Number Ones - Bruno Mars 'Just The Way You Are'

The seventh installment of a recurring feature where we listen to and analyse the latest number one Australian single so you don’t have to.

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Bruno Mars
'Just The Way You Are'
Elektra/Warner

This week we have a new #1, Bruno Mars’ 'Just The Way You Are' (no, it’s not a Billy Joel cover), which had been threatening to get there for several weeks now. It knocks Pink’s paean to celebration 'Raise Your Glass' from the top after only a week. It is Mars’ first #1 single, but he also co-wrote and sang on that Travie McCoy’s 'Billionnaire', and he and his production team, the Smeezingtons, co-wrote and produced Cee-Lo’s 'F U', both of which got in the top 10 and are still in the charts.


Bruno Mars 'Just The Way You Are'

In the six months or so that I’ve been doing this Number Ones feature for The Vine, the amount of super-saccharine songs to have gotten to #1 has been surprisingly low. We’ve had a song about wanting to go out and celebrate ('Raise Your Glass'), a song about feeling good at a club (Taio Cruz's 'Dynamite'), a song about trying to pick up on the dancefloor (Usher's 'OMG'), a song about hoping that the guy you picked up on the dancefloor will be good in bed (Rihanna's 'The Only Girl'), two songs about failing relationships (Brian McFadden's 'Just Say So' and Eminem/Rihanna collaboration 'Love The Way You Lie'), and a celebration of the qualities of girls from a particular US region (Katy Perry's 'California Gurls'). But there’s not much in the way of the sweet lovey-dovey sentiment you associate with chart pop here. Instead, the teenage girls who are the likely target market for these songs come off as a slightly cynical bunch who quite like partying, and who want to have good sex, possibly in California.

'Just The Way You Are', on the other hand, is so sweet that government health organizations should seriously be checking if it causes diabetes. The song positively radiates sweetness. In the song’s video, Bruno Mars comes across completely earnestly, flashing big puppy dog eyes and a shy grin at a pretty girl:



It’s a song that not only features the line “She’s so beautiful, and I tell her every day” but also the chorus hook “And you’re amazing just the way you are”. And believe me, these sweet nothings are just the tip of the iceberg. Mars also sings these lyrics with a studied sweetness - it would be very easy to sing this stuff with a smirk, or as a transparent plea for attention, but he mostly avoids anything remotely ironic, as well as avoiding vocal gymnastics and AutoTuned synthetic sounds on his voice. Mars really is doing everything within his power to sound sincere. He actually resembles Australia’s Guy Sebastian in a bunch of ways; the hat, the soul vocals in a higher range that evoke Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder.

The song is effective – the repeated “Her hair, her hair” lines at the start of the verses are catchy, and the steeply rising melody at the start of the chorus introduces a little tension before defusing it with the (also catchy) tag of the chorus, which is simple and effective as a hook. It’s also a song that, in all fairness, could have been a hit for Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, if it were given the kind of blue-eyed soul arrangement that the Smeezingtons gave to Cee-Lo’s current #7 hit, 'F U'. It has the right kind of doo-wop progression and the right kind of genial vaguely soulful feel. Instead of the blue eyed soul arrangement I want it to have, though, this recording has a fairly straightforward backing track that sounds surprisingly dated, with an insistent Keane-ish piano riff running through the song, and some anonymous funk beats that evoke the commercial pop of the late 1990s. 

And yes, Mars has to be aware of piano man Billy Joel’s tune with the same title, in the same way that Katy Perry was very aware of the Beach Boys’ 'California Girls'. After all, a few scenes in the video even portray Mars sitting behind an upright piano, and that’s an unusual enough thing in synth-obsessed chart pop that you suspect it’s a tip of his rakishly-angled hat. But Joel’s 'Just The Way You Are' is a little more ambiguous than Mars’ song, more aware of the ups and downs that characterise relationships:


Billy Joel 'Just The Way You Are'

Where Joel sings “I want you just the way you are”, he was not suggesting that his wife (who he wrote the song about, and who he later divorced) was literally perfect; he was instead suggesting that he loved her for who she was. Mars is having none of that - he wants the object of his affection just the way she is because she’s perfect. This, I suspect, is a more unrealistic sentiment than Billy Joel’s – sooner or later Mars will have to find out that she farts in bed. 

But at the same time, the target market here would dearly love to believe that someone thought they were perfect – not just someone whose faults you don’t mind, but someone who is absolutely perfect. And so on that level, perhaps Mars’ tune works better than Joel’s. Much of the song is almost devoted to counteracting the low self-esteem the girl in question has about her appearance. But a large proportion of women have self-esteem issues about their appearance, after all, what with the emphasis that society puts upon it. Even the kind of girl who looks like a model (such as the actress in the video clip) feels insecure about her appearance – there’s always someone prettier than you, after all.

And so I don’t doubt that there are thousands of girls hanging off Mars’ every word right now, thinking he’s dreamy and hoping that, one day, someone will sing those lyrics to her, the same way that girls in the 1990s did to the Backstreet Boys’ sentiments in 'As Long As You Love Me' or to John Mayer’s 'Your Body Is A Wonderland'. This kind of sentiment is very old in pop music, of course. As far back as 1937, Fred Astaire had a hit with a Gershwin song called 'You Can’t Take That Away From Me', a similar list-of-things-I-love-about-you kind of song:


Fred Astaire 'You Can't Take That Away From Me'

Gerswhin's lyric contains lines like “The way you wear your hat” and “The way your smile just beams”, which could fit pretty comfortably in Bruno Mars’ song. When Fred Astaire sings the song to Ginger Rogers in the movie, he even does similar puppy dog eyes and shy grins to Mars.

But to my ears, Mars' 'Just The Way You Are' sounds too calculated and measured to be real. He probably doesn’t actually believe this stuff. After all, the kind of person who could put together a deliberately calculated universalised song like 'Just The Way You Are' is probably a cynical bastard (and he is the same cynical bastard who co-wrote and produced 'F U', after all). I’ve heard plenty of sincere love songs written by people I know for their loved ones, and they sound different to 'Just The Way You Are'. These songs are more personal, they have more details and quirks – they’re full of little in-jokes, references to things they’ve done, times they’ve shared, places they’ve been. On 'Just The Way You Are', Bruno Mars literally could be singing to almost anybody. This lets anybody use the song for their own purposes  – there’s no inconvenient wrong details when you sing it to the girl you want to be your girlfriend.

But even one tiny unique detail in the song about the girl would have made this song seem so much more real. After all, Billy Joel’s song has the line about how he doesn’t want the clever conversation she’s incapable of, and 'Can’t Take That Away From Me' has a line about how he likes how she sings off key. And so perhaps Bruno Mars’ 'Just The Way You Are' would be so much more believable had he mentioned the way she makes lasagne, or the way she posts smartarse comments on pictures on Facebook.