It’s serendipitous that Bruno Mars has returned with a new single within a fortnight of the finale of Stranger Things. The sci-fi period piece hit Netflix the summer before the release of Mars’s previous lead single as a solo artist, “24K Magic,” in October 2016. They both circled different corners of the ’80s: The Duffler brothers show zeroed in on suburban Dungeons & Dragons obsessives during the Satanic Panic as the Bruno jam revisited the talkbox funk of Zapp’s “Computer Love” and Cameo’s “Candy.” Mars’s new song “I Just Might” and the Stranger Things farewell pageantry bring the compound nostalgia of revisiting 20th-century art and life via the lenses of two fixtures of late Obama-era pop culture. In the optimistic but quite violent 2010s, we’d cosplay the bawdy ’70s and ’80s for a change of pace, but in the scandalous 2020s, even the 2010s look reasonable enough to miss. We gaze into concentric layers of longing for an organizing ethos, style, and politics, for something the slop-drenched, uncertain present takes for granted.
“I Just Might” keeps Bruno Mars’s time machine parked in the same pocket that inspired “24K Magic” and 2014’s Mark Ronson–assisted “Uptown Funk,” two reminders that funk is every bit as brash and hard-hitting as rock and roll. The new song’s fuzz-drenched dance routine again serves the past spritzed in hot sauce, like his 2024 Sexyy Redd collaboration “Fat, Juicy & Wet,” which asked us to contend with a Rio 2 co-star saying “pretty pussy.” “I Just Might” sweetly retreats into the formula Mars worked a decade ago. This is your textbook plea to the DJ to run something that will heat up your romantic prospects, a sunny pop-funk hybrid chronologically situating itself around 1970-something. In a career that could jump from airport reggae-pop to New Wave to turn-of-the-’90s new jack swing without notice, the move seems rooted in the same apprehension to get too far beyond the public’s ideal version of the artist that drove the return to form of Lady Gaga’s Mayhem.
Mars’s guest appearance on that album’s simmering duet “Die With a Smile” nudged him out of the booked stasis of an annual Las Vegas residency, and its success said that people really missed his voice, which, if he belts it out just right, can hook you with even the most meat-and-potatoes bit of banter and band activity underfoot. “I Just Might,” whose video features a band of Brunos cutting a rug on a different makeshift ’70s variety-show set than the “Die With a Smile” clip, buzzes around a similar concept. It lays out a pleading appeal it repeats until you start to lose reservations, its longing for a love interest boiling alongside its desire to get back on top of the charts.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
The Little Richard wardrobe in the “I Just Might” video isn’t escaping lingering complaints that Mars, a musical chameleon and student of pop history, gets too into character in his explorations of Black soul and funk from the mid-20th century. It’s unfair to what is really a multicultural brain trust to imply that his music sells the trappings of Blackness without the people. It ignores the contributions of co-writers Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II, Brody Brown, and Philip Lawrence and bandmates like sax player Dwayne Dugger. But the “Hey Ya”–esque army of one of “I Just Might” makes its bed focusing on reconnecting us with an artist who used to feel almost omnipresent instead of how the sausage is made. The message is just Bruno Mars wants back on wedding playlists. Because this hook salesman has long since fine-tuned his pitch, this track built from parts we’ve heard before, whether in the actual disco era or in any 2010s trip back to the ’70s or in the plentiful past-pondering of the present, eventually skewers its prey. It’s catchy as hell; he knows his talents, the masses, and the industry.
Sign up for The Critics
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.
