Switched on Pop - Mark Ronson: Funk Politics

Episode Date: January 15, 2015

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per per records. When I was a young man in high school I was

obsessed with funk music. I'm I listened to Parliament, Funkadelic, and Cool, and the gang on repeat. I quoted lines ad nauseum, such as, tear the roof off the sucker, tear the roof off the sucker, take the roof off the sucker. That's so embarrassing.

And let me, and I would say things like, let me put my sunglasses on so I can see what I'm doing here. I was in a band, a short-lived band called Function with a K, not a C. Oh, God. And I may have written a song called You Funked My. battleship. How was the radio play on that one? It was a local hit. Local high school. Yeah. No, localized to my bedroom. Okay. Great. But I had to hide my love of funk because people didn't really understand why I was so obsessed with the music that was so old and dated and why I wasn't listening to, I was on the radio at

the time. Alanna's Morissette and the Goo Goo Goo Dolls. And so I sort of pushed that to the side and went on with my life and function disbanded. And now I'm listening to the radio and what comes on the speakers, but Uptown Funk, the number one song in the country. And man, Charlie, it should have been me. It should have been me. That lanky Jewish guy making funky music for all of America. should have been me. And what I want to do in this episode of Switched On Pop is understand why it's him and not me.

I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And you're listening to Switched on Pop, the show about the music and pop music. On today's episode, we are going to delve deep into the number one song in America, Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars. And we're going to try and understand why a DJ is leading the revival of soul and funk music. And what is it about the sound of funk music that makes it just so funky? And for the first time in the short history of Switched on Pop, we are going to be joined by a special guest who will help us understand what happened to funk. Where did it go? Why did it disappear in the first place?

And why is it coming back today? So Mark Ronson comes out with this single Uptown Funk for his record, which came out yesterday. And just last week, he usurp Taylor Swift as the number one song on the charts, which is really maybe heartbreaking for Nate and I, as you all have seen our love for Taylor. There's lots of people who've got to be asking, who is this Mark Ronson? Well, he's this secret sage of pop music. One of those guys working behind the scenes, putting out hits year after year, and all the while growing his name with iconic DJ sets largely in New York but also around the world. And he's got credits to his name with Christina Aguilera, Adele, Bruno Mars, even Paul McCartney. And he's, of course, best known for his work

with Amy Winehouse on Back to Black. So you've got this person who's been working behind the scenes and all of a sudden his name is now on the charts. Right. And so what we're seeing here is the move from producer into artists. Something that we should all acknowledge is every time we hear a really good pop song on the radio, there's usually someone behind it who's helping craft that sound. And Mark Ronson is a great example of one of those producers. He's making that crossover now.

I think a great example from the past would be Quincy Jones, who was behind many of Michael Jackson's records. What else was he behind? He started as a trumpet player, actually, played in Dizzy Gillespie's band. Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. And he also worked with Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra. He's got Eddie Van Halen. Wow. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gay. He's completely across the, across categories. But he also broke out with his own music. And like Ronson was was a crossover from between producer and actual artists. Exactly. But it's a rare thing to do. It's not not often accomplished.

So now that we know who this Mark Ronson is, let's start us off listening to Uptown Funk. Yeah. Yeah. That is just amazing. Okay. Uptown Funk. Yeah. So what are you hearing?

I'm hearing classic elements of funky music. Right. We've got a huge horn section blasting out these really tight riffs over the chorus. And that to me is reminiscent of a lot of bands. Earthwind and Fire comes to mind. They were known for having one of the tightest horn sections in the business. Yeah, and I'm definitely hearing some those funky drums, James Brown's style. You know what I'm talking about. And what really holds this Ronson song together are those wobbly scents and that really funny voice in the background which sounds so much like this Zappin Roger tune, do Wadiddy, blow that thing. And

What else, Charlie? What else is? The most important element of a great funk song is, of course, the bass. Yes. And Uptown Funk is just seeped in that funky slap bass. Can you quickly explain to us what is meant by slap bass? Sure. Well, a typical bass player is going to pluck the strings with their fingers for a more muted and mellow tone. But Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone invented a whole new way of playing the bass

where you would slap the bass with your thumb and then pop up with your fingers, creating this incredibly percussive rhythmic style. And you can hear that slap bass from Larry Graham on Sly and the Family Stones. Thank you. Well, and I think the other thing that's going on here is funk is all about this vamp. In contrast to many of the other songs we've talked about, this doesn't have a complex harmonic structure or even much of a harmonic structure at all. Right, there's few chords.

There's very few chords. And you could argue that there's really only two chords. going back and forth throughout this entire song. Instead, the way this song creates contrast and interest is through rhythmic variation, through different instrumental combinations and through different lyrical sections. Right. Yeah, I think if you break down the song, it doesn't even have the structure of a typical pop song. A typical pop song, we've talked about before on Switchdown Pop, you have your verse.

your chorus and your bridge. And they're usually going to be verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge, verse chorus, something like that. And when you listen to Uptown Funk and you try to say, well, where's the chorus? There's not really a chorus, right? You have the like, I'm too hot. God damn. You've got the girls hit you hallelujah. And you have the don't believe me just watch.

All these things which in another song could definitely be a chorus. But they're all just section, ongoing sections. And so if you actually break down the song, it does have a structure, but it's not typical. It's basically an A, B, C, D structure, meaning there's an A section followed by a B section, a C, and then a D section. And they do that twice and then just riff on a too hot version, which is the B section for like two-minute outro of the song. So there's a structure here, but it doesn't look anything like what we expect from a pop song. Yeah, exactly. A, B, C, D as opposed to as what you were describing, something more like AAB, AAB, C, AAB. Right, right.

Which is a form that in a lot of ways is very faithful to the tradition of fun, which was never about harmonic complexity, but was really about rhythmic excitement and lyrical invigoration. Probably best exemplified by James Brown in many ways the godfather of funk music. Yeah. In the other single from this Mark Ronson record, featuring the return of the rapper Mystical, it's very much in a James Brown mode. Great song. You can tell that Mark Ronson really knows his influences and he's intentionally drawing from James Brown. Here you can hear it's really focused on a really complex drumbeat. And rapping or, I mean, like really James Brown kind of style shouting over the track.

Yeah, it has a creature-like quality. It's a talkiness with incredible vocal syncopation and utterances, entirely his own style, which he helped create. Which raises a question, is this song Uptown Funk? is it merely a static recreation of a bygone musical genre? Or are Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars really adding something new to this style of music? To answer that question, I think we should go to the source itself. Mark Ronson has a TED Talk viewed over a million times. Oh, okay.

Where he looks at the history of sampling and how it affects music in which he says, You can't just sort of hijack nostalgia wholesale. It leaves the listener feeling sickly. You have to take an element of those things and then bring something fresh and new to it. And I think any great artist is always referencing the past, showing their incredible repertoire, but making it relevant for modern times. I think a composer who illustrates that really well in the classical world to someone like Arnold Scherenberg, this is someone who in the beginning of the 20th century, revolutionized music by what he called emancipating dissonance. In other words, he abandoned the harmony of chords and melody that was familiar to Western

tonal music for some 300 years and said, we need to come up with a new system of music where all pitches are created equal. This results in a hugely influential and to a lot of ears very discordant and cacophonous music. But what's interesting is that in the beginning of his career, even as he was experimenting with these really radically new melodic and harmonic forms, he was still putting them in really old vessels. Oh. Basically putting them in Baroque dance forms. So here's a recording of Glenn Gold playing first the Bach Baroque Jig followed by the Schenberg. And you'll surely hear the difference.

Wow, so you can tell here these are the same song structures. The same Baroque dance forms that we looked at in Boombang Pow episode. Yeah. These dances like the Chaconne and the Bure and the Gavot. So he was retaining these very old forms, which for him still had a lot of meaning, and filling them with this different and really avant-garde melodic content. So it was a bit of something old and something new so that they, that there was a connection that listeners could draw.

Exactly. And I'm curious, do we think that Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars are succeeding in blending the new and the old in this song? And I think to get us there, we want to look back into the history of funk, where it went, and how is it that it's arrived back on the scene today? Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

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Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process. returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want order at the border.

They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. To help us understand this funky moment that we're experiencing the resurgence of funk, We are lucky to be joined by Micah Salkin, an African-Americanist who writes about house music history and culture and is pursuing a PhD in American studies and is also one half of the mighty DJ duo, Micah Jackson. Thank you so much, guys. It's a pleasure to be on Switched-on Pop. Thank you, Mike, for joining us. I wanted to jump in and ask the first question. Why is Funk and Soul coming back today?

So I don't think Funkin' Soul ever left us. I think the way that. that genre gets marketed is super fascinating, right? So what does it mean that we have a top single on the charts that's self-consciously funk? Not that we didn't hear funk in other tracks for the last 10 to 15 years, but why do we need to and want to resurrect an idea of a music that was explicitly political connected to blackness? you know, and it's being produced by a kind of whiteuteur who loves the history of black music and a racially ambiguous Hawaiian guy with plenty of African-American extras in the music video

to remind us what what funk is all about. Maybe one of the things that we're seeing happen right now is some uneasy appropriation and some looking for the rougher edges in pop music that we've smoothed over in the past year or so with folks like Taylor Swift really riding the charts hard. What past is this drawing from? You mentioned that there's a political past of funk. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, so if you think about groups like Sly and the Family Stone, artists like James Brown, you know, godfather of funk and soul. These were artists that were emerging at a time in the late 60s and the 70s at the tail end of the civil rights movement. And funk music was really rebellious and in some cases revolutionary. It was a revolution to have an interracial band like Sine the Family Stone coming out of the Bay Area. And a lot of the music that was produced by funk artists like George Clinton and then later on in the 8th,000, 80s by kind of electro-funk artists like cameo. It was party music first and foremost.

I don't want to take that away from it, but it was also born in a particular political moment that artists were responding to and the energy of that music reflects the rise of neoliberalism and kind of the death of Fordist economics in the U.S. And I think that's why it gets incorporated into hip-hop so much. and funk is really the lifeblood of gangster rap in the early 90s, I think that people have wanted, will continue to want funky music, right? So the difference between funk music, right, this genre that has a particular political history and the idea of calling something funky or wanting to feel the funk, right?

So maybe we can make a distinction there in terms of thinking about, you know, maybe funky music has never gone away, right? Right, uppercase funk versus lowercase funk. That's perfect. It might not have gone away, but we shouldn't ignore. There might have been some intentional things going on in the industry of music that led to the decline of record sales if they weren't promoted, even though the music never went away. Right. I definitely think that's true.

I think that, you know, you sort of see an ebb and flow with interest and investment in black artists in particular in the U.S. in terms of the mainstream recording industry. And independent labels, so many of them. important ones like VJ in Chicago, Black owned and operated, and of course, Motown in Detroit, and then later L.A., some of those smaller independent labels

really became the breeding grounds for the majors. So the top artists would get creamed off those smaller independent labels and then get big distribution deals with Atlantic or Warners or whatever. And then that really helped kill, you know, that in Paola scandals

that were disproportionately targeting small and minority-owned record labels. What were those? So if you know what Paola is, it's the kind of pay-to-play record promotional practices that probably in some guys continue today. I remember it was featured in the get-on-up James Brown biopic, and he sort of breaks all the rules and figures that he's going to fire all of his business people, and he'll just go and pay the young DJs to play his music. Right, right, which is not an uncommon practice. It just so happens that when Black record executives did that, you know, There was a disproportionate response by the FCC.

So you have labels like Philadelphia International, which is basically the hotbed for most of what we know in terms of orchestral disco, really the biggest budget stuff. That label got hit hard by the Pala scandals. And so did Mercury Records in Chicago, which was a thriving small record label. So these things kind of compounded. And as a result, you know, this is at the same time that disco is sort of ascendant, which is a much less expensive music to produce in late 70s. You sort of have the death of the black band in some ways. Not completely. Clearly, not completely.

But certainly it's a nadir for the black band. Disco was less expensive than funk simply because there were less musicians that you needed to. Right. You didn't need a horn section. No, you have synthesizers. And you have a drum machine. And in terms of live performance, you have a DJ. So that really changed the economics of making a band.

Right. I think that that contributes to a sort of decline in new funk music being produced. I don't think it kills funk by any means. Right. So there's both some economics going on there. But as you were saying, even with the FCC and an unequal hand in regulation, there was a political nature to the decline of funk music as well. Right. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's incidental that these kind of enormously popular black artists,

that a government agency reacted to their popularity in kind, you know, with legalistic, bureaucratic types of discrimination. I was particularly intrigued in this ridiculous music review that only the economist could write, where they say, It is easy to understand why soul music is enjoying a revival. Faced with cuts in social spending in a sluggish economy, listeners in Britain may find solace in Adele's throaty songs of heartache. And they go on to basically say that black music is soulful and authentic, which might be a little bit simplistic.

They go on to say that because people are experienced such hurt, what they need is that soulfulness again in order to deal with the solace. Hmm. That's interesting. Yeah. Everyone knows there's an inverse proportion between economic fortunes and the level of throatiness in pop music. Yeah. The funny thing here is, or the interesting connection between the economist and Mark Ronson, if you will, is this article in The Economist was titled, Authenticity makes a comeback. Authenticity, the most ill-defined concept ever. It's terrible. That's what I'm saying. Lots of generalizations. Only the economists can write. write this stuff. And Mark Ronson's radio show that he did on East Village Radio was called authentic shit.

Oh, well, he's certainly trading in the idea of authenticity, right? You know, he wouldn't be costuming his dancers. He wouldn't be putting a straight-haired Filipino kid in a perm at a black hair salon. If he didn't think that blackness still, you know, it's paradox, you know, this is what the scholar Fred Moten so brilliantly points out in his work is that blackness is paradoxically the thing that's got the most value and the thing that is without any value. You know, in this in this moment of the I Can't Breathe movement taking hold, you know, what does it say that our biggest public debates in kind of popular music are about Igia Zalia and Azalea Banks and who's got the right to hip hop? You know, are we going to have that same

debate about Mark Ronson and funk? I kind of doubt it. So what does that mean for you? Is this just a pop song or is it actually drawing from its political past? And I'm curious, do you think that it needs to? What is its role in the history of funk music? Maybe its role is to just point out that there's a longer history to this music. I don't think that pop artists have the responsibility to hold the torch for a political cause. And I don't see Mark Ronson particularly distancing himself from the history of this music. But I also don't see, if someone wants to look at the the mantle of funk and its history. Let's look at the roots, right?

Let's look at a group that's, you know, explicitly carrying on a, at times, black radical tradition and its musical practices. I don't know that we need to look for Mark Ronson to do that. I don't think he claims to be doing it. On that note, Mike, I'm curious if there are other musicians you're listening to right now that you feel carry that mantle in perhaps a more low-profile way than Ronson and company. You know, we were talking the other day about that it kind of matters in some ways that

Ronson is white and British, right? And you mentioned Adele before Charlie and sort of, we're in this moment where Sam Smith has more Grammy nominations than, certainly than Mary Jay Blige, who I've been touting for her latest album, on which she actually collaborates with Sam Smith and disclosure. We keep trying to find white artists that will do. what so many black artists are already doing. And I don't think that, I think that that, you know, that's just part of a white consumer public,

wanting to see people that look like them. And it's also a record industry that's profoundly conservative who doesn't try to promote anyone who doesn't. And then there's Bruno Mars, man, who has a sick voice, right? Yeah, yeah. He has a really powerful high tenor. He has a soulful vibrato that he brings into his music. You know, he's a great.

singer. You know, this isn't a lyrical masterpiece, but he's really, he's working that, he's working that, uh, that party music sound. And, you know, I think one of the things we also have to consider, too, is that people are exhausted with the EDM. It's just been too much for too long now. Right. Right. People want live instruments. They want variety, right? Like, they don't want their radio dial to just be a Vichy on every other track or whoever to, Right. Swedish or whatever dude is of the moment. Right.

And that's why Uptown Funk is so popular right now. It has got a great live band in the backing track. This is not a cartoon of funk. No, Ronson has put together one of the best live bands you can imagine. I believe that. You know, he's a musician. He's not playing around with sound. He's committed to it.

Yeah, so I'm mad at him. Let's see what happens. You know, can he get another top 10 hit out of this new album. I hope so. I hope so. Also, I will say before we wrap things up that in defense of the lyrics of this song, Rhyming. Michelle Pfeiffer, Nate, Michelle Pfeiffer. But rhyming. White gold. Rhyming Mississippi with fresh jar of Skippy is more, and a more entertaining lyric than anything I've heard in a while on the charts. And the history of funk lyrics is not necessarily. necessarily one of the poetry.

True. True. But, you know, I would, I would question new highs or new lows, Nate. Fair enough. This has been wonderful. Micah, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your insights into the history of funk and house music. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, my pleasure. You guys, have a great rest of your show and talk to you soon. Thanks, Micah. Thanks so much for listening to Switchdon Pop. If you like what you heard today, you can find us online on the iTunes store, the Apple Podcast app, Stitcher Radio, SoundCloud, or online at www. www.Switchdownpop.com.

Today's episode has been brought to you by fluorescent blazers, hair curlers, and shoe polish, all prominently featured in the music video Uptown Funk. Which, if you haven't watched, we recommend you go do so right now. And please join us in two weeks for a special Super Bowl-themed episode. That's right. Did you know that your favorite drinking song is the national anthem? And did you know that the national anthem used to be a drinking song? That and more next time. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding and I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

Thanks for listening. Let me tell you all. Funk you up. Uptown funk you up. Uptown funk you up. Uptown funk you up. I said uptown. Funky up.