If you look into the mirror and see Bruno Mars, break it, I say.
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[4.00]
Jonathan Bogart: I just like listening to Lil Wayne so much that I’m more willing to tolerate gloopy introspection from him than from almost any other top-level rapper; but dragging Bruno Mars into it isn’t playing fair. There’s gloopy introspection, and then there’s nauseating self-indulgence. Bruno pretty much only traffics in the latter.
[5]
Anthony Easton: Weirdly soft, like that trick where whispering in a crowded room gets you attention quicker than shouting, except there is nothing here worthy of one’s attention. It’s not that it’s boring, or any of the other charges that excuse this lack of attention; it has an absence, and an absence that might be worth picking up if you thought it might be signifying something.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Bruno’s the best part here, stepping wide of the Disney-DVD chorus of “Lighters” in favor of a pop-Gothic solemnity. He jumps to notes like he’s been hoisted by his suspenders, but I find the strain endearing. Weezy just deploys a series of dubious reveals and half-hearted puns. Sorry to pick nits, but his MJ footnote is gonna battle with Nicki’s “Last name is Zolanski/No relation to Roman Polanski” for 2012’s most unnecessary spelling-out of a reference. Lovers of empire take note: he seems to have exited his rococo period and shot straight into classical crossover.
[4]
Alfred Soto: When he sees his mom, dad, and the person he is and hates in the mirror, she doesn’t reassure him in the dulcet tones of Kelly Rowland — he belches from the depths of his soul in the adenoidal voice of Bruno Mars. Too serious to be camp.
[2]
John Seroff: It wasn’t that long ago that Wayne gave a damn — remember? Not that his lyrics were consistently brilliant (though they sometimes were) but there was a respectable passion for the word, a hunger that read burning and real. Now we get a half-baked meditation on narcissism swept up in faux Boadicea, the same remedial A/A, B/B, C/C rhyme scheme you used for the front page of your best friend’s yearbook and Bruno Fucking Mars. The emotion is false, the empathy is canned, the inspiration is baldly mercantile. Depressed fifteen year olds deserve better than this.
[3]
Iain Mew: “Mirror” deftly handles its navel-gazing, with Wayne adding enough humor and pride to balance out its potentially overbearing seriousness. Getting a guest singer to do something at all narratively interesting for once (e.g. playing his reflection) is a clever move too, even if the meta shout-outs slightly spoil the effect. It helps that I’ve been waiting for Bruno Mars to do something this Gothic since “Grenade.”
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Whinging para-para-paradise…
[3]