Bruno Mars – That’s What I Like

It was finished, and it was a ballad. Then Bruno Mars rejected every beat he couldn’t dance to.

In a Burbank studio in the summer of 2016, Bruno Mars was dancing while four producers changed the drums underneath him. Each time a chord or a hit landed somewhere his body could not follow, he stopped, and they tried something else. The song they were working on already existed. Mars had a complete demo of That’s What I Like, fully written and produced, and by the account of one of the men in the room it sounded like a ballad. He told them it was missing a bounce.

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The four were the Stereotypes: Jonathan Yip, Ray Romulus, Jeremy Reeves and Ray McCullough II. They had known Mars since 2007, before the record deal, and had drifted out of his orbit once the hits started. In 2015 Yip sent him beats for the album he was making, then more beats, and heard nothing. In June 2016 he tried again, and this time Mars needed help. The team finished the title track of 24K Magic with him, and he handed them two more problems. This was one. Trap-style drum programming gave a slow song a double-time feel, which was the bounce he had been asking for. Then they took the rest apart as well, writing new chords, a new pre-chorus and a new bridge. James Fauntleroy came in on the writing, the first time Mars had asked him. The finished song carries eight names.

What all that labor produced sounds like no labor at all, and that was the point. The lyric is a list of treats offered to a lover, from champagne to a Manhattan condo, with a cook named Julio carried over from Uptown Funk. Mars said the album was meant to make people feel fabulous. Not every critic was charmed. Slant complained that the words seemed “written with a dollar store’s rhyming dictionary.” Mars had doubts of his own, though not about the rhymes. He told CBS he had to live with the song for more than a year before he trusted it.

The Long Way to No.1

Atlantic released 24K Magic in November 2016 and had a different second single in mind, Versace on the Floor. The label changed course and sent That’s What I Like to radio on January 30, 2017. Mars sang it at the Grammy Awards on February 12, and Billboard’s Hot 100 had it in the Top 10 soon after. Then it stalled, spending four weeks at No.2 behind Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You. A package of remixes arrived on April 21, and in May, in its fifteenth week, the Hot 100 ranked it No.1, his seventh. It stayed in the Top 10 for twenty-eight weeks, Billboard placed it third for the year, the R&B Songs chart kept it on top for twenty weeks, and the RIAA has certified it diamond.

One Camera, Half Speed

The video was made by the same method of subtraction. Mars and co-director Jonathan Lia had a more elaborate idea, shot a test, disliked it, and cut the plan down to a single light and a plain backdrop. Mars and Phil Tayag had worked out the choreography in advance so the drawings could be planned around it. The camera never moves and never cuts. Lia filmed one long take with the song playing at half speed, then doubled the footage, which is why Mars’s movements have that slightly unreal snap. Hand-drawn animations, some added afterward by the studio GenPop, act out the lyric around him. On March 1, 2017, Mars tweeted that he had just finished shooting, was going to edit it and take a bubble bath, and would have it out in two hours. It appeared that day. By October 2025 it had passed 2.4 billion views.

On January 28, 2018, the Recording Academy gave the song three Grammys, for Song of the Year, Best R&B Song and Best R&B Performance, on a night when Mars won six. The top award divided people, because a song about room service had beaten heavier material. The objection misreads what was being honored. Nothing about this record is casual. It is a ballad that was dismantled and rebuilt by a man who would not accept a single bar he could not dance to, and the ease everyone hears in it is the most carefully made thing about it.