“This song comes from love and if you can’t hear it, I don’t know what to say to you,” he added.
Mars – son of a Filipino mother and half Puerto Rican, half Jewish father Ashkenazi – went on to explain that musicians learn from artists who came before them and compares the use of these artists as inspiration to athletes who use NBA legend Michael Jordan as a model for their athletic careers.
In 2018, writer and activist Seren Sensei said in a video clip that Mars “increases its racial ambiguity to cross genders”.
“What Bruno Mars does is to take a pre-existing job and he completely, word for word, recreates it, extrapolates it,” said Sensei. “He doesn’t create it, he doesn’t improve it, he doesn’t make it better.”
The presenter of the interview Charlamagne tha God pressured Mars to see if these criticisms would affect him.
“It comes with the show,” said Mars. “There is real merit in what people are saying about black artists not getting their flowers.”
Mars shared that he wears his heart on his sleeve and hopes that other artists will be inspired by his work in the same way that he was inspired by others.
“I hope that later in the future, there will be a band taking what we did and changing, and going crazy, and putting their own twist on it – because if they don’t, then what is the point of us doing this?”
CNN’s Deena Zaru contributed to this report.