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Yet more people want a co-write on Uptown Funk
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 31 October 2016
Maybe we should all be given a songwriting credit on the Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson hit ‘Uptown Funk’, just in case.
An American electro-funk band called Collage have sued the dynamic duo and all their music business pals claiming that ‘Uptown Funk’ rips off their 1983 single ‘Young Girls’. Actually, only one of Collage is still alive, Larry White, though the estates of his two former bandmates are also listed as plaintiffs on the action.
According to Pitchfork, the lawsuit claims that “many of the main instrumental attributes and themes of ‘Uptown Funk’ are deliberately and clearly copied from ‘Young Girls’, including, but not limited to, the distinct funky specifically noted and timed consistent guitar riffs present throughout the compositions, virtually if not identical bass notes and sequence, rhythm, structure, crescendo of horns and synthesisers rendering the compositions almost indistinguishable if played over each other and strikingly similar if played in consecutively”.
So there you go. As previously reported, The Gap Band were added as co-writers on ‘Uptown Funk’ because of its similarities to their 1979 hit ‘Oops Up Side Your Head’, while earlier this year another group called The Sequence accused Mars and Ronson of ripping off their 1979 song ‘Funk You Up’, though they are yet to go legal.
