Bruno Mars is still the golden boy of American pop

What they have in common the two most streamed singles of the last two weeks worldwide on Spotify? Bruno Mars. One moment he is in the studio of an old TV variety show duetting with Lady Gaga on “Die with a smile”the ballad with a ’70s mood, the result of the collaboration with Miss Germanotta, which from August to today has totaled a total of 825 million listens on Spotify. The next moment he’s on a set playing drums for Rosethe South Korean pop star with whom he has just released the irresistible “APT.”in which at a certain point he even starts rapping.

The official video clip of the song has racked up 260 million views on YouTube in two weeks, while on Spotify the song has overtaken “Die with a smile” itself in the last week, totaling 87 million streams worldwide in seven days. Too bad that in both cases his is not the main name associated with the song, but that it appears only after the word “featuring”: .the Golden boy of stars and stripes pop of the last fifteen years, 230 million copies sold between albums and hits like “When I was your man”, “Just the way you are”, “Locked out of heaven” and “Uptown funk ”, is back. And he immediately took back his scepter.

And to think that until a couple of months ago Bruno Mars he seemed to have disappeared into the black hole where pop stars destined for oblivion end up: “What happened to it?”, we asked ourselves, as if we had forgotten – too quickly – the goals achieved in a handful of years by Peter Gene Hernandez, this is the real name of the artist, who in the years of gold someone even went so far as to define it as theheir of Michael Jackson (cumbersome label that has been slapped on everyone from Justin Timberlake to The Weekend). Stop on the record at the beautiful “An evening with Silk Sonic”, the album recorded in 2021 together with his friend Anderson Paak under the name of Silk Sonic, a triumph of r&b, soul, funk and hip hop that won multiple Grammy awards, before reappearing surprisingly alongside Lady Gaga in “Die with a smile” the Hawaiian artist had lost all traces.

Taking refuge in a silence that he had not interrupted even when at the beginning of the year an American television station, reporting the indiscretions of an anonymous source close to the singer-songwriter, had launched defamatory accusations against him, claiming that Mars had contracted gambling debts of $50 million with the MGM Resort in Las Vegas, one of the largest hotels in the USA, and that he had been forced to perform in the hotel’s theater since 2016 to pay off the same debts.

While those rumors chased each other wildly, he – who in February in Las Vegas opened his own venue, the Pinky Ring, a very exclusive club where he occasionally puts on some surprise performances – sat there polishing the records. diamond and platinum awards won over the years, along with 9 Grammy Awards. When “Die with a smile” was released in August, Bruno Mars’ talent silenced the chatter. “Bruno’s talent is inexplicable. His music and vision are of the highest caliber. There is no one like him”, he said of the musician Lady Gaga. Then came “APT.”, the surprising collaboration with the Blackpink singer: Mars brought all his groove into the sound world of the K-pop heroine, returning to wink at a market, the Asian one, where he has always been strongsince the beginning with “Doo-Wops & Hooligans”, the album of “Just the way you are”, “Grenade” and “The lazy song”.

Meanwhile last Thursday achieved a record on Spotify: with 120.8 million monthly listeners on the platform he dethroned The Weeknd, becoming the artist with the most monthly listeners ever. Is the time ripe for the release of a new album, eight years after your last solo album “24K Magic”? It would seem so.