
Don't Believe Me? Just Watch: The rise of Uptown Funk
On Jan. 17, 2015 — ten years ago today — “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It would spend 14 consecutive weeks in the top spot, set new records for streaming in the U.S. and worldwide and would win Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.
The Making of 'Uptown Funk'
Born in London but raised in New York City, Mark Ronson became a popular disc jockey, hip hop music remixer and record producer. In the 2000s, he became noted for his producing work for Lily Allen, Christina Aguilera and especially for Amy Winehouse. He won a Grammy Award for Producer of the Year for his work on Winehouse’s 2006 album “Back to Black.”
After he worked on Bruno Mars’ second album, “Unorthodox Jukebox” in 2012, Ronson asked Mars to help out with a song for Ronson’s own solo album, “Uptown Special.”
What became “Uptown Funk” began life as a jam in Mars’ Los Angeles studio. Mars was on drums, and “said he’d been doing this James Brown/Trinidad thing that could be fun,” Ronson said. Ronson played bass while producer Jeff Bhasker played keyboards.
“On the first night we wrote the verse, ‘This hit, that ice cold...’ We were trading lines. Jeff had the ‘Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold,’ we were like, ‘Wow, that’s cold, that’s like a Kanye West line’!”

Despite Ronson’s excitement that first night, the song took seven more months to finish. They kept adding to the track “but it all felt corny,” Ronson said.
At one point, Mars went out on tour and played around with the song. He sent Ronson a demo recording but Ronson says he felt it was cheesy. “It had this dinky little clap on it and we’d been doing this heavy funk thing. But he just knew — and he said, in the nicest possible way — ‘It’s this way or the highway.’ And he was completely right.
Another choice Ronson made was to forego a typical hit single-type hook. He liked the “do doo do” bass part and said, “OK, we can have these rap verses and not really a cool hook because we’ve got this cool bassline and that’s the
cement’.”
'It's Saturday Night And We In The Spot'
Although Mars gets only a “featuring” credit on the song with Ronson listed as the main artist, Ronson is happy to give Mars plenty of credit. “Seventy-five percent of the song is him — he’s the hook master,” Ronson said. Michelle Pfeiffer says she’s mostly flattered by the mention of her in the song. “I’m in an exercise class,” she said, “and the song comes one and — [heavy sigh].”

Ronson says he struggled to record his guitar part in the one day he had left before producer Jeff Bhasker left to work on another project. Ronson took a lunch break and fainted in the restaurant. “I threw up three times,” he said. “Jeff had to carry me back to the studio.” Ronson finally nailed his part — “on take 82,” he said.
There’s a moment in the song where Mars sings, “Stop — wait a minute” and the track pauses a beat as he continues: “Fill my cup, put some liquor in it.” “Minute” and “in it” isn’t a typical rhyming couplet but it works in this song. In the Kidz Bop version, that line is changed to “Fill my cup, put some water in it.”

The song’s video features Mars singing, Ronson scowling and the two of them with the group the Hooligans walking and dancing in what is a fake New York street on the 20th Century Fox back lot in Los Angeles. By the start of 2023, the “Uptown Funk” video had become the ninth most-viewed YouTube video of all time, with more than 5.2 billion views.
“Uptown Funk” was released onNov. 10, 2014 and debuted at No. 64 on the Billboard Hot 100 on Nov. 21, thanks to digital sales. The very next day, however, Mars, Ronson and the Hooligans performed the song on “Saturday Night Live.” It then sold 110,000 more digital copies. It would go on to set a record for most weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart.

Ronson and Mars have been repeatedly sued for copyright infringement over the song. A 1980s Minneapolis funk group Collage filed a suit in 2016 and then, a year later, so did electro-funk group Zapp.
Both suits were settled out of court. The Gap Band sued in 2015 and then again in 2021. Band members were added to the list of co-writers.

2015: A Year of Giant Hits
Of the nine songs that occupied the top spot in the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 2015, only two stayed there one week. One song hit No. 1 for only one week, but then returned for one more week twice more. “Uptown Funk” spent 14 weeks at No. 1 and was the biggest-selling song of the year.
