Mark Ronson

One night, around 1 a.m., I dropped a new cut called Deja Vu Uptown Baby.

Only a few weeks old, its hometown pride refrain had already taken over every club and radio station in NYC.

When the chorus hit, as the crowd chanted, uptown, baby, uptown, baby, we gets down, baby, loud enough to be heard five blocks away, I ducked the volume and dropped the instrumental to Busta Rhymes' Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See on beat under their voices, remixing the room itself.

There was a half-second delay as their brains processed what just happened, and then they ignited like an energy rocket from floor to ceiling.

For eight bars, it felt like we'd all leapt into another dimension.

It's such a visceral memory of all the times because there are thousands of times that I would do that.

You would drop the volume so the whole crowd is chanting, uptown, baby, uptown, baby.

And as they're chanting, that's all they're thinking about.

You drop it.

The bus rhymes instrumental.

So they're still chanting.

There's a split second where they have to realize, oh my God, he's dropping this other song that we love even more as we're singing under it.

So you are literally remixing the room.

Whenever you do one of those mixes, we used to call them wordplay mixes, where you go from the line in one song,

There's a line in Snoop's Gin and Juice where we got, and they ain't leaving till six in the morning.

And then on six in the morning, you go right into Nas, Uchiwale, because he's referenced that song.

So they ain't leaving till six in the morning is now Nas.

So you've just done this.

slick, on-beat transition from Snoop to Nas.

And of course, like, you know, it takes a half second for the brain to realize, but it's still on beat.