This album review looks back at Bruno Mars’s 24K Magic, a nine-song funk and new jack swing record that beat Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z for Album of the Year, and celebrates its 10th anniversary this November.
Genre: Funk, R&B, new jack swing
Label: Atlantic
Release Date: November 18, 2016
Vibe: 🪩🏆
As I researched and made notes for this review, I discovered it’s insanely difficult to ascertain exactly where Bruno Mars fits in the pop culture firmament now, a little over 15 years after his first single as a lead artist, “Just the Way You Are,” turned him into one of the world’s biggest pop stars overnight. It’s instructive to look back on the gulf that song created between the critical establishment and the music-buying public at large and note that, as he closes in on two decades in the spotlight, he’s never really deviated from that formula. Music snobs have consistently pegged his hits as, to put it charitably, cheesy guilty pleasures that know how to get the most out of the nostalgia-maxxing machine. And yet, that’s hardly stopped him. Despite how cringe or not you think the saccharine arrangement and lyrics are, “Just the Way You Are” sold 12.5 million digital singles, making it the best-selling track of 2011. To date, he’s sold over 150 million records, has grossed nearly a billion dollars on tour, and, as of October 2026, has the most monthly streams of anyone on Spotify.
So how do you square that dichotomous career narrative? Lyndsey Havens, Executive Editor at Billboard, speaking with the Guardian in 2026, attempted to do so, saying, “A Bruno Mars song ages really well, no matter when it’s released. There’s nostalgia built into the music, but his songs can’t be placed in a certain time.” Later, she rebuked the bad rap that’s risen from what many point to as his inherent corniness. “[His music is] so about love [but] one of my favorite things about him is that he really owns it,” she added. “If an artist can do that, all of their fans can do it too. There’s no shame involved, there’s no guilty pleasure sensation—it’s just good music.” I think that’s mostly on the money, though I would add that having a strong grasp of the artists he’s aping on his records adds to the experience, especially on his ode to 80s and 90s R&B, hip-hop, and New Jack Swing, 24k Magic.
I was an evening show DJ at a Top 40 station when this album’s promo cycle began. The anticipation was sky-high for the record, especially after Mars and Mark Ronson topped the charts in 19 (!) countries with “Uptown Funk” in 2015. It remains the most successful song in either of their careers, and it’s not close, really, and after a year of near-total omnipresence on our airwaves, it was still pulling in calls for requests. Others tried to dethrone it as the go-to pop cut from 2015 (Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5, and The Weeknd were among them), but no one could slow it down. So there’s that aspect, but there’s also the fact that I was a millennial in my mid-twenties, eking out just enough of a living to finance the next late-night cruise through town in my station wagon, radio blasting the entire time, or excursion to the nearest humid dancefloor to let loose. If that snapshot of my life had a soundtrack, Mars might well be the artist anchoring it. It marked a moment when the last wisps of EDM were dissipating fast, and mainstream music was pivoting back toward rap, trap, and R&B. It was a shift perfectly suited to his sensibilities.
Born Peter Gene Hernandez in Honolulu, Hawaii, Mars emerged from the womb as a song-and-dance man. His parents were both performers, and starting at age four, he was performing five nights a week with the family’s band, the Love Notes. He quickly became known for his Elvis impersonation and, later on, another one of Michael Jackson. By all accounts, his attention to detail was meticulous and his drive second to none, helping him become well-known in local entertainment circles. After Mars’ sister played a demo for Mike Lynn, then the lead A&R guy at Dr. Dre’s Aftermath label, he ventured out to California in 2003. But it didn’t happen for him right away. A failed contract with Motown led to him shifting gears for several years, giving his career a jumpstart as a behind-the-scenes tastemaker instead. He’d pen popular tracks for the likes of Adam Levine, Brandy, and Sean Kingston, among several others, before breaking through internationally as a co-writer on Flo Rida’s “Right Round.” Successful vocal cameos on B.o.B’s “Nothin’ On You” and Travie McCoy’s “Billionaire” hit pop airwaves less than a year later, and the rest is history.
24k Magic is, in many ways, the most universally accessible iteration of Mars’ musical persona, perfectly straddling the line between rose-colored 80s and 90s R&B tributes and mid-2010s pop appeal. He’d show flashes of his ability to navigate that balance on his previous album, Unorthodox Jukebox, with cuts like “Treasure” and “When I Was Your Man” aspiring to the heights of late-70s Michael Jackson. But that LP is also all over the place stylistically. Not in a bad way, mind you, but it’s front-loaded with songs that would sound more at home on a Police album (”Locked Out of Heaven”) or something from Peter Gabriel (”Gorilla”). Here, the sequencing, arrangements, production, mixing, and performances are all airtight and, more than anything he’d released to that point, hyper-focused on a single, unshakeable aesthetic. The title track sets the blueprint, with synth brass and talk box-driven groove that makes you feel like you just walked into the best house part of your life. It peaked at No. 4 on the Hot 100 and won Record of the Year at the 2018 Grammys.
The next two songs on the tracklist, “Chunky” and “Perm,” make good on that promissory note, delivering two sterling funk jams at different tempos. On both, Mars openly channels the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, over funk that’s got enough bottom to keep your primal urges engaged and enough brass bursts to provide a soft aural landing, should you need it. It’s undemanding, uncomplicated music, which has been a criticism of Mars over the years, too, which I’ve never understood. Not all great music needs to make you think. It asks you to move, and the stakes stop there. No harm in that. “That’s What I Like” is arguably the strongest example of that model’s charm. It’s got this strange instrumental construction, simultaneously moving at a slow dance tempo yet oozing head-roll, shoulder-lean energy. The chorus fits a car stereo effortlessly with the volume up, and I say that with a ton of field experience. My sentimental favorites are the New Jack Swing spinoffs, namely “Finesse,” with its In Living Color tribute music video, and “Versace on the Floor,” one of the decade’s sexiest songs, bar none.
In 2018, Album of the Year went to Mars in a crowded field. He beat out records including Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., Jay-Z’s 4:44, Lorde’s Melodrama, and Childish Gambino’s Awaken, My Love! I remember Kendrick being the critical favorite (he still took five awards that night, including Best Rap Album), while Jay-Z’s critical comeback left him empty-handed at music’s most important altar. Mars finished with six wins from six nominations and 11 career Grammys, and “That’s What I Like” also beat “4:44,” “1-800-273-8255,” “Issues,” and “Despacito” for Song of the Year. His Album of the Year speech thanked the other nominees and then belonged to his teachers. He recalled singing at 15 in a Hawaii show and learning later that the songs he performed were written by Babyface, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and Teddy Riley. The speech made the album’s argument of coming from the heart of a devoted student, not a pop music hack.
Where Mars fits in pop culture got a somewhat definitive ruling that night. Kendrick got the rap trophies and continues to rake in the prestige votes, while Mars has aimed for and increasingly collected bigger, broader acclaim. As a result, the gulf he initially opened with “Just the Way You Are” has never really closed. The backlash that followed argued identity. Seren Sensei said Mars plays up racial ambiguity to cross genres (and noted that Prince never won Album of the Year), while Vibe’s Marjua Estevez argued that Mars wasn’t appropriating Black culture, coming with insights from his own Puerto Rican and Filipino ancestry. Publicly, Mars has taken all the haters in stride, explaining that it’s part of the gig. His 2026 release, The Romantic, was met with more lukewarm reception, with some complaining that Mars had nothing to say. But what exactly is he expected to say? It reminds me of a passage from Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” review of Scarface, where he says of those admonishing Al Pacino for his over-the-top performance, “What were [his] detractors hoping for? Something internal and realistic? Low key? The Tony Montana character is above all a performance artist, a man who exists in order to gloriously be himself.” You could make a convincing argument that Mars personifies those last three words, too.
What’s your favorite Bruno Mars track? Drop it in the comments.