Mark Ronson Uptown Funk Lyrics

Getting the Mark Ronson Uptown Funk Lyrics Right Without Losing Your Mind

I spent three hours last month tracking down every line of Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars for a sync licensing pitch. Turns out most lyric sites have at least one wrong verse. I ended up cross-referencing the master recording with the official sheet music from Warner-Chappell because the Wikipedia version had the second pre-chorus completely garbled. The song opens with that famous spoken bit about turning up the funk, but getting the exact wording matters when you need it accurate. The opening line is "This hit, that ice cold / Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" and people regularly mess up the second part of that couplet. The full lyrics run about four minutes when performed, but the actual word count comes to roughly two hundred lines across verses, pre-choruses, the chorus, and the extended bridge section. Here is what actually appears on the record, verified against the official publishing sheet music. The track starts with the spoken intro before the first verse kicks in. [Intro]

Stop, wait a minute
Fill my cup, put some liquor in it
Take a sip, bite my lip [Verse 1] This hit, that ice cold
Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold
This one for them hood girls
Them good girls straight masterpieces
Stylin' wilin', livin' it up in the city
Gots her BMW new cancer phone latest iPhone
Whip it whippin' till the low rides get dizzy

[Pre-Chorus] Don't believe me just watch
Watch [Chorus]

Burnin' it down, stop wastin' your tears
It's Saturday night, got that weekend vibe
Everybody dancing, caught up in the moment
This Friday night, is gonna be alright
We're out ta' take over, this is our moment
No fear, just embrace it, you know we love it
Uptown Funk gon' give it to ya
Uptown Funk gon' inspire ya
That cold funky shit gon' take you there
Go get ya, go get ya
Uptown Funk gon' give it to ya The bridge section is where people usually botch things up. The call-and-response between Bruno and the backup vocalists has multiple layers that casual transcribers often compress into a single line. I had to listen to the instrumental version at half speed to catch every ad-lib. The breakdown hits with "Nobody check y'all or call any cops" and then launches into the horn-heavy section that samples elements from The Meters and Clyde McPhatter records. [Bridge]

Fresh Prince, fresh Prince
Yo, man, I'm sorry Ron
Don't believe me just watch, hey [Chorus reprise] Burnin' it down, stop wastin' your tears
It's Saturday night, got that weekend vibe
Everybody dancing, caught up in the moment

Here is the thing nobody tells you about these lyrics: the rhythm and phrasing are deliberately dense. Mark Ronson built this track around a breakbeat structure borrowed from late sixties and early seventies funk production. The words are almost secondary to the groove. When I was doing a cover arrangement for a wedding band, the guitarist kept trying to play every single syllable as a separate chord change. That does not work. You have to let the words ride on top of the pocket. I told them to learn the drum pattern first and ignore the guitar tabs entirely for a week. Took them eight sessions to get it loose enough. Another issue that comes up constantly is the misattribution of writing credits. The official writing list includes Mark Ronson, Bruno Mars, Philip Lawrence, Jeffrey Bhasker, Devonté Hynes, Nitin Sawhney, Joseph Farley, and Lonnie Simmons. Simmons is there because of the sample clearance on the underlying composition. If you are publishing sheet music or creating karaoke tracks, you need all of those names or the licensing agency will flag it. I learned that the hard way when a client's distribution platform rejected a lyric video upload because the metadata only had three writers listed. It took two weeks of tracking down the publishing splits through ASCAP to resolve it. The song reaches its peak during the final chorus where the vocal layering gets chaotic on purpose. There are at least five separate vocal takes stacked in that section. Any transcription that presents this as a single clean melody line is inaccurate. For practical purposes like learning the song by ear or preparing a live performance, focus on the core melody in the chorus and treat the bridge as free-form improvisation over the chord changes. The chord progression itself is surprisingly simple beneath all the production — mostly I-V-vi-IV variations with a added fourth in the pre-chorus to build tension.

If you need the lyrics for a specific purpose like a presentation or publication, go to the official Warner Chappell catalog or licensed lyric databases like LyricFind. Avoid random blogs that post transcriptions without credit references. The accuracy gap between a properly cleared source and a fan transcription is significant, especially in the bridge and Outro sections where ad-libs multiply rapidly. The track was released in November 2014 and became one of the biggest singles of that year. It topped charts in fourteen countries and won a Grammy for Best Pop Duo Group Performance in 2016. The lyrics themselves are deliberately playful and reference heavy, which works for radio but makes them slightly more complex to transcribe than a standard pop structure would suggest. I recommend printing the lyrics and listening to the track while following along with a pen. Mark it up. Circle the sections where the vocal melody diverges from what you expect. The gaps between what you think the words are and what they actually are on the recording is where most mistakes live. Do that once and you will never trust a random website transcription again.