When You Gonna Learn?

When You Gonna Learn? is the first single off of the album Emergency on Planet Earth, being the band's debut single. It was released originally in October 1992 as an act of goodwill (by Acid Jazz Records) before being re-released in September 1993 for the band's debut album. Similar to Emergency on Planet Earth, the song follows an environmental awareness theme calling focus to the issues within capitalism and the youths future with the rising danger of climate change and war. The music video, directed by Morgan Lawley, was infamously pulled from MTV due to its graphic footage of seal clubbing, Nazi parties, animal experimentations, and whaling operations. The uncensored video remains up on the Jamiroquai channel.

Background

Before "When You Gonna Learn?" was released as the band's first single, the track "Natural Energy"^[1] was made beforehand to only three copies. It is unknown where these three copies are, but it is most likely one of them is in possession of Jay Kay. There is no official release of "Natural Energy" as only a radio broadcast of the tracks existsm albeit with a few tags.

The debut single would be first played by Kiss 100 FM during the summer of 1992 with a noticeably different structure than the release. The track is around 6 minutes and verses are switched around. The track's chorus follows a similar chord progression to Johnny "Hammond" Smith's "Los Conquistadores Chocolates", with it being close to 2 octaves lower. If the connection isn't clear enough, the Cante Hondos mix uses a much more similar progression along with sampling the wing sound effect from the song. Acid Jazz Records booklet of the single release thanks Smith for allowing Jay Kay to use the chord structure, however it is unclear if he recieved any royalties.

Lyrics

The track is broken down into 3 sections which focuses on 3 key issues. The first verse follows the issues of lower class societies struggling with survival and poverty. Jay Kay brings up the endangered future of the youth, saying "Foresight is the only key, to save our children's destiny". The chorus references the track "River Deep - Mountain High", in which Kay pleads for the world to wake up and realize the issues of our world, saying that "We gotta wake thisworld up from it's sleep". The second verse centers more on the rich, with them killing our environment and controlling our lives, with Kay saying that quote "Greedy men been killing all the life there ever was". The chorus then follows with the same message as before, along with a didgeridoo bridge. The song ends with Kay questioning when the world will learn to stop these people from destroying our environment and our future.