#16: MARK RONSON with BRUNO MARS
“Uptown Funk”
Single released: November 2014
“You’re too intense, Marcello. Lighten up.” My whole fucking life. Music makes me happy but I am ill-equipped to express that happiness in ways that others might understand, hence I am not really capable of communicating it, as the remaining readers of this book have already and fully appreciated. My music writing inspires migraines, sleep and untraceable boredom. Similarly, if somebody idly asks me what sort of music I like, I dry up and witter something incoherent such as “well, have you got a spare couple of hours so I can explain it to you?” That puts people off asking me that question ever again; it isn’t what they want to hear, just as when I give a literal and honest answer to the stock query “How are you?”
I can get happy with music but my happiness generally does not – cannot – make others happy. It’s the condition of my life imposing its sword on my neck again. I find it impossible to celebrate, even or especially in the form of dancing. Don’t think of the old school discos (or more recent parties or clubs); I was either the snob sitting on the outside or over-compensated and became worse than David Brent, who got it from Alexei Sayle’s routine anyway.
I like to imagine a carefree youth spent doing extravagant dance routines with multiple partners at work parties but these things never actually happened, except in my mind. At twenty-four I was as oppressively buttoned-up as I have ever been. There was no Limmy-type glorified memory of reckless but happy antics. At school I would routinely turn down invitations to dance, in some cases, and it gives me no joy to recount it but when I’m gone who else is going to know, because the girls in question were in the B stream of classes rather than my A stream, and because the eleven-plus system routinely fucks children up at too early an age and forces them into divisions, simply to please anxious bureaucrats, this is how you end up thinking and acting, and the incipient hormonal rushes don’t exactly help either.
The picture in terms of writing about music is little different in essence and I suspect that this is the case for a lot of people who imagine themselves as music writers. I can’t just “enjoy” a piece of music. Well I can but as I said above I can’t convey that enjoyment to folk. My brain automatically requires exhausting and ultimately destructive analysis, pulling the music’s elements into irreparable fragments. If I composed music I’d be utterly useless at writing anything less than three minutes in length. Give him 100-word reviews, they’d say in my music critic days, and he sounds constipated. That is because I do not possess the journalistic competencies required to edit my thoughts down into coherence and meaning.
And maybe I’m experiencing similar problems with this book, at this juncture, in that, well some songs are high up here because I enjoy listening to them and they make me feel good. That is, in summary, really all there is to say. Daft yet admirable (or admirable because daft?) pop songs which momentarily render the world less shitty. For a lot of the sixteen songs remaining in this book I need only write, at best, a paragraph. It’s bouncy, funny and groovy and makes the sun shine through the clouds. It’s about just getting up and onto a dancefloor and not trying to impress anyone, but simply doing some business and enjoying yourself, and that in the right hands and feet is infectious in a very good way. The best pop can make you forget your self, step away from that wearisome burden of a you and…you know…engage with the world, instead of dispassionately marking its elements. Those who succeed in life tend to be lighter in spirit, don’t weigh everyone else down with them. If only the light that once existed within me had not been so hastily and brutally exterminated.
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