How to explain the popularity of "Uptown Funk"?

Man, saying that this sound hasn't been in a number one hit before this was way off the mark, I was way wrong. It was late at night, I was tired. Yeah, it also sounds like Calvin Harris, or something like Starships - which I've also always thought of as EDM-like. The new thing, for me, is the way the retro seventies sound is accented by these pop-EDM signifiers, and I love that, and think it's very k-pop like. Saying it's more like Wild Cherry misses the point, imo.

American pop is often eiter tasteful or -less. This mix of things I don't often see.

they werent making songs like uptown funk in the 70s - this is the 80s after get lucky's 70s, like 1985 after daft punks 1978

Eh, I think this and "Get Lucky," contemporary production flourishes aside, are straight up 1979/1980.

I find it awesome that this is peaking right after the "Blurred Lines" verdict, given how closely it approximates the "feel" of so many of the above.

it peaked in the UK in the first half of january, now we're back to ellie goulding and sam smith for the rest of the year

Man, my kids always want me to switch the Sirius station to Venus, which I think bills itself as "rhythmic pop," and it is always Ellie Goulding, or Clavin Harris or Zedd and someone.

I feel like this article is a pretty comprehensive list of various comparisons that this song gets in term of 80s funk songs:
http://www.billboard.com/articles/6327615/sugarhill-gang-to-trinidad-james-influences-mark-ronson-bruno-mars-uptown

And yeah the first two things I thought of when I first heard this song were Roger's So Ruff So Tuff and George Kranz's Din Daa Daa.

Cool. That would make a fun party mix.

I find it awesome that this is peaking right after the "Blurred Lines" verdict, given how closely it approximates the "feel" of so many of the above.

yeah, they're lucky it doesn't sound like one specific song otherwise it would have been the end for them !

Ask most people to name a Midnight Star song and you'll likely get the No. 81 "No Parking (On The Dance Floor)" long before the No. 18 “Operator.”

uhhh wtf this is "Freak-A-Zoid" duh

Good history lesson in that Billboard piece regarding how many African-american acts did not get crossover pop airplay from late 70s through 1983 or so.

yeah, nice article and pretty good party mix indeed !

That billboard article is great and furthers the point that this song must have been made reading 'the manual' for a number one hit.

The groove is one way and zapp, the chorus gap band and trinidad and elements from those other songs mentioned here and there. Only instead of going for top hits from the past they dug a little more but the point the manual makes when making a pop hit and not worrying about writing it yourself stands.

Good history lesson in that Billboard piece regarding how many African-american acts did not get crossover pop airplay from late 70s through 1983 or so.

I blame MTV.

But the first two years of what they're calling a disco backlash happened before MTV even existed and MTV wasn't widely available until about 1983, at which point they did play some of those crossover hits the article mentions ("Little Red Corvette," "Beat It"...) Not that they couldn't have done better (a lot better) vis a vis black music. There was also at the time MTV's rival "Night Tracks" on TBS that was equally available - though not 24/7 - which did play black music.

You should copyright the "How to explain the popularity of _________?" wording in the thread title. I've got a whole bunch of them.

"It’s a penance by America for not making an irresistible style the pop success it deserved to be the first time around."

this slate quote is crazy! it sounds like half the hit pop songs of the 80's! it sounds exactly like the 80's. like eerily so. in the 80's video they would have had a dog in sunglasses and at the end of the video the dog would drive away with the model in the sports car and everyone in the video would look at the car driving away and go WHUUUHHH????

he'd have a point re the modest chart placings of zapp, gap band etc if people didn't also think this sounded like "living in america" and "walk the dinosaur"

see, what i like about it is that it absolutely sounds like all of these different songs, but not really like any of them. like at first glance it's a straight homage to either of those latter two songs, but listening to those, actually neither of those late-80s songs is as fat and electro-dirty and loud as zapp or "atomic dog" or the other turn-of-the-80s things being invoked here, or "uptown funk."

so it's clearly a really loving celebration of all this music, and maybe part of what it does is redeem those earlier sounds (clearly still MUCH beloved on "older folks" radio as mentioned above) by way of those later ones that kinda-sorta but didn't quite carry them over to the mainstream. i dunno, i think it's cool. i know jack shit about bruno mars's upbringing or w/e but i'm kinda imagining it like a tribute to his parents' music.... like what he heard around the house growing up. i guess that makes it like vampire weekend and graceland or something. or maybe not - all the sounds in the song (and the vintage black male fashions in the video) were pretty much totally disappeared from the wider landscape by the time he was six years old, if not from other outlets including hypothetical parents' stereos.

so sure, potentially it's more arch and revivalist, a brian setzer deal as noted above - but it's kinda better than brian setzer. i mean it's a cool song. it would have been a hit back then too IMO. whereas it's hard to imagine "stray cat strut" or "jump jive & wail" actually competing with the hitmakers of their respective nostalgia eras.

maybe another way to articulate this is that while the video totally presents a pastiche of fashions, lighting, scenes and camera angles you might have seen in an 80s video, it's otherwise free of LOL SEE IT'S THE 80S stuff. like it's pretty clear everybody is totally stoked to be dressing up like this, they know they look cool as hell and have always wanted to be in such a video. i'm struggling to think of a counterexample here, but, i dunno, it's not like weezer being on happy days or nirvana being on ed sullivan and the gag is that they don't belong there and they're cooler than those cheesy old-timey things that we make fun of now. or insert any rock/punk band that goes "back to the 80s" and it's comical that they're wearing hair metal wigs etc. and maybe i'm mistaken, or giving the song too much credit, but part of me really wants to take that as a kind of transgressive gesture, reclaiming some kinda bypassed or overlooked urban cultural forms with strong black and latino roots, refusing to wink-wink around them, and making them into a gigantic hit song.

i may also just be mixing this up with the atomic dog/genius of love thread, where pappwheelie talks about playing these early 80s classics and getting told by bartenders "to stop as 'we're not selling beer to 40 yr old black men,' despite the 21 year old white girls dancing..." funk those bartenders.

reminds me of mj too. and jj. they were pretty big back then. mark/bruno could do a good cover of what have you done for me lately...

come to think of it, janet and cab calloway in zoot suits = bruno

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Ow1nlafOg

wow i didn't realize dan hartman co-wrote 'living in america' (which honestly is the song that the duplo-house stylings of 'uptown funk' reminds me of more than any at this point)

whoops @ that edit resulting in a bad verb agreement

Huh, I don't think I've ever actually heard "Walk the Dinosaur" before! I mean, I probably did as a kid, but I'm listening to it now, and it doesn't sound familiar. Good example to bring up in this thread.

this slate quote is crazy! it sounds like half the hit pop songs of the 80's! it sounds exactly like the 80's. like eerily so. in the 80's video they would have had a dog in sunglasses and at the end of the video the dog would drive away with the model in the sports car and everyone in the video would look at the car driving away and go WHUUUHHH????

― scott seward, Friday, March 20, 2015 7:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

voting scott for king of 80s examination

also I am pretty sure jaymc is a complete alien if he has never heard Walk the Dinosaur, or his .xls started sometime after that era

so it's clearly a really loving celebration of all this music, and maybe part of what it does is redeem those earlier sounds (clearly still MUCH beloved on "older folks" radio as mentioned above) by way of those later ones that kinda-sorta but didn't quite carry them over to the mainstream. i dunno, i think it's cool. i know jack shit about bruno mars's upbringing or w/e but i'm kinda imagining it like a tribute to his parents' music.... like what he heard around the house growing up. i guess that makes it like vampire weekend and graceland or something. or maybe not - all the sounds in the song (and the vintage black male fashions in the video) were pretty much totally disappeared from the wider landscape by the time he was six years old, if not from other outlets including hypothetical parents' stereos.
so sure, potentially it's more arch and reviva

this is such a good post. yes it's referencing a load of things.but that's not necessarily a bad thing in itself. The number of times in my own attempts at music making I realise I've ripped off the bassline to 'Pass the Dutchie' or sang a melody line out the UB40 songbook or copied Wham or accidentally repurposed Men At Work or the Flying Pickets or A Flock of Seagulls. It's part of my upbringing really, and I don't see it as 'stealing' as it's totally subconscious stuff brimming up from the primordial ooze of my first musical impressions.

The video is very Moonwalker innit?

weird how Was (Not Was) went from no disco gurus to Mick-Keef enablers.

this is my jam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8PjjxJ7v78

I saw Was (Not Was) play a reunion show here maybe, dunno, five years ago? Less? It was the day after New Year's Eve, there was a blizzard, and there were maybe 50 people there. Pretty good, iirc.

going back to Dr Casino's post, yes it's like a turbofied 'look what this could have been' best-of-all-worlds marriage of overlooked style married with new turbofied production values.

"Spy in the House of Love" video basically shows Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers backing "Living in America"-era Brown

If Marty McFly went back in time thirty years ago today, what song does he play at the dance to blow everyone's mind?

I thought the video was a reference to the closing credits in jay and silent bob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O3vC8tDj1M

For most of my life I've only known "walk the dinosaur" from the George Clinton & the goombas version

1 Walk The Dinosaur (Single Version) 3:48
2 Walk The Dinosaur (Club Remix Edit) 3:42
3 Walk The Dinosaur (Funky Goomba Remix) 6:14
4 Walk The Dinosaur (Goomba Dub Mix) 4:14

"I Gotta Feeling" is actually a really helpful non-obvious point of comparison, not just for length but also the sense that it's not immediately apparent what is the key hook

In a song that's all about anticipation (and basically only ever played at one point in the evening), surely it's instantly apparent what the key hook is? I still kinda think you could replace the boshing bits with virtually any EDM pop at the right tempo and no one would really care, as long as you also gave them the opportunity to sing the "let's do it" bit right at the end.

i like "i got a feeling" specifically for the fact that it rhymes "mazeltov" with "take it off"

You are literally the only non-lame person I have ever met who has admitted to that.

"i gotta feeling" is horse trash

i always thought it's funny that black eyed peas use "i gotta feeling" to close their shows

I've always suspected that Black Eyed Peas wrote "I Gotta Feeling" after a run of bar and bat mitzvahs will.i.am attended. He probably eyed all these rich and powerful LA industry friends and their children and the wheels started spinning in his head like a slot machine.

IMO this song is a stunning parade of signifiers and catchy as hell, deserves its success, but like crocodile rock of someone dismisses it as mindless ersatz bubblegum all I can say I don't hate that on principle.

I like this song, I mean of course I like the original 80s bounce stuff it co-opts a lot better but so what really....I can like both.

I will admit this is one of those songs people tend to beat into the ground quickly though - can't escape it lately.

It's not nearly as annoying as "Happy," that's for sure, not least because Pharrell's phalsetto sucks and Bruno's funk yelp is pretty on-point. I actually haven't heard it out and about so much, and my wife had somehow never heard it at all until yesterday. But my kids sure know it.

the thing I hate about "Happy" is shitting on it gets you a side-eye like you just ate somebody's beloved pet

"It's called 'Happy', do you hate the sun too?"

hard to drive when its blaring in my eyes iirc

i like "happy" loads more now that it's not fucking everywhere

You are literally the only non-lame person I have ever met who has admitted to that.

― Matt DC, Saturday, 21 March 2015 10:28 (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

....thanks?

really good post dr. c