The Praise You video is one of the most loved music videos ever made, and almost nothing about it was planned the way a normal shoot is. In 1999 Spike Jonze took a boombox, a handful of amateur dancers and a fake community troupe to the sidewalk outside a Los Angeles movie theater, pressed play for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” and filmed what happened. Nobody asked the theater for permission. The people in line had come to see a film, not a music video.
The result cost almost nothing, looked like a home movie, and went on to beat the big budget productions of its year at the MTV Video Music Awards.
A tape left in a hotel room
The story starts with a different Fatboy Slim song. Before “Praise You”, Jonze had filmed himself dancing alone to “The Rockafeller Skank” and left the tape in Norman Cook’s hotel room in Los Angeles. Cook loved it and had no idea the dancer was the director behind some of the decade’s most celebrated clips. In a 2019 feature for ELEPHANT, he recalled deciding on the spot that whoever was in that footage should dance to his next single.
That next single was “Praise You”, the third single from You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. Released on Skint in the UK on January 4, 1999, it went to number one on the UK Singles Chart and reached number 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its opening vocal, the line almost everyone can sing, is sampled from Camille Yarbrough’s 1975 track “Take Yo’ Praise”.
Meet the Torrance Community Dance Group
For the video, Jonze invented a troupe called the Torrance Community Dance Group and cast himself as its leader, Richard Koufey, the self appointed genius behind its moves. Roman Coppola produced. According to Michael Gier, one of the dancers, Jonze stayed in character as Koufey through rehearsals, the shoot and even after the cameras stopped.
The location was the Fox Bruin Theater in Westwood, the 1937 cinema famous for its wraparound marquee near UCLA. The crew filmed guerrilla style, without permission from the property owners. The troupe arrived, set down a boombox in front of a crowd waiting for tickets and started dancing.
The moment the music stopped
The most famous moment in the Praise You video was not scripted. Partway through the routine, a theater employee walked over and switched off the boombox. Koufey responded by throwing his arms around him, and the troupe carried on. Jonze kept the interruption in the final cut, and it became the beat that made the whole thing feel real.
Gier later described the reaction from the crowd: “At first people didn’t know what to think, but they loved it; they were really cheering us on.” He also insisted nothing was staged for the camera: “What you see in the video is exactly what happened.”
The bill for all of this was tiny. The video reportedly cost around $800, a rounding error next to the glossy clips MTV was playing at the time.
How the Praise You video won the 1999 VMAs
On September 9, 1999, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the joke reached its biggest stage. Regis Philbin introduced Fatboy Slim, Richard Koufey and the Torrance Community Dance Group, and the troupe performed the routine live at the MTV Video Music Awards.
The video took home three awards that night: Breakthrough Video, Best Direction, credited to the Torrance Community Dance Group, and Best Choreography, credited to Richard Koufey and Michael Rooney. Jonze accepted in character as Koufey. The only category it lost was Best Dance Video, which went to Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca”.
Jonze stretched the bit even further with Torrance Rises, a short mockumentary that follows Koufey and his dancers on their journey to the VMAs.
Why it still matters
Dance music videos in the late 1990s often leaned on expensive effects, models and slick club scenes. The Praise You video went the other way. It showed ordinary people, badly synchronized and completely committed, having more fun than anyone in a glossy production. It turned an awkward public moment into pure joy, which is close to what a good dancefloor does every weekend.
It also cemented Fatboy Slim as an artist with a sense of humor about his own records, something that runs through his catalog to this day, from the stories in our Fatboy Slim facts roundup to recent studio games like Funk Drunk with Felix da Housecat. More than 25 years later, the clip still circulates every few months as if it were new, and the question in the comments never changes: would you have joined in?
