Great, funky song - amazing horns, great beat and Bruno Mars is that the top of his game - singing, dancing. Love it. Pretty hilarious - Mark Ronson is a producer - he’s worked with Amy Winehouse, Mars and many others* - and is very well regarded. This is his project - so you see him as the “trying to look Uptown Cool” white guy in the video. To be clear - he is VERY well regarded as a producer and I like his music - but these types of situations where the lead name is off to the side is always funny.
Enjoy!!
*His sister is the DJ who Lindsey Lohan had a relationship with. Their stepdad, I believe, is Mick Jones from the band Foreigner, so they grew up with money and music.
Aw, man, Leaffan, you still in a bad place? Sorry, man. Given the threads you’ve been starting lately stating you don’t like a number of well-loved movies and such, it sounds like this is another notch on your “Bah Humbug!” belt. Totally cool.
Bo - serious question: is there funk you like? I can’t recall, sorry - I’m in an airport on my iPhone and can’t search. This music doesn’t sound like your “satan trapped under a lawnmower” preference.
Love this tune. My wife showed it to me the other night. We generally don’t agree on music and she showed it to me because she knew it was right up my alley and she liked it too. This is an earworm that isn’t going away for a while.
It’s okay. Kind of a “funk 101” obvious pastiche for the uninitiated. But why bother, when James Brown is just a click or two away? I guess you gotta get the kiddies interested somehow, so there’s that. I do agree that Bruno Mars is an excellent performer with good musical taste.
I have, AFAIK, one of the largest collections of '60s & '70s funk, soul and R&B music in Nevada. Prolly about a hundred CDs, many of them regional compilations so literally hundreds of bands are represented. I have the complete works of Freddi/Henchi & the Soulsetters, most of Eddie Palmieri’s work (I’m especially fond of Harlem River Drive’s 1st album) and most of BT Express’s output (they made a couple of albums that are so bad I don’t even want them for completeness’s sake). I’ve seen both the Ohio Players and George Clinton/P-Funk at least 6 times each and will stop everything to listen to The Temptations.
I remember that thread, but obviously, not your prodigious funk collection. Argh again.
I am on the road for work, but will see if I can get back to your links in that other thread.
I have to ask: so, what’s up with this track? What don’t you like about it such that you would dismiss it off hand?
I guess, at the very least IMHO, I give them “pizza credit” - I mean, all pizza is ultimately, pizza, which is a good thing ;). This is music with a funk groove made with real instruments and presented in an entertaining way.
Even if it is not amazingly amazing, I love the fact that this type of track is charting, you know? I think that is why I started this thread - hey, funk is charting!
I feel the best music is done by people who do it because they feel they HAVE to. They have to get it out of their system. Like the Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea ads that preceded it…it feels corporate and inorganic.
My reaction to this was visceral. The opening sampled vocals were a major turnoff, not least because they sounded poorly done to me. The opening lyrics was where it completely lost me, tho. I think it was 14 seconds in when I closed the window. More on why later.
Entertaining way I’ll give you, as lots of people seem to like the song and video. The real instruments part I’ll withhold an opinion on, as lots of what I heard was not real instruments, but I admittedly didn’t hear much of the song.
I think it’s debatable whether or not this is funk, but I don’t think it’s very debatable that this song and video seek to not just evoke 1984 but to convince us that it is 1984 all over again. The pop culture references in the lyrics wasn’t “a nice touch” to me, it was “shameless exploitation”: those references are not for his audience today as much as they are for the audience that was listening back in the mid-80s. The clothing, the cars, the production look of it all, all are there to immerse and reinforce the “mid-80s feel” but not to honor or recall or reference or parody or satirize… It seems to me to be a crass appeal to nostalgia. (And IMO, the type of pop music from that era that they are copying sucked ass.)
I admit to having a larger problem with Bruno Mars: I think he’s this generation’s Lenny Kravitz. He’s slick and all, but IMO essentially all he’s doing is repackaging things others have done before that were popular. And by “repackaging” I mean “almost literally copying everything note for note but with new lyrics and with the bridge from some other song”. There’s a fine line between “honoring/referencing” and “copying” and some people make a living by trying to walk that line; obviously I feel that some stay on the right side of that line better than others.
FTR, I tried to watch this again with my GF, who places far less importance on music (and cannot listen at all to most of what I enjoy) and is several years younger than I am. She began loudly insisting, with colorful vernacular, that I turn it off right around the time she heard “Michelle Pfieffer”.
