Uptown Funk — Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars (2015)

Why this song

In February 2016 Mars and Ronson played this song at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show, watched by an average of 111.9 million people in the United States alone. Before that it had spent fourteen straight weeks at number one there. You know it whether you chose to or not.

Now open it up. Two chords: D minor and G. They go round and round from start to finish and lead nowhere.

If the harmony never changes, something else is doing the work. That is why this song is on the syllabus.

Historical context

It started as a jam. Bruno Mars and his band, The Hooligans, had been playing a loose groove on the Moonshine Jungle Tour (2013–2014). In a studio session with Mark Ronson and producer Jeff Bhasker, Mars sat at the drums, Bhasker at the keyboard and Ronson on guitar, and they decided to build on it.

Foto: Su-May, CC BY 2.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

That session produced the opening line, "This hit, that ice cold / Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold", and with it the feeling of having something. What it did not produce was a song. Ronson worked on it for seven months, recording in six studios across Los Angeles, London, Memphis, New York, Toronto and Vancouver.

Along the way they spent months on a sung chorus and then threw it away. One version had a hard rock breakdown in the middle. At one point they nearly abandoned the whole thing.

Ronson passed out during a session trying to nail the guitar part. He got it two days later in Toronto, playing it in front of The Hooligans, on take 82. The track went past a hundred takes before it was finished.

Musical characteristics

Put the song on and count out loud: one, two, three, four. Almost nothing you hear lands on your numbers. It arrives just before or just after. That is syncopation: the accent goes where you do not expect it.

For syncopation to register, somebody has to hold the ground. That is the snare drum, hitting on two and four: the backbeat. It is the fixed grid you measure everything else against. Without it there is no syncopation, only mess.

The guitar shows this better than any diagram. The right hand never stops: sixteenth notes all the way through. The left hand squeezes and releases the strings, deciding which of those strums sound and which come out as a dead "chuck". What you hear is not the hits — it is the gaps the muting leaves.

Underneath there are two chords and nothing else. D minor and G, round after round. That kind of back-and-forth on two chords is a vamp. In C they are the second and fifth degrees, a ii–V progression, the same one jazz uses to set up the trip home.

Here the trip home never happens. That G never falls onto C, so the chord that ends up feeling like rest is D minor. The song circles on purpose: if the harmony will not resolve, your attention moves entirely to the rhythm.

The bassline at the start was sung by someone who does not play bass. Philip Lawrence came up with it after a show on the tour, engineer Charles Moniz asked him to sing it, and that opening "doh, doh, doh" is his voice.

And the chorus barely has words. After scrapping the sung chorus, Ronson said they kept just a short horn line instead, following the example of Kool & the Gang. You remember the tune without remembering a single lyric there.

Hard facts: key signature with no sharps and no flats, resting on D minor, 4/4, 115 BPM, 4:30. Form: intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus and outro.

Trivia and curiosities

• The credits list eleven writers. Four of them wrote it. In 2015 the song was re-registered because of its resemblance to The Gap Band's "Oops Up Side Your Head" (1979), and that song's writers took 17% of the publishing royalties. A rhythmic and textural resemblance costs the same as a copied melody.

Foto: Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

• Three more lawsuits followed: the band Collage over "Young Girls" (1983), The Sequence over "Funk You Up" (1979), and Zapp's publisher over "More Bounce to the Ounce" (1980). All three were eventually dropped. When you work inside a whole musical language — late-seventies funk — the line between quoting and copying stops being obvious.

• The first line quotes Trinidad James's "All Gold Everything", which the band had been playing at soundchecks. James and Devon Gallaspy were credited as co-writers before the single even came out: that one they sorted out themselves, with nobody suing anyone.

• Seven months of work, six studios, over a hundred takes and an entire chorus thrown away, for a song that sounds like it fell out of one afternoon. That easiness is the result, not the starting point.

Classroom activities

• Play: D minor and G, two bars each, everybody at once. Guitars and ukuleles keep the right hand moving without ever stopping, muting the strings and releasing them only where the chord belongs. The difficulty is not the chords. It is not stopping your hand.

• Body percussion: half the class claps only on two and four, and never moves off it. The other half comes in half a beat earlier. Then swap. The group holding the backbeat is the one holding the other group up.

• Analyse: count "one and two and three and four and" over the intro with the track playing. Closed question: of the attacks in the sung bassline, how many land on a number and how many land on an "and"?

• Create: take any two chords and write eight bars in which no attack falls on beat one. Steal the procedure, not the song.

Key vocabulary

• Syncopation — síncopa: el acento cae entre los tiempos, no encima
• Backbeat — el golpe de caja en el dos y en el cuatro
• Muting — apagado: tocar sin dejar que la cuerda suene del todo
• Vamp — vamp: dos acordes que se repiten sin llevarte a ninguna parte
• ii–V progression — progresión ii–V (segundo y quinto grados)

Resources

In Year 3 — this song is also used in the unit ¿Cómo sabes por dónde vas en una música que oyes por primera vez?, from the theory and history book.

Where it is explained — this song is studied in the units La sala donde suena esta canción no existe, ¿Por qué no te aburre una canción de un solo acorde?, from the modern music history book.

Official music video

Guitar tutorial — GuitarLessons365. It insists on the thing that matters: the muting counts as much as the chords, and the right hand keeps the sixteenths going.

Bass tutorial — Clay's Bass Lessons, with the tab on screen. This is the line Philip Lawrence sang on the record.

Keyboard tutorial — Marks Piano (PGN Piano), chord version. Two chords and you have the whole song.

Drum tutorial — Liberty Park Music. Starts from the backbeat and stacks the rest on top.

• Full band chart (JamZone, Music Will) — https://jamzone.musicwill.org/songs/inthestyleof-uptownfunk-by-markronson
• Tab — attached below; the button opens it in Songsterr