It’s a free-for-all on the Hot 100 chart right now. “Die With a Smile,” a slick, sappy Lady Gaga ballad destined for oldies radio rotation in about 20 years, has been hovering around No. 1 since summer. “Apt.,” a peppy new wave-inspired cut by Blackpink’s Rosé that speaks the rhythmic, hyperactive language of TikTok, is also in the Top 10. And a little further down, there’s Sexyy Red’s “Fat, Juicy and Wet,” the kind of raunchy, would-be strip club anthem that seems to float into the mainstream every few years. Nothing really links these songs — except for the fact that Bruno Mars appears on all three.
Mars checks many of the boxes of an A-list pop star. But unlike those who usually occupy the top slot of Spotify’s most-streamed artist ranking — which the 39-year-old musician has for the bulk of 2025 — it’s not always easy to discern his specific viewpoint, or even a favored niche. Pop has long rewarded shape-shifters like Madonna, whose careers are marked by bold artistic reconfigurations, but Mars is a different beast: a performer with such a malleable identity at one moment that his name stands for little except its association with hits.
Depending on your vintage, you might best remember Mars as a sappy adult contemporary crooner, thanks to his early No. 1s like “Grenade” and “Just the Way You Are.” On “Locked Out of Heaven,” certified diamond for 10 million sales, he was in full Sting drag, belting over shimmery new wave. Silk Sonic, his collaboration with Anderson .Paak that yielded a 2021 album, reveled in a kind of throwback sleaze, perhaps in tribute to his semi-adoptive hometown, Las Vegas, where he has held down a residency at the Park MGM for an astonishing near-decade.
Rather than try to distill his essence into one sound, Mars has remained stubbornly chameleonic — though rooted in old-fashioned music-making, the kind that employs acoustic instruments and appeals to Grammy voters (he has 33 nominations and 16 wins). “Die With a Smile” hearkens back to his days as a Jason Mraz-esque wedding song maestro; despite its title, the song is pure soft-rock schmaltz, finding both singers indulging their worst impulses toward lounge act cosplay. “Apt.” taps into the new wave pep of his 2012 “Unorthodox Jukebox” album, this time cribbing familiar elements of hits by the Go-Go’s, Blondie and Bananarama.
Both songs came with their own distinct visual aesthetic — ’60s Americana, and a shambolic, pseudo-punk look — and were colossal hits on TikTok, radio and beyond. While “Apt.” was always intended for Rosé’s December 2024 debut album, “Rosie,” Gaga initially said that “Die With a Smile” was a one-off, and had nothing to do with her forthcoming album, “Mayhem.” Six months later, fans noticed the song had been tacked on at the end of the “Mayhem” track list; it’s hard to argue with some two billion extra streams.
In the streaming era, it is conventional wisdom that trying to appeal to every constituency at once is a failing game — just ask Katy Perry, whose broad-strokes pop began to flounder as soon as streaming began to supplant radio. And yet, a mere two months in, Mars could feasibly claim that 2025 is his biggest year ever, all while nurturing not two, but three distinct personas: Toward the end of January, “Fat, Juicy & Wet” arrived. Dialing up the knowing greasiness of his “24K Magic” era, the song exists on an entirely different plane from “Apt.” and “Die With a Smile,” likely intended for rap radio and party playlists. Like its predecessors, the track was an instant hit, debuting at No. 17.
Mars, seemingly facing the option of either drilling into one niche or honing some kind of chimeric genre-mash, has chosen a third route: Play multiple games at once. Audience maxxing, of course, is nothing new. Shania Twain sold country, pop and Bollywood-inspired versions of her biggest records to capture audiences outside of America; early in her career, Beyoncé rerecorded songs like “Irreplaceable” in Spanish. As is so often the case, Drake adopted and then amplified this practice; his 2018 album “Scorpion” placed delicate synth-pop alongside New Orleans bounce and Memphis rap.
Drake’s songs prized a distinct sense of personality above all else: Even when he crooned over an M83-type-beat on “Summer Games,” you never forgot that you were listening to a Drake record. Mars, on the other hand, is a willing participant in his own sublimation — his defining characteristic may be smoothness. He doesn’t have any notable lyrical hallmarks, and his voice slips seamlessly onto each track. He throws a little Korean into his lyrics on “Apt.” and only raps on “Fat, Juicy & Wet,” in reverence of the song’s context. In cases like these, being a cipher is a feature, not a bug.
That all three songs are successful suggests that listeners are less wed to coherent “world-building” than one might think, willing to settle for a genre exercise delivered by a name-brand star — the equivalent of buying underwear, groceries and auto parts at Walmart. And it is listeners — the implication-laden term used by streaming services like Spotify — that Mars seems to be shooting for, not fans. A fandom is filled with die-hards, the kind of people who help Lana Del Rey sell out a stadium despite not having a radio or chart hit in many years; listeners are more passive consumers, the kind who wouldn’t necessarily care that Mars offers none of the parasocial emotional connection expected of stars in the 2020s. (He seemed to at least partially retreat after a 2010 arrest in Las Vegas; he pleaded guilty to cocaine possession, and the charges were later dismissed after he completed counseling and community service.)
In many ways, Mars was born for this. Growing up, he became known for his impersonations of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, and played in his family band, a pedigree you can hear clearly in his reverent stylistic tributes. His father is Puerto Rican and Jewish, while his mother is Filipino, and, perhaps as a result of growing up amid different cultures, he is pop’s premiere code-switcher, able to feasibly hop between the ’80s schlock of “Die With a Smile” and the playful hedonism of “Fat, Juicy & Wet” without raising too many eyebrows.
In that light, Mars is proposing a new mode of stardom, albeit one he himself is best positioned to pull off: the multiversal pop star, determined to be everything, to everyone, all at once.
