What happens when a melting pot crashes into a binary?
This Zen riddle has been with me for as long as I’ve been thinking seriously about culture. It’s back in the frontal cortex today because the New York Times just rolled out the first episode of a new podcast, Cannonball with Wesley Morris. “Every week, we’re doing culture — but with feelings,” its host declares. The first topic is framed as a mock confessional: “My Love Affair with Bruno Mars.”
I’m a big admirer of Wesley Morris, as a critic, a commentator and a person. We briefly overlapped at the Times, and have had friendly exchanges. So I hope it won’t seem as if I’m clapping back here — but after checking out the episode, which also features culture writer Niela Orr, I felt a need to tilt the frame. Because for almost the entirety of the conversation, there’s a tendency to discuss Bruno Mars and his musical synthesis in terms that recall a certain hit by one of his heroes: Black or White.
To be clear, Morris and Orr deliver smart analysis, and a few crisp zingers. (Wesley on “24K Magic,” which abruptly gives us Braggadocio Bruno: “It’s like watching your prom date turn into a pimp!”) But I would argue that something’s missing here. In fact, I already have — at the 2022 Pop Conference, hosted by NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. The theme was “When I Think of Home: Race and Borders in Popular Music.” I had no choice but to answer the call, with a paper that combines music and cultural criticism with an unusual (for me) bit of personal history.
We were still coming out of pandemic mode in the spring of 2022, and the Pop Con welcomed virtual presentations. So I created a video for my paper, which I titled “Lucky For You That’s What I Like: The Equatorial Brown-Eyed Soul of Bruno Mars.” It was well received by my fellow Pop Con attendees, and in the three years since, it hasn’t been shared with anybody else.1 But now I’m sharing it with you. Enjoy!
Leave the Door Open
Before we go, I want to point out that the complex calculus of Bruno Mars’ ethnicity and cultural origins do come up in the Cannonball conversation, after Orr thoughtfully invokes the Zadie Smith lecture “Speaking in Tongues.” At this point there are five minutes left in the 45-minute episode, and Morris says this:
Connecting him to Obama and Drake is interesting, because he too is a person from a place of multitudes, right? He and Obama are both Hawaiians. There’s an openness and a boundary-lessness around identity. You can be a lot of different things and express a lot of different selves. He’s so fluid and comfortable at that, and I think that the thing that got him invited in by so many of us is that it was hopeful. It wasn’t cynical.
Obviously I think this is worth unpacking a bit more! So that’s the spirit in which I’m offering my own comment. And in the spirit of collegiality, here’s the Cannonball ep on YouTube, so you can see how one conversation ends where the other begins.
There’s a lot more to discuss here, clearly. I’m keen to hear what you have to say.
Mahalo for reading The Gig! If you’re new here, I hope you’ll poke around a bit. And stay tuned: my next dispatch will be a reflection on Paul Simon’s “Quiet Celebration” tour, which I’m catching tonight at the Academy of Music in Philly. Onward!
There has, however, been an adaptation. At the urging of my friend and former editor, Evan Haga, I wrote this piece for TIDAL Magazine.
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