Bottle-popping lyrics aside, one hesitates to call “Uptown Funk!” a
club record per se. I mean, maybe a club in 1981. Whereas the chilly months usually bring us more
cutting-edge,
up-to-the-minute beats, with this latest hit, Ronson and Mars have gone all the way retro. The song is a brazen return to the electro-funk of the early ’80s, a fertile, transitional moment when black artists grafted brassy ’70s R&B to New Wave synthesizers. So dense are the song’s allusions that you could strip it for vintage parts, like
a Cuban car. It contains just one modern borrowing, the “Don’t believe me, just watch” refrain taken directly from Atlanta rapper Trinidad James’ 2013 R&B/Hip-Hop chart hit
“All Gold Everything,” a bite so overt that Ronson & co. properly include James in the songwriting credits. But that’s just the most litigable interpolation:
This Billboard dissection of the song’s forbears by radio expert Sean Ross lists more than a dozen antecedents, and if you know even a little about this period of R&B the borrowings will seem uncanny.
For instance: Isn’t the chant “Up-town/ Funk you up/ Uptown funk you up” a steal from the Gap Band? Yes, cross-pollinated with some early Sugar Hill Records. That stomping party-train beat—doesn’t it have the stank of post-disco James Brown? You know it, and Bruno’s lyric “Gotta kiss myself, I’m so pretty” also owes something to the Godfather of Soul. How about those gurgling, Vocoderized vocal sounds—where have you heard them before? On classic funk records by Zapp’s Roger Troutman (as well as German synth-funkster George Kranz). Didn’t Prince protégés Morris Day and the Time patent that preening-vocal-plus-multi-dude-chorus approach? You know what time it is. And those syncopated horns—didn’t Rick James make his bones with that sound? What did the five fingers say to the face?
Here’s the thing about the roughly 35-year-old records I cited above: All were huge R&B hits, but none were big pop hits. That even includes Rick James: His singles were black-radio smashes but all failed to reach the Hot 100’s Top 10. Yes, even “Super Freak” (No. 16, 1981; the
1990 M.C. Hammer hit that
sampled “Freak”
did better than that). As Ross notes in
Billboard, the turn of the ’80s was a particularly segregated time on the radio. The “disco backlash,” he writes, “effectively kept all types of black music, not just disco, off of Top 40 [radio] for three years, beginning in fall 1979.” And “many other developments in R&B music—the beginnings of rap, the return of disco to its R&B roots, the emergence of a second generation of funk artists, many of them influenced by new wave—happened mostly off of Top 40’s radar.”
This is why, ever since “Uptown” dropped two months ago, I’ve found it ironic to see so many bloggers, critics, and friends of mine calling it a ready-made smash. Sure, it sounds like an instantly familiar chart-topper to us
now. But “Uptown Funk!” is to vintage electro-R&B in 2015 what
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” or
“Basket Case” were in the early ’90s to vintage punk: a catch-up. It’s a penance by America for not making an irresistible style the pop success it deserved to be the first time around. There’s been a lot of that in the Hot 100’s penthouse lately. Ten months after Pharrell took Impressions-style soul
all the way to No. 1, and four months after Meghan Trainor
did the same with Doris Day girl-group pop, one wonders what mothballed music style we will revive next.
Two-tone ska?
Prog-rock?
Baroque pop? (Personally I’m pulling for
doomy goth-dance.)
And if there’s one producer you might have predicted would retrofit an old style for modern airplay, it’s Mark Ronson, the
nattily dressed 39-year-old Brit whose
celebrated production transformed the late Amy Winehouse from a
talented hip-hop-soul singer into the
premier postmodern revivalist of her day. His 2008 Producer of the Year Grammy honored an exceptionally successful year in which he manned the boards for hits not only from Winehouse but also
Lily Allen and
himself. That year could well have been a fluke, and Ronson has earned his share of
criticism as a Lenny Kravitz–style necromancer—whether he’s hiring Sharon Jones’ backing band the Dap-Kings to craft
letter-perfect ’60s soul recreations or
teaming with Duran Duran to help them meticulously reconstruct the sound of their
Rio-era selves. But Ronson has outlasted his Grammy moment and proved himself a
hard-working and durable studio polymath, facile in range of styles, even if many of those styles are as old as he is.
What was
not predictable, in any case, was Ronson scoring a chart-topping U.S. hit. In England he’s a near–household name, having scored a half-dozen Top 40 hits with a range of singers. (Ronson’s 2007 cover of the Zutons’
“Valerie,” fronted by Winehouse, is basically a U.K. dancefloor classic at this point; and his pop-and-B reworking of
“Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before,” sung by Daniel Merriweather, wound up the highest-charting version of a Smiths song in U.K. history.) In America, though, despite that Grammy win, Ronson was largely known only by attentive pop fans and music industry followers. His production on tracks like “Locked Out of Heaven” and Winehouse’s smash
“Rehab” brought him to the Hot 100 as a fine-print credit, but he’d never touched the chart as an artist before. He doesn’t sing or rap like fellow producer–artist Pharrell Williams, but Ronson has now matched Williams’s
improbable feat last year with “Happy,” scoring a chart-topper near his 40th birthday—and like Pharrell with last year’s
GIRL, Ronson is dropping his new album,
Uptown Special, which arrives this week, with a No. 1 hit already on it.
