"Praise You" Page

TORRANCE COMMUNITY DANCE GROUP PRESENTS

Fatboy Slim's

"Praise You"
A TORRANCE PUBLIC FILM PRODUCTION

"Praise You" News.
Add this to your wish list: The Work of Director Spike Jonze. The DVD features an audio commentary from Fatboy Slim on "Praise You", the rocumentary 'Torrance Rises', and more!

>My crew and I competed in Edge 102's "Praise You" dance contest on Oct. 27, 1999, with Norman Cook as the judge! We entered ourselves as the Toronto Community Dance Group. I chatted briefly with Norman and scored an autograph for the "Praise You Page!" Check it yo!

>"Imagine trying to explain to Sony Worldwide that I wanted to make this deliberately crap-looking video," he says. "The only thing that swayed them was Spike doing it. They trusted that it would be genius, not complete rubbish. But when I first saw it, I actually thought, 'Oh no, we've gone too far. This is actually rubbish, and not genius!'"

Click here to read the full JAM! Music article on Fatboy genius talking about "Praise You".

>The Tori Amos issue of Spin Magazine has a feature article on Spike Jonze, and in it the author writes about Spike's denial that he had anything to do with the video -- that they received an angry letter from "the real director", with a resume of all his work. (Thanks Britain for the scoop!)

>"Praise You" won three MTV Video Music Awards beating out Korn, Busta Rhymes, Eminem, Ricky Martin and more to win Breakthrough Video, Best Direction and Best Choreography. Fatboy and the Torrance Community Dance Troupe also performed "Praise You" live at the Awards.

>Read the REAL story behind the video (passed on to me from Darryl Lee) here. Michael Gier, one of the dancers, shares his experience.

"Praise You" The story.
Click here to see the "Praise You" video in RealVideo!

The video that's making bad dancers look good, was shot after Fatboy Slim's performance at the Mayan Theatre in LA. It was taped on the lam outside a Westwood theatre, in one take under 10 minutes. The dancers are from the "Torrance Community Dance Group", the theatre managers and bouncers appearances were unscheduled. So was a break dancing Michael Jackson impersonator (who was cut from the video).

The video is an expanded version of Spike Jonze's (Video Guru behind Weezer's "Buddy Holly", Beastie Boys' "Sabotage", and the Chemical Brothers' "Electrobank") video treatment for "Rockafeller Skank" (right about now the funk soul brother check it out now ...). The treatment was a joke ... a video tape of Spike dancing it up on Hollywood Boulevard. Spike had some free time the weekend Norman was DJing in LA ... and in 5,6,7,8!

Look for Norman Cook (that's Mr. Fatboy Slim) in the video! He's bald, and pops his head in behind choreographer Richard Carfay (aka Spike Jonze) when he's talking about b-boys and posses.

"Praise You" The dance moves.
Below are the dance basics for the "Praise You" video. The best way to learn them is by taping the video, and practicing along. Don't practice too much, or you'll be too good. Once you can remember the moves, take 'em to the dance clubs and upstage the go-go girls. See you at the movies!

Group: Start hunched over, back to audience, holding hands. Turn and stand up, in sequence.
Lead: Squatting in the middle of the half circle. Roll up, gesture/point to the right half of the group, then the left half of the group.

All: Raise arms up, jump like jumping jacks, but without the arm movements.

Group: Step touch, step touch to the right four times. Arms are jazz hands, air guitar style. Same to the left. Repeat three more times.
Lead: Same, but opposite direction, and with your own poor style.

All: Body shake.

All: Step leap front, down to the ground. Step leap back, down to the ground. Repeat two and a half times.

All: Form a circle. Front sashay. Fish move back. Turn. Fish back again. Step hop backwards. Turn, airplane.

All: Twist to the right. B-boys pose, with head nodding to the beat.

interuption
Lead: Jump/piggy back the front of the person stopping the music. Tell/assure the audience: "We got some b-boy moves."
continue

Group: B-boy pose, with head nodding to the beat.
Lead: Uprocking. Six step, front roll, back roll (that turns into a front roll.)

Group: Robot starting to the left, then facing front, then facing right. Repeat. Stand and shake while watching lead.
Lead: Interpretive dance. Two counts of eight. Running man, running man. Step with big arm movements. More ... step with big arm movements.
claps and whoo, whoo's!

All: Form a line. Shuffle with right foot. Arm wave with the left arm (each person swing their arm in a full circle, one at a time, in sequence.) Again back.

Lead: Moon walk backwards, poorly.

Lead and woman: Run and leap, taking turns, ending in Vogue like poses. Repeat.

All: From a line, step kicks like crazy. Kind of like the Roger Rabbit but frontwards.

Lead/All: Dancers run into the lead, lead throws each of the dancers into a leap.

All: Run to centre, forming a circle, shake arms upwards. Turn. 80s pound down.

"Praise You" The Page.
After trying to recreate the dance at my friend Wendy's house party, I made it a mission of mine to write down all of the moves. Before doing so, I figured they might already be online. They weren't. So then my mission turned into documenting the moves, and building a website around them. And here we are.

This page was Astralwerk's AMUSING LINKS OF THE WEEK in the 8.6.99: astralwerks newsletter! Hip hop hooray!

About me ... This site was created in '99. "Praise You" is one of my top 10 favourite vids. "Thriller" is my ultime fave music video. I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and remember when Spike Jonze worked on Dirt magazine.

"Praise You" The musical.
(Hopefully) coming soon.

e-mail me!