The Singles Jukebox

That’s what we like…?

[Video]
[6.27]

Dorian Sinclair: So I’ve done my time as a hardcore musical theatre fan, and in a musical theatre context “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” works very well — it’s got momentum, it packs in a ton of exposition very efficiently, and it does a good job of musically characterizing each of the singers who participate. The things that make a good musical theatre number, though, often don’t translate very well to a single: when removed from its context, “Bruno” is confusing, filled with seeming non-sequiturs and disparate musical styles. Considered as a song on its own, it fails for all the same reasons it succeeds within Encanto.
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Jessica Doyle: I’m a little surprised this has become the breakout song, partly because it didn’t impress me as much as “Surface Pressure” did and partly because it’s mostly plot, and plot is not Encanto‘s strong point. (It’s as if “Non-Stop” became the song everyone knew from Hamilton, and Encanto doesn’t have Hamilton‘s history crutch, so for a lot of people “Married in a hurricane” makes much less acontextual sense than “I was chosen for the Constitutional Convention!”) Then again, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is 95 percent the secondary characters, and the secondary characters are far and away Encanto‘s strong point; I’m resisting the temptation to turn this blurb into 2,000 words of speculation about Madrigal family dynamics involving Pepa. So I’m not displeased, but do see the movie. Or at least (if you don’t mind spoilers) this.
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Alex Clifton: My favourite bit in all of Hamilton comes at the end of Act I, during “Non-Stop.” After the longest number in the musical, everyone chimes in singing their themes that have been established during the first act. It makes me tear up every time because the melodies fit so well together, like watching a puzzle come together with its last few pieces. Miranda excels at this kind of polyphony and “Bruno” is no exception — once everyone begins singing their own pieces, I can’t help but sit back in awe. I don’t think modern pop music has enough contrapuntal stuff (bring back the ’90s boy-band chorus!!! It happened all the time there) so it’s really lovely to hear it here. 
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Katie Gill: Look, if any song was gonna get popular from Encanto, it’s this one. It’s easily the best song out of the film — which isn’t saying much because the rest of the songs range from “absolutely forgettable” to “Lin Manuel Miranda at his absolute worst.” (Hot take: “Surface Pressure” sucks.) That’s probably the reason why it went viral in the first place: theater kids have been starved of new media for a while and will happily launch onto the first halfway decent offering, ready to run it into the ground at the slightest provocation. But if we’re talking about oddities and novelties on the Billboard charts, this is more “sea shanties” than “Let It Go” or “Gangnam Style.” It’s fun! It’s cute! Nobody’s gonna be talking about it in a month.
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Andy Hutchins: Does it work as a song? Sure. Does it work well outside the context of Encanto, which I have not seen but which seems to have a plot I could largely grasp from a trailer and the little writing about it I’ve encountered? Not quite. Unmoored from any understanding of who Bruno is — other than someone both in everyone’s fears and on everyone’s lips — I find the story being told here is recognizable in its rough shape (he’s a witch!) but inscrutable when it comes to detail (why is someone happy about a witch’s curse?). “Let It Go” or “My Shot” this is not, though that sort of universality is not what this is aimed at in the first place. But the melody’s spine is straight enough for salsa and cha cha — like Marc Anthony’s “I Need to Know,” with which “Bruno” shares more than a bit of DNA — and it is a fertile enough soil that a whisper-rap verse that sounds like Cardi B channeling the Ying Yang Twins and a couple of two-speaker verses can all coexist in this flower bed. It’s hard to listen to this for a first or fifth time and be bored, and a 25th time for a parent probably still features a dramatic cameo for “It was our WEDDING DAY” or “You telling this story or am I?” that the kiddos will adore during car trips. Even if the EGOT pursuer behind it all does not always sock dingers, churning unexpected singles will keep a batting average incredibly high.
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Nortey Dowuona: “I’m sorry, my fellow writers, go on.”
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Crystal Leww: In a different context, someone recently described Hamilton (and by extension, Lin Manuel Miranda) as being “obviously talented but somehow perpetually cloying and kitschy.” “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is technically super impressive, with ten parts that needed to come together in a four minute song that is also telling a story. But unfortunately, it is also super annoying. 
[3]

Alfred Soto: It doesn’t irritate me like many Miranda compositions, nor does it scatter saccharine like fertilizer. The ersatz “Latin” rhythm provide momentum. A bit of alright.
[6]

Rodrigo Pasta: Highly interesting that this became the viral smash off of Encanto, considering that, were this a Broadway musical, its ensemble nature would fit it better as the closing of Act I. Partially, it might be the defect of other songs in the movie: lately, the musical numbers for the Disney protagonists — in this case, Mirabel, voiced by Stephanie Beatriz — tend to be the least interesting and most formulaic of the bunch. In the case of Encanto in particular, Lin-Manuel Miranda seemed much more eager to give stronger, more complex compositions to side characters, a good thing since there are many of them (“What Else Can I Do” and especially “Surface Pressure” clearly surpass Mirabel’s leading tunes). But “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is different: a villain song, sung not by the villain, that very clearly portrays a wrong depiction of him, until we realize we’re not dealing with a villain at all. The song in that sense is a slow crescendo that passes the accuracy of Bruno’s story from the closest generation to the furthest one, and each person depicts him wrong in the best ways possible. From Pepa’s ruined wedding day (aided by her wonderful husband, great back-and-forth of behalf of Mauro Castillo) to Camilo’s exaggerated depiction, as the rhythm suddenly becomes incredibly lethargic — “rrrats along his back” and the percussion rattles along like a monster — to the paranoid citizens that misread everything. The finest moment by far is the seemingly angelic prophecy of Isabela, with delicate strings that never fully enter, as if the song knew it was all too pristine. It’s matched with the dreadful prophecy of Dolores, which clashes horribly with her cousin’s (a little “Helpless”/”Satisfied” situation here), and is beautifully sung and accompanied by music that now can’t stay behind. Once that occurs, the walls finally seem to close in with a brief section that denotes fleeting urgency as the rest of the day goes on. Lin-Manuel’s technique of piling storylines up still doesn’t fail him! What does fail him is the poor production in the final section, which, since it wants to pile up all melodic lines together, hides them all and nothing resurfaces at the right moment; we could use Alex Lacamoire around. An oddity for a Disney hit, but if we’re still rightfully establishing Lin-Manuel Miranda as one of the finest musical compositions of the century, it only makes sense the rarities are what stand tall for the listeners.
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Katherine St Asaph: Lacking the seething hatred for Disney that seems mandatory for writers in 2022, I quite liked this. Inevitably for an ensemble song, it suffers a bit from being severed from its video ensemble — it makes sense it was buoyed by TikTok, land of karaoke, fandom and other extramusical narratives. I can’t hear Dolores’s bridge without missing the crisp footsteps. Like all of Miranda’s work, the construction is ingenious in a studied way — the whole thing builds up to a “Tonight“/”One Day More” finale of simultaneous omnicounterpoint. Like so much of modern musical theater, the vocals get thinner and thinner; whatever Isabela does is hardly singing. But in terms of doing its job — making me want to actually see Encanto — it did its job better than any Disney-to-chart escapee in recent memory.
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Lauren Gilbert: Judging by the number of times I’ve woken up this week with my brain going “bruno-no-no-no,” LMM did his job here.
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