Member Since: 12/15/2011
Posts: 13,205
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An expert: Uptown Funk is different than what's popular now
Quote:
The #1 song in the country is slower than normal and lacks a chorus altogether — not your usual fare when it comes to hit jams. Still, those two elements are precisely why Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk!” is currently sitting pretty at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, according to the experts.
“It’s a slightly slower tempo than you would normally get in contemporary pop,” Joe Bennett, Professor of Popular Music and Dean of School of Music & Performing Arts at Bath Spa University, told MTV News. “Most contemporary pop right now is an average of more than 120 beats per minute — and it’s 115, so it tends to stick out. Musically, it makes it sound a little bit cooler than everything else that’s going on at the moment. It’s not as frantic — it’s a lot more laid-back.”
Despite not being a frenetic, high-paced dance song — like most chart-topping tracks — Bennett said “Uptown Funk!” has its place on the dance floor; it’s a song for a certain point in the evening when grooving usurps moving.
And that impression makes sense. According to Ronson, the song was born in the mellowest of ways. “It kind of started out of a jam,” he said. “I think it was something that Bruno used to jam around at soundcheck at his gigs.” He and Mars then worked on the track while the “Gorilla” singer was on tour — recording across the globe. Ronson called it one of the trickiest tracks of his career.
“We kept trying to write a chorus — but nothing ever felt quite right,” he told MTV News.
In the end, though, it was the absence of a traditional chorus that made the song stand out to Bennett — and likely, subconsciously, all the fans that made the jam #1. “The big release, the most exciting bit of the song, is the brass riff — which really has hardly any vocals in it at all,” Bennett said. “It’s a real sort of exhortation to dance at that point in the track because all this tension had been built up.”
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The rest is in the link below, funny that ATRL keeps saying that's it just following the trend and sounds like other pop hits on the radio. 
http://www.mtv.com/news/2044080/upto...-musicologist/
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