On Bruno Mars
Seren Sensei throws down the gauntlet on Bruno Mars, a creature whose many constructions amount to little more than a sickly candy wedged in the throat. An excerpt from herRiot Material essay is below:
Bruno Mars is an agent of the system of white supremacy. There. I said it.
More pointedly, Mars is representative of a system that smudges out Black people, specifically Black Americans, while white and non-Black persons of color benefit from anti-Black racism and white supremacy. If Mars were white, we — the Black community — would not be okay with it. Yet despite the fact that he is not white, that still does not make him Black, and it in no way indicates that he is not benefitting from anti-Black racism as a non-Black person of color. Rather, the stark and barefaced opposite is true.
Per his handlers, Mars was remolded from doing ukulele pop music like “The Lazy Song” and saccharine hits like “Grenade,” to wearing backwards caps and dookie chains talking about “dripping in finesse.” He has moved from one traditional Black American genre to another traditional Black American genre like some kind of amorphic parasite, changing his image in wholesale fashion as he scuttles along — from zoot suits and suspenders and permed conks when he was in his du-wop/Frankie Lymon phase, to dressing up like Morris Day and the Time impersonating Prince in his funk phase, to wearing Kross Kolor fits and a fake afro in his 80s/90s phase…
Read the rest of this piece at Riot Material magazine: http://www.riotmaterial.com/on-bruno-mars/
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