Little Girl In Back Seat Waits For The Beat To Drop In ‘Uptown Funk’ Before Breaking It Down

Mar 26, 2021

In an adorable video on YouTube from 2017, a little girl named Maddie is captured in the backseat of a car reacting to the crescendo and beat drop in Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson's 2014 hit "Uptown Funk." When she hears the song nearing that pivotal moment, she knows just what to do — dance!

Before pressing play on the video we might expect a little bit of car seat shimmying, but Maddie seems to already have quite the groove in her heart at a young age.

The clip starts in the middle of the song, when the familiar refrain comes in with Mars singing "Hot hot!" Maddie immediately gets this excited look in her eyes as if she recognizes the song. She bounces a little, and her head moves up and down to the beat, but it's not until the lead up to the drop that she really starts to get into it.

Around halfway through the video, Mars sings the words, "Don't believe me just watch!" and the horns come in. That's the moment when Maddie shoots her little arms up into the air like she just doesn't care and goes for it! She truly does dance like nobody’s watching.

In that moment you can hear another car passenger say, "She knows where the beat is!", before everybody giggles and applauds.

Ethan Than, Maddie’s uncle, uploaded the video, writing in the description: "My Niece carefully listening to Uptown Funk, and then grooving to the beat drop.” Since its original upload, Than’s video has become yet another “Uptown Funk” YouTube hit.

The clip has accumulated a whopping 11 million views and more than 60,000 likes, making it one of the many viral “Uptown Funk” clips on the video platform. And the original music video itself was one of the very first uploads on YouTube to break 3 billion views, according to Forbes. This is all to say that Ronson and Mars’ track has seen a whole lot of success online — not to mention the fact that it topped the Billboard 100 charts for 14 weeks, or the glowing reviews it received in the press.

As Harriet Gibsone writes in a Dec. 2014 piece on the track, “Uptown Funk” became a “phenomenon” and an “overnight karaoke classic” in and of itself.

But what accounts for the song’s success? How come so many people from around the world — from Maddie in video featured below to flash mobs in Sydney, Australia — seem to have resonated with this now legendary track?

First of all, it’s important to note that a whole lot of talent and work seems to have gone into the track. Ronson, who produced the song, is legendary in the music industry for having worked on Amy Winehouse’s breakthrough album “Back to Black” and with Adele on the song “Cold Shoulder.” In other words, he has a lot of experience when it comes to perfecting the perfect mainstream hit. And while his name isn’t as well known among listeners, the track’s third producer, Jeff Bhasker, is a Grammy award-winning writer who’s worked with Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys, Ed Sheeran and Eminem.

Given that these three stars worked together, it begins to make some sense how they were able to create a song that became a pop-culture touchstone. And, of course, they also worked incredibly hard.

“There was all of this pressure because Bhasker was leaving at the end of the day,” Ronson told Billboard of the writing process in 2014. “The plan was for me to record my guitar part by lunch. Lunchtime comes around and I still haven’t nailed the part. We go out and in the stress of finishing this song I fainted in the restaurant. I threw up three times. Jeff had to carry me back to the studio.”

The track, a little under five minutes of tape, took the supergroup 82 takes to finish, according to the same interview.

Beyond all the hard work behind the scenes, Gibsone also points out that social media played a massive role in ensuring the song’s success. Just weeks after the song dropped, English actress and model Cara Delevingne uploaded a series of Instagram videos of herself, Kurt Russel, Kate Hudson and others in attendance at the gathering dancing to the newly released track. It quickly accumulated more than 250,000 likes, providing yet another platform for “Uptown Funk’s” success.

Of course, the song was also a success simply because, well, people loved it.

This is how Tom Breihan of Stereogum describes the track for his Jan. 2015 review of Ronson’s album “Uptown Special.”

“It’s the best American #1 we’ve had in more than a year, easily, and maybe much more,” Breihan writes.

“It manages to be catchy as all hell without having a chorus. I have a two-year-old son who transforms into an avatar of pure unthinking joy every time he hears the song. (He mumbles ‘Uptown Funk!’ in his sleep. I am not joking. It’s his favorite thing other than dinosaurs.) ‘Uptown Funk’ is the rare song that manages to transcend hit status and becomes some sort of cultural event. We’ll still be hearing it at weddings years from now, and some of us will even be happy to hear it.”

Breihan’s prediction certainly came true. Not only are “Uptown Funk” fans still playing the track at weddings years later, but Ronson and Mars’ hit song has become a genre unto itself on the internet. In one of the most well-known uses of the song, Scot Pankey, a theater instructor at New Tech High School in Dallas, Texas, choreographed a school-wide dance to the song, which went viral just like Maddie’s video.

“I heard the (“Uptown Funk”) before Christmas and fell in love with it,” Pankey told  The Dallas Morning News in January 2015, shortly after the video went viral. “We are a project-based school — there are only two in the Metroplex — and that means you give the students a project, put them in teams and they have to come up with solutions. They had three weeks to work on it, then present as a group what they learned.”

Just like Pankey’s clip or Delevingne’s Instagram video, Maddie’s dance move are a welcome and notable contribution to the hundreds — if not thousands — of “Uptown Funk” spinoffs that are bound to make you smile.

What’s your favorite “Uptown Funk” video? And what do you think of Maddie’s dance skills? Let us know — and be sure to pass this story on to friends, family members and fellow music lovers!