BIGSONG:
Peter Gene Hernandez (born October 8, 1985), known professionally as Bruno Mars, is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, musician, dancer, and music video director. He is known for his stage performances, retro showmanship, and for performing in a wide range of musical styles, including pop, R&B, funk, soul, reggae, disco, and rock. Mars is accompanied by his band, the Hooligans, who play a variety of instruments, such as electric guitar, bass, piano, keyboards, drums, and horns, and also serve as backup singers and dancers.
Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Mars moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue a musical career. In 2009, he co-founded the production team The Smeezingtons, responsible for various successful singles for Mars himself and other artists. He rose to fame in 2010 buoyed by the success of “Nothin’ on You” by B.o.B and “Billionaire” by Travie McCoy, both of which featured his vocals. That year, Mars released his debut studio album Doo-Wops & Hooligans, which blended pop with reggae pop and R&B. It spawned the international number-one singles “Just the Way You Are”, “Grenade”, and “The Lazy Song”. Drawing inspiration from disco, funk, rock, reggae and soul genres, his second studio album, Unorthodox Jukebox (2012), was his first number one on the Billboard 200. It amassed two Billboard Hot 100 number-one songs, “Locked Out of Heaven” and “When I Was Your Man”.
In 2014, Mars was featured on Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk”, which topped various music charts, spending a total of fourteen and seven weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart, respectively. Mars’s third studio album, the R&B-focused, 24K Magic (2016), received seven Grammy Awards, winning the major categories of Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. The album also yielded the top-five singles “24K Magic”, “That’s What I Like”, his seventh Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, and a remix of “Finesse” featuring Cardi B. In 2021, Mars and Anderson .Paak, as Silk Sonic, released the collaborative studio album, An Evening with Silk Sonic, which delved into 70’s R&B and soul, led by the chart-topping single “Leave the Door Open”.
Mars has sold over 130 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Eight of his songs have reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and his concert tours are some of the highest-grossing in history. He has received 15 Grammy Awards (including three Record of the Year wins), four Brit Awards, eleven American Music Awards, 13 Soul Train Awards and holds three Guinness World Records, among other accolades. He featured on Music Week’s best songwriters (2011) and Billboard’s Greatest of All Time Artists (2019) lists and rankings such as the Time 100 and Forbes Celebrity 100. Mars became the first artist to receive five Diamond-certified songs in the United States and has been regarded as a pop icon due to his influential career.
Life and career
1985–2003: Early life and musical beginnings
Peter Gene Hernandez was born on October 8, 1985, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Peter Hernandez and Bernadette San Pedro Bayot, and was raised in the Waikiki neighborhood of Honolulu. His father is of half Puerto Rican and half Ashkenazi Jewish descent (from Ukraine and Hungary), and is originally from Brooklyn, New York. His mother emigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii, and was of Filipino and Spanish ancestry. His parents met while performing in a show in which his mother was a Hula dancer and his father played percussion. At the age of two, he was nicknamed “Bruno” by his father because of his resemblance to professional wrestler Bruno Sammartino.
Mars is one of six children and came from a musical family which exposed him to a diverse mix of music genres, including first and foremost rock and roll, and later reggae, hip hop, and rhythm and blues. His mother was both a singer and a dancer, and his father performed Little Richard’s music, which inspired him as a young child. His uncle was an Elvis Presley impersonator, and also encouraged three-year-old Mars to perform songs on stage by Presley and Michael Jackson. At the age of four, Mars began performing five days a week with his family’s band, The Love Notes, and became known in Hawaii for his impersonation of Elvis Presley. When he was five he urinated on himself during a performance of Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (1961), which led his parents to think they could be making a mistake. However, Mars never wavered. In 1990, Mars was featured in the Hawaiian tabloid shopper MidWeek as “Little Elvis” and performed in the halftime show of the 1990 Aloha Bowl.
In 1992, he appeared in a cameo role in the film Honeymoon in Vegas and was interviewed by Pauly Shore on MTV. When Mars was six years old, he was featured on The Arsenio Hall Show and throughout grade school, he performed with his family’s band, two shows a night, covering Frankie Lymon and Little Anthony. When he was a child he had a small version of a drum set, guitar, piano, and some percussion and learned to play the instruments. When Mars was 12, his parents divorced, ending The Love Notes act. His father’s various businesses, ranging from temporary-tattoo parlors to memorabilia shops, failed. Consequently, there was no longer a steady source of income. He moved out of his parents’ house along with his brother and father. They lived in the “slums of Hawaii”, on the back of a car, on rooftops, and in an abandoned bird zoo, Paradise Park, where his father worked before it closed. Mars transferred schools and was bullied initially, but he became popular in his last school days.
The time Mars spent impersonating Presley had a major impact on his musical evolution and performing techniques. He later began playing guitar after being inspired by American rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix. In 2010, he also acknowledged his Hawaiian roots and musical family as an influence, explaining: “Growing up in Hawaii made me the man I am. I used to do a lot of shows in Hawaii with my father’s band. Everybody in my family sings, everyone plays instruments … I’ve just been surrounded by it.” When he attended President Theodore Roosevelt High School in Honolulu he sang in a group called The School Boys, who did several shows including opening for his father’s new band, performing songs by the Isley Brothers and the Temptations. The singer, while in high school, became well known in Hawaiian entertainment, becoming the opening gig for a huge magic show and impersonating Michael Jackson in a celebrity-impersonators show, making $75 per performance.
After his sister in Los Angeles, California, played his demo for Mike Lynn (the head of A&R at Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment record label), Lynn summoned Mars to Los Angeles. In 2003, shortly after graduating from high school at the age of 17, Mars moved to Los Angeles to pursue a musical career. At that time, he lived on Mansfield Avenue and was surprised by the poverty and squalor of the neighborhood. He adopted his stage name from the childhood nickname his father gave him, adding “Mars” at the end because: “I felt like I didn’t have no pizzazz, and a lot of girls say I’m out of this world, so I was like I guess I’m from Mars.” Moreover, the adoption of his stage name was also an effort to “avoid being stereotyped”, as the music industry tried to pigeonhole him as another Latin artist. They even tried to convince Mars to sing in Spanish.
2004–2010: Production work and It’s Better If You Don’t Understand
I’d always been a working musician in Hawaii and never had problems paying rent. And then it’s like, ‘Now I’m in L.A. and my phone’s getting shut off.’ That’s when reality hit. I started DJing. I told this person I could DJ because they said they could pay me $75 cash under the table. I didn’t know how to DJ. I lost that job pretty quick.
—Mars, speaking about his experiences of moving to Los Angeles to pursue a musical career.
Shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Mars signed a record contract with Motown Records in 2004, but the deal “went nowhere”, leading him to have a conversation with will.i.am’s management, which also turned out to be fruitless. However, the singer’s experience with Motown proved to be beneficial to his career. American songwriter and record producer Philip Lawrence was also signed to the label.
After Mars was dropped by the label less than a year after being signed, he stayed in Los Angeles and landed a music publishing deal in 2005 with American record producers Steve Lindsey and Cameron Strang at Westside Independent.
Bruno came to the conclusion that the best way to further his career was writing and producing hit songs.
—Cameron Strang, about developing Mars’s career.
Lindsey showed Mars and fellow songwriters Brody Brown and Jeff Bhasker (who Mars met through Mike Lynn) the ins and outs of writing pop music and acted as a mentor, helping them to hone their craft. Bhasker explained that Lindsey would “mentor us, and kind of give us lectures as to what a hit pop song is, because you can have talent and music ability, but understanding what makes a hit pop song is a whole other discipline.” Lindsey confessed he “held Mars back for five years while they learned an extensive catalog of hit music.” In a different interview, Brown corroborated the former story. During this time, Mars played cover songs around Los Angeles in a band called Sex Panther, with Bhasker and Eric Hernandez (the former’s brother), who eventually became the drummer of The Hooligans.
