Dance Commander

In this song, the Dance Commander is ordering fun, and you must obey! The song is all crazy fun, which Electric Six lead singer Dick Valentine needed. He formed the band (known then as the Wildbunch) in Detroit in 1996, but in 1999 moved to Los Angeles to take a sensible job working as a press release editor for PR Newswire. "I didn't know that many people in LA at the time, and I was working weird shifts like 2 p.m. to 11 p.m.," he said in a Songfacts interview. "So I'd get off work and I was trying to stop doing music, but then I ended up writing more songs in that period than I ever did, just because I was so bored." "I wrote 'Dance Commander' as a fictional story about how I wanted to withdraw like $3,000 and go to a club," he added. "But I was in a studio apartment at I-10, Overland, just sitting there. I had nowhere to go and didn't have any friends and was just dreaming it."

The video was directed by Ruben Fleischer and shows Spencer running around a house breaking stuff, intercut with shots of him in military garb. Spencer admits that it makes no sense.

Released on their debut album, Fire, "Dance Commander" was the third Electric Six single, following "Danger! High Voltage" and "Gay Bar." All three songs were Top 40 hits in the UK, where their label, XL Records, was based. But all three of the videos for these songs excluded every band member except Dick Valentine, which didn't sit well. After a tour and a round of promotion, three members quit the group and XL dropped them. Dick Valentine replaced them and kept the band going, eventually landing on Metropolis Records. Their last hit was a cover of "Radio Ga Ga" in 2004, but they quickly became a cult favorite, consistently selling out small venues and releasing new music on a regular basis.