C major · Camelot 8B · 132 BPM
Going Out of My Head
by Fatboy Slim
- 132
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 59
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
"Going Out of My Head" was built around a guitar riff lifted from Yvonne Elliman's cover of "I Can't Explain", a song originally recorded by The Who. Fatboy Slim produced the track for his 1996 debut album Better Living Through Chemistry, layering over the riff a drum sample taken from "The Crunge" by Led Zeppelin. Mostly instrumental, the song carried a single repeating vocal, a voice singing "Going out of my mind", and folded shuffle drum beats and Space Age sound effects into the mix. The Chemical Brothers, close friends of Fatboy Slim, insisted that he release it as a single, and it came out on 21 April 1997 as a double A-side with "Michael Jackson".
The single became the first Fatboy Slim release to reach the UK top 100, debuting at number 57, and was also his first to chart in the United States, peaking at number 28 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart. Clearance for the "I Can't Explain" sample had not been properly arranged at first. When the track appeared on the soundtrack of the 1997 film The Jackal, The Who guitarist Pete Townshend heard an advance copy and reportedly "flipped his wig". Townshend received a songwriting credit, and Fatboy Slim gave up publishing royalties for the song.
Doug Aitken directed the music video, which showed breakdancers performing a b-boy routine and drew heavy airplay on MTV. The Washington Post cited it in an article about the late 1990s revival of breakdancing culture.
Going Out of My Head runs at 132 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.82 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 455 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.