I love this album. I appreciated “The Lion The Beast theBeat” and “Boys & Girls”. I have mad respect for “The Archandroid.” But I love Unorthodox Jukebox. Like, I can
picture myself ten years from now unearthing this CD, putting it in the player
(we’ll still have those in ten years, right?) and being transported right back
to this moment in time, with total recall of what it felt like to be twenty
three and really messed up.
It reminds me of “Little Red Corvette” by Prince.
You know the song that starts out sexy, gets dancey, then with one line—“You’re gonna run your body right into the
ground!”—injects a hint of melancholy that sticks with us all through the
epic play-out.“Unorthodox Jukebox” is a combination of songs that celebrate a good time, and songs that regret what those good times have cost you. It may take Mars & Co. a whole album to do what Prince accomplished in one track, but still some major credit is due. This interpretation may be a result
of my present emotional state—Certainly the years I spent idly doing fuck-all
seem less fun now that I’m an (almost) twenty-four year old temp who dearly
wishes she never stopped practicing the violin.
Anyway, to business...
1. Young Girls
The first ten seconds sound like sunrise after a sleepless
night. It conjures up the bleary, “oh my god is it really that
time?” feeling. Or maybe it's the "sun-is-rising-and-I-have-no-idea-where-I-am"
syndrome, which I personally have never experienced, but for whatever reason I
am now picturing Mars waking up on a rooftop like that poor bastard in The Hangover .
The producers hit a bull’s-eye on those opening ten seconds,‘cos sure enough when the lyrics start, our hero is at the start of a new day and the end of a long night:
“I spent all my money/ bought a big ole fancy car / for
these bright eyed honeys/ Oh yeah you know who you are / Keep me up ‘til the
sun is high / ‘til the birds start calling my name / I’m addicted and I don’t
know why / Guess I’ve always been this way / All these roads steer me wrong /
But I still drive them all night long.”
He can’t control himself. There’s a sense that in
a few years he’ll regret all this, but for now he’s at a loss for what to do
instead. There are certain trappings of success that (I’m guessing) it's hard to say no to. After working his whole life to get to this
point, this character has trained himself that this is what he wants, so it’s hard to say no to
all the sex, drugs, and parties that are supposedly the reward for all that
hard work.
There’s a palpable sadness and weariness in every note of
this song. It sounds like a Ronettes classic, slowed down for maximum
introspection. All four writers deserve gold stars, while Mars’ voice, with its
unbearably adorable little-boy-lost quality to it, sells this shit for maximum
emotional devastation.
*If I may veer into the personal one more time, my early life
was dominated by endless work that stifled my desire to do anything I didn’t
absolutely have to do. Whenever I wasn’t at school or work, I wanted nothing
more than to turn up the music and just do nothing. For ten whole years. And
while other people went to dances and got boyfriends or jobs or hilarious
anecdotes to relate at a later time, I got an uninterrupted evening to myself,
which I stupidly believed was all I ever wanted out of life.
There was always a sense that I was missing out on
something, but to get it would mean sacrificing the thing that I lived for—a
place away from feeling insecure about all the things I was doing wrong, or would do wrong if I tried them. It’s weird,
and weirdly comforting to think that someone so far at the other end of the spectrum
would grapple with the same feelings—in short, the “what I wanted might not be
the best thing for me, but I don’t know how to want anything else,” dilemma.
I would also like to add, that should Bruno Mars die young,
we all know this will be released as a single and designated the mass-mourning
song. Every artist should have one in their catalogue just in case.
2. Locked out of
Heaven
This song has already been (rightly) praised to death. The
four-on-the-floor chorus, the beat-box that actually sounds like a musical
instrument and not a sound effect, the lyrics...it’s all perfection. But what
takes it over the top is how it all builds to that fabulous musical orgasm at
the 2:42 mark, followed by the laid back (post-coital?) repeat of the chorus
(3:10), which, for whatever reason, makes me think of Fred and Ginger dancing
off the screen in one of their classic movies.
There are but a few perfect moments in cinema history, and Fred
and Ginger own at least five of them.
3. Gorilla
And now it’s time to check in with those Young Wild Girls
and just what they’re doing to our poor, set-upon young lover who has decided that he would rather be
Prince than Sting, thank-you-very-much. This is the one point on the album
where Mars’ adorable (I swear I don’t mean to be condescending when I use that
word) vocals fail him. He can’t quite sell the “body full of liquor with a
cocaine ticker” line, even though we all know he’s been arrested for cocaine
possession and some youtube commenter informs me he pissed on a stranger who
told him he was too drunk (I didn’t look into it because knowing shit like that
about a complete stranger never did anybody any good). But I digress. The
production is smooth and decadent so that Gorilla sounds like a great song, even though the image of primates humping
is, alas, not as arousing as Bruno Mars seems to think it is.
This song also has a dorky wish-fulfillment vibe, with its,
“30 feet tall” and “I bet you never ever felt so good,” lines. It’s
embarrassing when a man so obviously wants to be assured that he’s THE BEST
EVER, but this song is already so weird it’s kind of endearing. And if Mars’ vocals don’t quite live up to the
lyrics he can take solace in the fact that his “OOoohs” and “Yeah!”s in the last minute and a half are perfection. He sounds more
dangerous and alluring than Prince or
Michael Jackson...though admittedly, the bar for that one was only set about
waist high.
4. Treasure
This song sounds like it was assembled from
spare parts of Prince's Shallow as it is on its own, “Treasure” is a necessary palette cleanser between
“Gorilla” and “Moonshine”. The “Baby
Squirrel” line is a nice wink at the audience, though it makes me feel like
there’s a joke I’m not in on, that may be kind of sexist. But whatever. This
one’s forgettable.
ONE MORE THING: What is Bruno Mars’s obsession with insecure
women? The heroine of “Just the Way You Are” was some a nervous wreck who
couldn’t take a compliment and hated her own laugh. This chick “don’t know it
but [she’s] fine so fine.” Is this guy seriously that attracted to insecurity
or is he just catering to a hell of a lucrative demographic?
5. Moonshine
Okay, back to the good stuff. How can a song actually sound
drugged out? The hazy paranoia of the first twenty seconds of “Moonshine”
conjure up the feeling of someone in desperate need of a fix. Twenty seconds! “Evocative”
is the word you’re searching for, ladies and gentlemen.
The beat proper doesn’t come in until after our hero has
connected with his quarry and they drive off into the night. I don’t know if
this is sex as a metaphor for drugs, or drugs as a metaphor for sex. It might
be an amalgam of all that hedonistic swill, but boy does it sound great.
Evocative.
It might be an even darker track than “Gorilla”, but in this
case Mars’ high voice serves him better. He doesn’t have to sound aggressive
this time, just equal parts lecherous and lost.
6. When I Was Your
Man
Oh look, another #1 hit. I like to think that means I don’t
have to write anything about this one. It’s a song so direct that it’s almost
pandering: “I should have bought you flowers / And held your hand / Should have
gave you all my hours / When I had the chance.” Congratulations Bruno Mars, you
just sang what every scorned woman in the history of Planet Earth has ever
wanted to hear, and I hope you enjoy the financial windfall it brings your
way.
This single actually sounds better in the context of the
whole album. “Moonshine” answers the question of just what he did wrong when he
was her man, and it’s dangerous enough to balance out this tracks gooey
sincerity.
7. Natalie
Let me begin by saying that this song is everything
Madonna’s “Gang Bang” wishes it could be. The antithesis to “Grenade,” it’s
nasty and cruel but oddly fun to sing along with.
Misogynistic is a strong
word, and I’ll entertain the debate over whether this song deserves to be
painted with that brush. After all, he’s “digging a ditch for that gold digging bitch.” This allmusic review has very strong feelings about that one. I prefer to hear thsi song as jokey melodrama, the antithesis to the
equally over the top “Grenade”.
The biggest strike against Bruno Mars is that on (almost) every
other song this guy’s ideal woman is weak and insecure. Ahem, “You walk around
here like you wanna be someone else ...you don’t know it but you’re
fine so fine”, “Her laugh she hates but I think it’s so sexy,” “They might say
‘hi’/ I might say ‘hey’ but you shouldn’t worry / about what they say.” It says
something that the only assertive female in his repertoire is marked for death (working with Chris Brown in any capacity will not get you in with the feminists either).
Two things save this song: One, Natalie isn’t actually the only
assertive female in his repertoire—we can’t forget the “Good strong woman” who
dumped his ass for not taking her to enough parties. And two—Bruno Mars does
not have the voice of a killer.
That’s one sentence I
never thought I’d have cause to type, but there you have it. I know next to
nothing about Bruno the man, but the voice that couldn’t sell the line about a
“cocaine ticker” sure as hell can’t make this revenge fantasy sound like
anything to get too upset about. I have a feeling that when he catches her
they’re’ll be less murder and more Gorilla sex.
8. Show Me
Meh,
9. Money Make Her Smile
Wow, is this post already 2,000 words? I really do love this
album, guys. The best part of this song is its opening “All you get back /
coming to the stage is a girl who’s new in town”—ah , the corruption of
innocence. Beyond that, the song on its own is only so-so, with overreliance on
electronic sound effects rather than real instruments. It sounds just as
knocked-off as “Treasure” but even more shallow. But the inhuman chant of “Give
‘em what you got” and even the obnoxious electro sound effects build on the
atmosphere of excess that the album has built up so well. The smooth elegance
of a song like “Gorilla” is replaced by a manic, insane, obnoxious, electro
swell. With its inhuman chant of “Give ‘em what you got! Got! Got!” this is the
audio equivalent of the moment when all the excess and filth that was alluded
to on previous tracks spills over into something ugly and alienating (Speaking
of which, this song was co-written by Chris
Brown). Which brings us to...
10. If I knew
Ouch. The last track is the realization of all the creeping doubts
raised in “Young Girls.” “I was a city
(silly?) boy / Riding to dangers where I’d always run / A boy who had his fun/
But I wouldn’t have done / All the things that I have done / If I knew one day
you’d come.”
This silly boy is damaged goods. The woman he loves can’t
deal with his past and he wants a do-over. I can think of a dozen different
reasons why this song is so affecting, but what it all comes down to is that
everyone has something in their lives that they regret. That feeling creeps up
on us in between the good times until one day it overwhelms them.
“I wish we were seventeen / So I could give you all the
innocence / That you gave to me.”
He’s actually slut-shaming himself. That gender reversal
alone would make this song interesting even if it wasn’t so emotionally
devastating. And of course the last song feeds perfectly into the first if
you’re player plays in a loop. It makes for a perfect circle, and a vicious
cycle.
I’ve done a bit with my life. I survived a tough high school
program, got a scholarship to Canada’s top university, graduated with honours
and wrote about four novels. They’ll
never be published but on optimistic days I like to think that practise will
come in handy when I get my big idea. But at seventeen I felt like I was
already old and played out, so I stopped trying at anything that wasn’t school.
School was the only thing I was ever praised for as child, so I gave up on (or
flat out rejected) any feelings that I was attractive or the idea that my own
creativity could lead somewhere better. I dug myself into a deep miserable hole
from which I’m only starting to escape, all the while (still) worrying that
it’s too late, like I’ve missed something crucial you can only learn once.
There is nothing at all like my life on “Unorthodox Jukebox,”
and that’s for the best. Reliving a great party will always be more fun than
reliving a long study session. But the hangover is the same. “I wish I was
seventeen so I could give you all the innocence that you gave to me”. I never
ever looked at anything with even a grain of innocence, or optimism. Fatalism
is my middle name and has been since I was a teenager. But how I dearly wish it
wasn’t. That’s why I respond to this album so strongly, because in between sexy
pop songs, it’s all about getting lost and wanting a do-over.
