By Jeff Cornell
40-year-old producer Mark Ronson scored the biggest song of his career and one of the hottest tracks of 2015 with his collaboration with Bruno Mars on “Uptown Funk,” off his Uptown Special album. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 consecutive weeks and spent 31 weeks in the top ten this year, becoming the second longest running top 10 single of all time.
Ronson told Radio.com that there is “not a lot of massive studio trickery” in the retro-sounding song, that has reminded many of Prince’s ’80s heyday. Bruno Mars played the drums on the track and Ronson played guitar. The producer added, “All the instrumentation is pretty natural, even the vocal bass in the background.”
Related: How Mark Ronson wrote “Uptown Funk”
The electro-funk hit also features some “old school drum machine claps and snares,” according to Ronson, but for the most part was recorded live. He continued, “That was what we set out to do with this song, to make a piece of dance music created by living people.”
Ronson and Mars avoided legal drama at the hands of The Gap Band and Trinidad James by giving them songwriting credits on the song. The track used elements of Trinidad James’ “All Gold Everything” and portions of The Gap Band’s 1979 hit “Oops Upside Your Head.” According to Billboard, The Gap Band gets 17% of the song’s royalties, while James gets 5%.
“Uptown Funk” is nominated for two GRAMMY Awards including Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and the coveted Record of the Year.
The video for the track was nominated for five 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, winning one for Best Male Video. The clip has been viewed over 1.2 billion times on YouTube making it the fifth most-viewed video of all time. Watch the video for “Uptown Funk” below:
