Ros\u00e9\u2019s December 2024 debut album<\/a>, \u201cRosie,\u201d Gaga initially said that \u201cDie With a Smile\u201d was a one-off, and had nothing to do with her forthcoming album, \u201cMayhem.\u201d Six months later, fans noticed the song had been tacked on at the end of the \u201cMayhem\u201d track list; it\u2019s hard to argue with some two billion extra streams.<\/p>\nIn the streaming era, it is conventional wisdom that trying to appeal to every constituency at once is a failing game \u2014 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<\/em> distinct personas: Toward the end of January, \u201cFat, Juicy & Wet\u201d arrived. Dialing up the knowing greasiness of his \u201c24K Magic\u201d era, the song exists on an entirely different plane from \u201cApt.\u201d and \u201cDie With a Smile,\u201d likely intended for rap radio and party playlists. Like its predecessors, the track was an instant hit, debuting at No. 17.<\/p>\nMars, 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, Beyonc\u00e9 rerecorded songs like \u201cIrreplaceable\u201d in Spanish. As is so often the case, Drake adopted and then amplified this practice; his 2018 album \u201cScorpion\u201d placed delicate synth-pop alongside New Orleans bounce and Memphis rap.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Drake\u2019s songs prized a distinct sense of personality above all else: Even when he crooned over an M83-type-beat on \u201cSummer Games,\u201d you never forgot that you were listening to a Drake record. Mars, on the other hand, is a willing participant in his own sublimation \u2014 his defining characteristic may be smoothness. He doesn\u2019t have any notable lyrical hallmarks, and his voice slips seamlessly onto each track. He throws a little Korean into his lyrics on \u201cApt.\u201d and only raps on \u201cFat, Juicy & Wet,\u201d in reverence of the song\u2019s context. In cases like these, being a cipher is a feature, not a bug.<\/p>\n
That all three songs are successful suggests that listeners are less wed to coherent \u201cworld-building\u201d than one might think, willing to settle for a genre exercise delivered by a name-brand star \u2014 the equivalent of buying underwear, groceries and auto parts at Walmart. And it is listeners <\/em>\u2014 the implication-laden term used by streaming services like Spotify \u2014 that Mars seems to be shooting for, not fans<\/em>. 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\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\nIn 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\u2019s premiere code-switcher, able to feasibly hop between the \u201980s schlock of \u201cDie With a Smile\u201d and the playful hedonism of \u201cFat, Juicy & Wet\u201d without raising too many eyebrows.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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