18 December 2014
I wonder if ‘Uptown Funk’ brought a wry smile to Maria Walsh and Carole Nelson of Zrazy. They were the duo behind ‘Ooh, Ahh, Paul McGrath’, that enjoyable Irish-chart-topping post-Italia-’90 bop which featured a terrace chant based on ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ by The Gap Band, who didn’t have a writing credit, and which—sequitur or non—wasn’t heard on the national airwaves while number one. And now here’s ‘Uptown Funk’, whose mid section similarly had the look of ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ but without any writing credit, and it was never off our radio! The writers of ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ eventually got a writing credit on ‘Uptown Funk’ three years later.
I must say, that alternate universe where ‘Uptown Funk’ isn’t played in public appeals to me, and perhaps to you too. Initially I found it enjoyable: the odd lyrics about Michelle Pfeiffer and making dragons want to retire; the vocalised basslines and splashes; the sparkling production; the clear love of Cameo and other ’80s funk. Pretty quickly, though, ‘Uptown Funk’ became to our ears what we now recognise as just another Bruno Mars record: bland, obsequious surface-level pastiche by a childhood Elvis impersonator who never quite kicked the high of getting easy oohs and aahs from a cabaret audience. And we can also loop ‘Uptown Funk’ into the familiar conversation about big-budget cultural appropriation of music of Black origin with more success, and initially all the credit, than its originators. (‘Oops Upside Your Head’ was a UK top ten hit and reached no. 17 in Ireland, but surprisingly didn’t even crack the US top 100.)
‘Uptown Funk’ is our final number one of 2014, and in hindsight it feels like a culmination of the year in chart-topping singles: the school-run clapalong of Pharrell’s ‘Happy’; Ariane Grande and Iggy Azalea’s problematic ‘Problem’; the retrograde retro-pop of ‘All About That Bass’. Go back a further twelve months to 2013 and we take in white rapper Macklemore’s skittish ‘Thrift Shop’, Katy Perry’s Insta-inspo ‘Roar’, and the Despicable #MeToo ‘Blurred Lines’. That two-year stretch gives us a clutch of gargantuan US chart hits which dominate pop radio and pop culture for the rest of that decade, perhaps longer. I can’t say 2015 brings us anything comparably titanic or influential at number one in Ireland; instead, out of the weeds we’ll be seeing some soundtrack hits, the last days of the boyband era, a few random collabs, and a Canuck teen heartthrob kicking on to chart dominance on our side of the water. Oops!
