Virtual Insanity
Jamiroquai's 1996 single is still touring 30 years later -- the group's current Latin America dates are explicitly tied to this anniversary -- and the song itself holds up as well as the video does.
By Song Reviews · September 3, 2026
Greatest of All Time!Jamiroquai's 1996 single is still touring 30 years later -- the group's current Latin America dates are explicitly tied to this anniversary -- and the song itself holds up as well as the video does.
“Virtual Insanity,” released August 19, 1996, as the second single from Travelling Without Moving, is best remembered for a music video most people can describe in one sentence without having thought about the song underneath it in years: Jay Kay standing on a floor that moves like it’s alive while the furniture drifts past him, directed by Jonathan Glazer using a hidden conveyor-belt rig built into the set. It won four MTV Video Music Awards in 1997, including Video of the Year, and the visual has genuinely outlasted most of its era’s other award-winning clips in cultural memory.
What the video’s fame tends to crowd out is that the song written underneath it – Jay Kay and Toby Smith’s clavinet-driven groove, indebted in equal parts to Stevie Wonder-style funk and drum-and-bass-adjacent London club music of the mid-’90s – is a genuinely sharp piece of songwriting on its own terms, with lyrics about technology and social conformity that read, thirty years on, as more prescient than most mid-’90s “future panic” songwriting managed. The bassline alone would have made the track a acid-jazz-scene favorite with no video at all.
Greatest of All Time! – and Jamiroquai clearly agrees: this year’s Latin America tour dates are explicitly billed around the song’s 30th anniversary, still the group’s signature moment three decades on.
Hero image: “Virtual Insanity” single cover, 1996, Sony Soho Square/Sony BMG. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.