Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At

NOV 26 2001 · 12:00

Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At (2001) Director: Traktor Era: Post-Millennial Electronic Boom (2001) - Peak era of big beat and UK electronic crossover into mainstream pop-rock charts, coinciding with the cultural high-water mark of Basement Jaxx's Rooty album cycle. Exceptionally high. A confirmed canonical artifact of early-2000s electronic music video culture, awarded, critically ranked, and representing a watershed moment for the Traktor collective's transition into music video direction. The video's practical effects, conceptual depth, and satirical intelligence make it an essential reference for any archive covering the intersection of UK electronic music and visual art at the turn of the millennium. Context: Released in November 2001, 'Where's Your Head At' arrived at the apex of UK electronic music's mainstream crossover moment, when acts like Basement Jaxx, Fatboy Slim, and The Chemical Brothers were achieving international chart success without sacrificing experimental credentials. The video's Prague setting, chosen partly for its affordable production infrastructure and Eastern Bloc institutional architecture, gives the piece a B-movie Kafkaesque texture that amplifies the song's disorienting energy. The central conceit of the music industry as a mad-science experiment, with musicians literally dehumanised into performing primates, functioned as a darkly comedic critique of pop commodification at a moment when manufactured pop dominated the charts globally. The video's absurdist visual language aligns with a broader turn-of-millennium trend in art-directed electronic music videos that treated the format as a vehicle for short conceptual filmmaking. Director notes: Directed by Traktor and shot over three days in a real mental hospital in Prague. The video won two awards at the 11th Annual Music Video Production Awards: Best Electronica Video and Best Directorial Debut. Pitchfork ranked it number 24 on their list of The Top 50 Music Videos of the 2000s. The video was among Traktor's first music video commissions, helping establish their reputation in the medium alongside concurrent work for Fatboy Slim. The central practical effect, chimpanzees with human faces composited onto their heads, including the faces of band members Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, was the defining visual achievement of the production.