At the moment, of course, he\u2019s generously rewarded for his talent. But surely the folks at Suno and Udio \u2014 prompt-based AI apps<\/a> that spit out \u201cnewly\u201d \u201ccreated\u201d \u201csongs\u201d to a user\u2019s specifications \u2014 could do what Mars does for a fraction of the cost, right?<\/p>\n \u201cThis ain\u2019t sweat \u2014 it\u2019s tears,\u201d the singer said as he dabbed his face with a towel midway through his concert Wednesday night at Inglewood\u2019s SoFi Stadium. Mars was playing up the lover man\u2019s dejection in his song \u201cWhy You Wanna Fight?,\u201d which he neatly segued into a medley of R&B classics including the Chi-Lites\u2019 \u201cOh Girl\u201d and Marvin Gaye\u2019s \u201cLet\u2019s Get It On.\u201d Yet you could imagine him weeping over the future that might be in store for old-school record makers like him (not least given that Udio recently struck a licensing deal with Mars\u2019 own record company).<\/p>\n Except that Mars, unlike an app, can also do it live.<\/p>\n The first of five SoFi dates on a yearlong world tour behind his album \u201cThe Romantic,\u201d Wednesday\u2019s show was a breezy master class by a veteran entertainer whose understanding of an audience\u2019s needs \u2014 our desire to laugh and to swoon and to scrunch up our face when a saxophone player hits a note so wrong that it\u2019s right \u2014 has the feel of a treasured natural resource that we\u2019re all watching slowly disappear. In an age of soulless AI slop, Mars comes onstage, eyes burning with the determination to wow; even (or especially) at his corniest \u2014 \u201cMarry You,\u201d for instance, or \u201cJust the Way You Are\u201d \u2014 his belief in himself is downright inspiring.<\/p>\n Bruno Mars performs at SoFi Stadium on Wednesday.<\/p>\n (Daniel Ramos \/ Atlantic Music Group)<\/p>\n On Wednesday he opened with a beefed-up rendition of \u201cRisk It All,\u201d the delicate bolero<\/a> that also introduces \u201cThe Romantic,\u201d then played a few more cuts from the new LP, which emphasizes his Puerto Rican heritage with elaborate Latin-pop arrangements that grew even brassier and more muscular in the hands of his large backing band. After that he started dropping in the vintage hits \u2014 \u201c24K Magic,\u201d \u201cTreasure,\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s What I Like\u201d \u2014 before bringing out his pal Anderson .Paak for a mini-set by their retro-soul duo Silk Sonic. There was pyro, there were video screens, there was a succession of gorgeously tailored floral-pattern suits. More than that, though, there was the person-to-person interplay: jokes about who\u2019s taller, jokes about who\u2019s the better singer, jokes about who knows the difference between La Cienega and La Brea. Had every comedic bit been rehearsed (and re-rehearsed)? Obviously. Yet that\u2019s precisely what was moving about it \u2014 the duo\u2019s dedication to finding their groove and sticking with it.<\/p>\n The final third of the show went rat-a-tat with songs from the last gasp of the Top 40 monoculture: \u201cGrenade\u201d and \u201cUptown Funk\u201d and the like. Mars took our familiarity with the material as an opportunity to deconstruct \u201cWhen I Was Your Man,\u201d turning over each part of the song to show us the emotional conviction it requires.<\/p>\n My only quibble with the concert was that, for all the humanity the size of the room allowed for, a stadium is probably not the best place to see Mars do his thing. An arena lets you get closer to the fine-grain texture in his songs; better still is a theater like the one he regularly plays<\/a> at Park MGM in Las Vegas. But I suppose I can\u2019t laud the valuable healing qualities of his music and then wish that fewer people had shown up to get a taste.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If anyone\u2019s career is at risk from the coming AI jobpocalypse, it would seem to be Bruno Mars\u2019.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618131,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[304393,115246,156,1872,3594,22612,91058,304392,157,111,139,69,1305,4625,152223,8628,134115,77746,304394,1680],"class_list":["post-618130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-anti-slop-machine","tag-bruno-mars","tag-entertainment","tag-face","tag-hit","tag-james-brown","tag-joke","tag-lover-man","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-show","tag-singer","tag-sofi-stadium","tag-song","tag-the-romantic","tag-udio","tag-veteran-entertainer","tag-wednesday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Bruno](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1790917212_93_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n