Bruno Mars Trivia Quiz: How Well Do You Know His Hits?

Trivia Quizzes Music

A family revue in Honolulu put Peter Gene Hernandez on stage before he was old enough for school, and the act that made him locally famous was a knee-high Elvis Presley in a white jumpsuit. The routine reached film in 1992, when he appeared in Honeymoon in Vegas as Little Elvis. The first half of the stage name came from his father, who called the toddler Bruno after the wrestler Bruno Sammartino; the second half arrived later, once the act had moved to Los Angeles and needed something with more lift. His mother had come to Hawaii from the Philippines, his father from a Puerto Rican and Jewish household in Brooklyn, and the revue worked through whatever the tourist rooms wanted that season.

The Smeezingtons was the name attached to a writing and production trio of Mars, Philip Lawrence and Ari Levine, and for a stretch around 2010 the credit turned up on hits that carried somebody else's name on the sleeve. A B.o.B single with Mars on the hook reached number one in the spring of 2010, Billionaire put him on the chorus of a Travie McCoy top five hit that summer, and the Cee Lo Green song that generated the most argued-over radio edit of the year came out of the same partnership, all of it before most listeners knew what he looked like. Doo-Wops & Hooligans, his own debut album, followed in October 2010 and produced a number one ballad and Grenade, and the same trio wrote and produced most of it in a room rather than across a file server.

The clearest picture of what he does on stage came in February 2014 at MetLife Stadium, where the Super Bowl halftime slot opened on Mars behind a drum kit in a gold jacket, playing a break before the horn section came in. The Red Hot Chili Peppers joined halfway. The broadcast drew an audience reported above 110 million, the largest for a halftime performance at that point, and he was invited back two years later to share the stage with Coldplay and Beyonce. His touring band, the Hooligans, plays the arrangements live and doubles as the choreography, which is rarer at that scale than the shows make it look.

24K Magic, released in 2016, narrowed the influences down to a specific stretch of late seventies and early nineties R&B and stayed there for nine tracks, with the drum programming, the talkbox and the vocal stacking all matched to period technique rather than approximated. The record won every category it was nominated in at the 2018 Grammy Awards, taking album of the year, record of the year for the title track and song of the year for That's What I Like, along with three awards in the R&B categories.

Uptown Funk, cut with Mark Ronson and released at the end of 2014, held number one on the Hot 100 for fourteen weeks and took record of the year. Silk Sonic, the project he built with Anderson .Paak and introduced with Bootsy Collins narrating, went further back still, and Leave the Door Open won both record and song of the year in 2022. Two duets in 2024, one with Lady Gaga and one with Rose of Blackpink, put him at the top of the global streaming charts again without a solo album behind them. Scroll past the last question for the full answer key.