If your Filipino-American family is anything like mine, then there was only one topic of conversation at this year’s hotly anticipated Thanksgiving dinner — the newest Bruno Mars album.

Having been released just a week before the holiday, Bruno Mars’ third full-length album, 24K Magic, was the metaphorical centerpiece of the dinner table. Somehow, everyone — even my technologically-challenged older relatives — had heard the album in its entirety and loved it. It played on shuffle alongside premature Christmas songs throughout the duration of the party, which ended with my entire family gathered around the TV, watching his 60 Minutes feature and recent live performances as if someone from our own family was up there on screen, performing at the Super Bowl alongside Beyoncé or opening up the American Music Awards.

Family members who showed no prior interest in popular music or contemporary American culture were spitting Bruno Mars facts and tidbits like they were common knowledge, while my little cousins recommended their favorite Bruno Mars cover artists on YouTube. One eager aunt suggested that we all go see him in concert together, then laughed at the impossibility of buying a block of 20-odd concert seats for the already nearly sold-out shows in San Jose and Sacramento. Even my friends from high school could not stop talking about 24K Magic, mentioning that they had liked Bruno Mars before, but never liked his music as much as they did right now.

The buzz surrounding the album was infectious. My Twitter feed was full of people quoting lyrics and citing their favorite songs, and my dad had Mars’ AMAs performance on loop in our living room for days. And while the patronage of Filipino artists is extremely common, if not heightened, in the Filipino community (like the time I once saw an older Filipina woman at Walmart buying 25 copies of Journey’s Revelation after Arnel Pineda replaced Steve Perry as the band’s lead singer), I hadn’t seen this kind of collective support for a Filipino icon across all age groups since the height of Manny Pacquiao’s career.

So I thought to myself: Is it possible that Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic is the great equalizer for the generation gaps that often plague Filipino-American families? Why is this bite-sized, funk-filled album bringing Filipino-Americans together like a post-Mass trip to the grocery store?

Nostalgia curator

The most obvious general appeal of 24K Magic is nostalgia. Rolling Stone praised the album for being “a shining moment for Bruno Mars the producer, arranger and nostalgia curator,” while Billboard.com published a track-by-track album listening guide, pairing each song with its supposed past-pop counterpart.

Like most nostalgia, however, the past we harken back to is a vague, fuzzy notion of the unspecific “past,” a mish-mash of time periods that all seem to blend together without pin-pointing a specific moment in time. Nostalgia is a feeling of longing for the past, and 24K Magic does a great job of making us long for “good ol’ days.” But if Filipino-Americans of all ages — from our titas and titos to our kuyas and ates — are nostalgic of the past that 24K Magic reminds them of, then what past are we thinking of?

Mars himself has directly stated that the album was heavily influenced by the ’90s songs he “was singing to get the girls in school, the songs that the girls like, what we were dancing to as children.” These influences, however, run through a much longer timeline, which explains the cross-generational appeal.

There’s the late ’70s vibe of the Commodores in “Straight Up & Down.” The laid-back ’80s Michael Jackson rhythm-heavy beat of “Rock with You” and “The Way You Make Me Feel” is all over the verses of “Chunky.” The opening beats of “Finesse” sound like a polished-up version of Boyz II Men’s ’90s hit, “Motown Philly.” And that Boyz II Men influence comes back in Mars’ ballads (“Versace On the Floor” and “Too Good to Say Goodbye”), but this time combined with that quintessential ’80s synthesizer sound and dramatic post-bridge key change that’s found in the ballads of Luther Vandross, Peabo Bryson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder and pretty much any karaoke ballad that you would find on your family’s Magic Mic. The album even has elements of nostalgia for the MySpace generation, riding the tailored coattails of Justin Timberlake’s suave post-*NSYNC career, with some 8701-era Usher and pre-Trapped in the Closet R. Kelly coating the whole album like a layer of smooth, silky peanut butter.

For me and a lot of my Filipino-American friends whose parents immigrated from the Philippines, this was music we grew up listening to, introduced to us by different family members at different stages of our lives. My parents were ’80s buffs (and huge fans of the synthesizer), but their older siblings praised Elvis Presley (who Bruno Mars began his career by impersonating.) My older cousins, who are now Mars’ age, love that same ’90s R&B vibe that Mars was chasing on this record, and I hear all of these influences come together with every repeat-listen of 24K Magic. With this album, Mars has curated nostalgic elements that speak both to the general public and to Filipino-Americans, like himself, who grew up seeped in this massive mixtape of cross-generational musical influences.