Groove Is in the Heart

Elektra released it in July 1990 as the debut single and lead single from World Clique. The band wrote and produced it. It was written in the late 1980s and played live as early as 1989, though the album version was not recorded until 1990. The backing track is built on the main riff of Herbie Hancock's Bring Down the Birds, from the Blowup soundtrack, and on the drums of Vernon Burch's Get Up, which also forms the basis of the slide-whistle breakdown. Bootsy Collins sings guest vocals, Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker play the horns, and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest raps a verse. The repeated I, I-I-I-I-I uses the first word of an Eva Gabor sample from the Green Acres theme, and Billboard noted that it opens with a spoken line from a 1969 belly dancing tutorial: we're going to dance and have some fun.

It went to number one on the US dance club chart and number four on the Billboard Hot 100, and was number one in Australia for a week in November 1990. In Britain it reached number two in September 1990, as a double A-side with a Peanut Butter mix of What Is Love that removed Bootsy and Q-Tip. The Steve Miller Band's The Joker took the top place by 44,118 copies to 44,110, and the chart rule that decided ties was dropped afterward. The video, directed by Hiroyuki Nakano, put the band in front of 1960s psychedelic backdrops, and was nominated at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards without winning. NME and the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll both named it the best single of 1990.

Pitchfork's Jess Harvell called it a bubblegum tune in the guise of a club record. Rolling Stone's 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs, where it stands at number 233, described a collage across different generations of funkateers. Billboard's staff list of the best dance songs called out its use of a slide whistle. For Record Store Day in April 2017 it was reissued on pink vinyl with remixes of What Is Love? on the B-side, and a Charli XCX version with Questlove and Black Thought was used in 2015 Target advertisements.