWhen I Was Your Man,\u201d and \u201cLocked Out Of Heaven\u201d (I exclude \u201cGorilla,\u201d a horrible song by anyone\u2019s measure), and those songs have stood up over the last four years in a genre where disposability is not concerning. I can\u2019t see anyone in four years clamoring to hear \u201cCalling All My Lovelies,\u201d since it is all surface masking nearly nothing underneath. <\/p>\n
To be fair, Mars is a lot of fun, charming and bold, grinning his way through the entire disc (witness the solid Bell Biv Devoe update \u201cFinesse\u201d) and singing his ass off.\u00a0 The title song, \u201cChunky,\u201d and \u201cPerm\u201d are a killer opening trio as far as funky party pop songs go; they should be on the next Now! collection any minute now. And \u201cToo Good To Say Goodbye\u201d is yet another entry into the classic category of heartfelt R&B ballads, although with the old-school \u201890s sound instead of whatever they do in 2016. It\u2019s a nice way to end the party, showing some actual heart under the glitz.<\/p>\n
The thing is, you can have gloss and glamour, champagne and suits, pretty dresses and cocktails and gold jewelry and sunglasses at night, your life a party where money is no object and everyone has fun. I think that was the basis for Barney Stinson\u2019s entire character on How I Met Your Mother<\/i>. Only Barney was pretty much a live action cartoon with almost nothing under the surface, and so it is with the majority of 24K Magic<\/i>. All the layers of sound and references to hashtags and expensive shoes can\u2019t mask mediocre songwriting, especially from a superstar who has done better and knows better. But damned if it isn\u2019t a fun way to spend half an hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":32919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[9339],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-44693","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bruno-mars","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44693"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}