Fatboy Slim - Praise You

I love the way Spike Jonze constantly manages to surprise with his music videos. I consider him the number one and the king of the genre. He’s also a brilliant film director and has directed many great commercials as well, with several of my favourite featurefilms among his work.

When Praise You appeared on television in 1999, it barely looked like a music video at all. Shot on low-grade video, framed awkwardly, and populated by dancers who seemed more enthusiastic than skilled, it felt closer to a prank than a promotional clip. That was precisely the point. Directed by Spike Jonze, the video became one of the defining cultural moments of late-90s pop - not by escalating production value, but by rejecting it outright.

The premise was simple to the point of absurdity. Jonze, performing under the pseudonym Richard Koufey, assembled a fictional dance troupe called the Torrance Community Dance Group and staged an unannounced performance outside a movie theater at Torrance Mall. There were no permits, no crowd control, and no plan beyond hitting play on a boombox and dancing until security intervened. The passersby captured on camera were not extras; their confusion, amusement, and irritation were real.

What makes Praise You endure is how completely it subverts the expectations of a pop artifact. At a time when music videos were still locked in an arms race of budgets, choreography, and glamour, Jonze offered something defiantly amateur. The dancing is loose, unpolished, occasionally off-beat. Jonze himself, in oversized glasses and ill-fitting clothes, moves with earnest awkwardness. The joy of the video comes not from perfection, but from commitment.

Jonze carefully choreographed the routine to feel spontaneous while remaining readable on camera. The framing mimics home video, but it’s structured to keep the group legible as a unit. The tension - how long they’ll be allowed to continue before being shut down - becomes the video’s narrative engine. When mall security finally breaks it up, the interruption feels like part of the performance rather than its failure.

For Fatboy Slim, the video was a perfect match. Praise You is itself a collage - built around a soulful sample and a house beat that celebrates gratitude and release. Jonze translated that spirit into physical space, turning public embarrassment into communal pleasure. The video didn’t sell aspiration; it sold permission - to dance badly, publicly, and without irony.

The impact was immediate and long-lasting. The video won major awards, including the MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction, and became a touchstone for guerrilla filmmaking, street dance culture, and the idea that sincerity could trump polish. It also cemented Jonze’s reputation as a director who understood pop culture not as spectacle, but as participation.

More than two decades later, Praise You still feels radical in its simplicity. In an era now saturated with self-aware “lo-fi” aesthetics, it’s worth remembering that Jonze’s video wasn’t pretending to be casual - it actually was. It captured a moment when a camera, a song, and a willingness to look ridiculous were enough. And somehow, that was praise enough.