31 Days of Music - Jamiroquai - High Times #tinychallenges

The more of these posts that I write, the more I realize that MTV played a bigger part of my formative years than I realized. I believe it was my junior year in college when I first saw the video for Virtual Insanity and just couldn’t believe how amazing it was. It wasn’t that the music was entirely new or that the video was something I couldn’t figure out how it worked, but the combination of all those little things made this one so memorable.

As cool as the song itself was, I just couldn’t get into the rest of their work. One hit wonder, or so I thought. Napoleon Dynamite changed that completely.

Seeing Napoleon dance on stage to Canned Heat is one of the best and funniest scenes that’s ever been put to film. It reminded me of how, late in my high school career, we met this quiet metal kid who played amazing air guitar. He would give performances in back hallways and the gathered crowd would go nuts at how into it this kid was. The best performance he ever did was when he slid down a set of concrete steps in the gym, head first, jamming the entire way, strumming with his right hand while his left held a lit cigarette lighter instead of a guitar neck. It was truly impressive and my high school’s own version of Napoleon.

But that movie brought me back to Jamiroquai’s discography and what a discovery it was. It wasn’t that the music was any different, but that I had changed and it finally made sense to me. So many amazing songs by this group, so today I give you their singles album as a way to step into some of the best jams you’ll find.