13 January 2011
Content warning: self-harm
It’s not just our (hopefully) more enlightened sensibilities – already in 2011 Bruno Mars’ chorus litany of angsty, performative self-harm came across as overwrought and crass, even by the shirt-rending benchmarks of ’90s US R&B balladry and the asinine skidmarks of ’00s US hip-hop-diluting chart hits. And his gripe is that the party of the second part, about whom he’s quite bitter and spiteful in the verses, won’t do likewise for him! Yeah, I wonder why that is. A real head-scratcher there, Bruno.
Anyway, the crassness and misogyny of ‘Grenade’ shows us that decades aren’t dividers and some of the more unpleasant ’00s pop-cultural tropes were being carried into the ’10s. The piano-pulling video is gimmicky at first and then descends into plain old tastelessness. Think of ‘Grenade’ as the Laurel & Hardy piano-pushing sketch remade by The Black Eyed Peas.
