Canned Heat

Album: Synkronized (1999)
Charted: 4
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Songfacts®:

  • Canned heat is a substance that when found on your heels, will give you a strong urge to dance. This song boogied all the way to #1 on the US Dance chart, giving Jamiroquai their second chart-topper, following "Space Cowboy" from 1994.

    In the catering industry, Canned Heat are those little tins filled with a gelatinous substance that when lit can be placed under metal dishes to keep food warm. There was a time when the stuff could be ingested for a cheap high; the blues musician Tommy Johnson wrote a song about doing so in 1928 called "Canned Heat Blues." That song provided the name for the band Canned Heat, which formed in 1966 and played at Woodstock.
  • This is the song that plays in the 2004 movie Napoleon Dynamite when Napoleon (Jon Heder) shocks his classmates by doing a mesmerizing dance routine in support of his friend Pedro, who is running for class president.
  • The song returned to Billboard's Hot Dance/Electronic and Dance/Electronic Streaming Songs charts in 2014 as a result of a viral video created by college student Matt Bray. The clip shows Bray dancing daily for 120 days to the Jamiroquai track with the edited visual using one second of footage from each day.
  • Gen X think of Napoleon Dynamite when they hear this song, but for millennials it brings to mind the climactic scene in the 2000 movie Center Stage, where a group of ballet dancers pull off a memorable routine to the song.

Comments: 1

  • AnonymousAlso in the movie Center Stage!
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