An obvious pastiche or homage to something from the past is always bound to bring out a few folks who claim that the track was stolen from the originators, and “Uptown Funk” is no exception. Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars already gave members of The Gap Band songwriting credit for the enormous hit’s similarity to “Oops, Upside Your Head” and now another late-’70s group is claiming that Ronson pilfered the track from them.
The all-girl rap group The Sequence — who notably featured current day R&B star Angie Stone as an emcee — is grumbling that “Uptown Funk” is a lift of their track “Funk You Up.” While they haven’t filed a lawsuit yet, their representative Kali Bowyer is telling TMZ that the two songs share a hook and have other similarities.
The song that recently won a Grammy for Record of the Year has already gone through two rounds of adding songwriting credits. Ronson and co. added Trinidad James and “All Gold Everything” producer Devon Gallaspy to the credits before the song was released, due to the track’s interpolation of the “Don’t believe me just watch” hook from the 2012 smash. They also added the Gap Band and the “Oops” producer to preempt a lawsuit in the wake of the Marvin Gaye/”Blurred Lines” ruling. “There’s nothing we intentionally or unintentionally took from that song, but that was the settlement we were told to follow,” Ronson told the Daily Telegraph. “After the ‘Blurred Lines’ thing, everybody was like, ‘You better be careful’, and that’s kind of all I wanna say about it.”
What do you think? Will Ronson be splitting the share of “Uptown Funk” yet again? Here’s the track for comparison’s sake, if you somehow managed to remove it from your memory:
(Via TMZ)