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What’s more, the music videos weren’t quite there yet either: By most estimates, MTV only had somewhere between 100 and 200 videos in their library at the time, and had to lean disproportionately on certain artists with more clips available (like REO Speedwagon and Rod Stewart) simply to fill 24 hours of programming.Īnd the quality of those videos? Well… it wasn’t the highest plane the art form would reach. When MTV first launched on Aug 1, 1981, it wasn’t available in most major markets - the staff held their launch party in Fort Lee, NJ, because no one could get the channel in Manhattan - and the operation was still fairly ramshackle, with a particularly technical difficulty-plagued first 24 hours. While the dancers do veer toward looking a little daft, part of the charm is in the upfront, non-judgmental nature of Praise You’s video-there’s a very delicate line between mockery and celebration, and Jonze hop, skips and jumps right along it beautifully.Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. The footage, too, is adorably grainy making it feel as much an extended You’ve Been Framed Clip as a four MTV Award-winning music video. The magic of the video then, and to an extent now, is that it’s deliberately unclear what’s real and what isn’t: people absolutely thought The Torrance Community Dance Group was a genuine entity Jonze is absolutely as much Koufey as Koufey is Jonze. Moves such as the “fish” (hands together, arms snaking in a zigzag), the “Julie Andrews” (an ebullient leap, a la Sound of Music) the “teapot” (hand one one hip, other becomes a spout) were soon aped in clubs everywhere as the track made its way to number one in the UK charts in January 1999. The dance is so utterly, brilliantly terrible-the sort of thing hitherto only seen at the tail end of weddings, or Year 6 discos. It was a thrill.” Fatboy Slim, Praise You, directed by Spike Jonze, still “At first people didn’t know what to think, but they loved it they were really cheering us on.” He adds, “What you see in the video is exactly what happened. “Richard Koufey just jumped on him like a monkey,” says Michael Gier, one of the actors in the group.
#FISH HEADS VIDEO MTV MOVIE#
The bemused crowd queuing for movie tickets becomes as much a part of the performance as the dancers as does the well-meaning security guard who rocks up and turns off the boombox half way through. Reminiscent of Gillian Wearing’s 1994 piece Dancing in Peckham, perhaps part of the beauty of it all is that it’s hard to imagine this happening now, living as we do in the post-flash mob age, immune to this sort of thing-heads down, looking away. The entire thing was shot in one take, in a genuine “guerrilla” performance: the gang showed up at an LA cinema in a van together, got out, pressed play and just went for it. To create the video, Jonze brought together a group of actors and remained firmly in character as Koufey for the entire duration of the rehearsals, performance and even after wrapping the shoot, according to one of the actors.
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For some reason we all thought he was black.” Fatboy Slim, Praise You, directed by Spike Jonze, still They said, ‘Actually, that is Spike Jonze’. Cook has said in an interview that he had no idea the dancer in the video was actually Jonze: “ ‘If we can find that crazy crackhead and get him to dance to my next single then that’s the video’. Jonze’s note on the tape said that he’d filmed someone dancing to the track, signing off, “Love Spike”.
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The collaboration between Jonze and Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) came about when the director left a video in Cook’s LA hotel room showing a blissfully eccentric guy dancing to The Rockafeller Skank, Cook’s 1998 single.
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