Single Awareness: Tom Tom Club – “Genius of Love” (1981)

If there is one song that has always alluded me, it’s Tom Tom Club’s 1981 song “Genius of Love.” There is a part of me who wishes that I could go back to the day where I first heard that song and capture the moment in a jar. When you’re young, weird stuff doesn’t exactly fly and you’re just wanting a rocking verse-chorus-verse structure where every line is clear and with a blatant earnestness that you’re going to be singing in your bedroom. 

That is now what “Genius of Love” is. At this point in society, we’ve gotten used to its funky instrumentation because of overplaying on the radio. I imagine that the person next to me would be rolling their eyes, eagerly reaching for the dial to find any other song. When they find out that Peter Cetera is the only option, they just pull out a gun and shoot the radio. Music had its moment, and now we must move onto some greater art form. Meanwhile, I sit there not mourning the fact that I now need to buy a new car radio, but that I was actually enjoying that Tom Tom Club song.

As far as songs that have withstood the test of time, I have been curious to know why “Genius of Love” continues to be so popular. It’s counterintuitive to the modern sound, or really any dance music of the time. The vocals are buried underneath the choppy melodies while strange backing vocals kick in. There is a formless nature to it, with people yelling randomly “James Brown” and “Bohannon” at different points. 

What was this all about? I want to believe that the opening lyrics hold some clues, but I am not entirely sure that it’s true:

What you gonna do when you get out of jail?

I'm gonna have some fun

What do you consider fun?

Fun, natural fun

That’s about as sensible as things get for the rest of the song. She’s gotten out of jail. But wait… why was she in jail in the first place? When you realize later that she’s done cocaine, you begin to wonder just what is going on. Is she in love with a drug dealer, or is this a more direct song about doing a rail of coke and watching the colors fly? There has to be some reason why you’d open with a line about jail, of being a criminal whose flippant joy makes her sound more like a mall brat than a tough brute.

This is what has piqued my curiosity for years. As a curious person, I desperately wanted to have answers, to know if in between the indecipherable lyrics that there was this deeper meaning. Considering the group is made up of members from The Talking Heads’ backing band, I think it’s best to take David Byrne’s advice and, as their concert film suggests, Stop Making Sense (1984).

The group was lead by Chris Frantz (drums) and Tina Weymouth (bass), who created the group in an attempt to make a group less obsessed with structure and lyrics. They wanted to make music that was more about movement, of creating a vibe. What started with the song “Booming and Zooming” (written by Tina’s brother Loric) soon evolved into a dream of making a full-fledged album. As a result, Frantz and Weymouth (who were also married) bought a house in the Bahamas and recorded their first hit “Wordy Rappinghood.” The success of that warranted making a complete album and helped to separate Tom Tom Club’s image from The Talking Heads.

Even then, Tom Tom Club existed in Byrne’s shadow in one significant way. Their eponymous debut was made in-between recording The Talking Heads’ 1981 album “Remains in Light.” Because of this, the duo was playing around the clock and had only three days to record their material. The song would evolve and change over time. Steven Stanley was an engineer who was messing around on a synthesizer one night, which eventually became the central melody for the song. Meanwhile, Weymouth had been playing so long that she was unable to play the bass line due to cramps. While she wrote the line, somebody else would record the part for her. She would also work on the backing vocals with her sisters Laura and Lani.

The goal of their sound was not to imitate what was popular but create something more laidback. Considering that they had recorded a song in The Bahamas, their comparisons to island-flavored melodies becomes an apt comparison. This was slower, lacking a four on the floor quality. With everything in place, they released their second hit. It wasn’t anywhere as popular as “Wordy Rappinghood” in Europe, but what followed was the only moment that Tom Tom Club would ever be more successful than The Talking Heads. Their song became a dance club hit, proving that it really didn’t matter what the lyrics were. It just had to make you feel good.

The music video was co-directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. Much like their album cover, it was based around the cartoon artwork of James Rizzi. If you have to know what vibe it was going for, it would rank among Frank Zappa’s favorite videos of the time for being “clever” and that Morton would go on to make the surrealist video game film Super Mario Bros. (1993). Even if the video was more of a collage of random images moving in a fast-paced style, it created something hypnotic, capturing the appeal of the song with nothing more than pictures that looked like they were drawn by pressing heavily on markers. Dogs change shapes and rats become confidants for jailbirds. On one level it’s just presenting the lyrics in their most direct way. However, that still raises a question: what is this song about?

The simple answer is that I don’t think this song is about anything specific. There’s very little in here that is clear and meant for heavy dissection. They even try to warn you with one of their most famous lines:

Stepping in a rhythm to a Kurtis Blow

Who needs to think when your feet just go

If you were to stop here, I’d have to agree with you. It feels like what follows is wallowing through a bunch of murky nonsense. There is no deeper insight to be had for a band who wanted to deconstruct the very form to its core, finding a way to make the music push ahead of the lyrics. But then again, what is with all of these references to jail and cocaine? Even from these calming vocals that rarely transcend its melodic purpose, those words stand out. 

Of the few phrases, I think it becomes clear early on that this is a love song, featuring Weymouth singing about how she thinks that her boyfriend is the “genius of love.”

I'm in Heaven

With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend

There's no beginning and there is no end

Time isn't present in that dimension

This is what I think the song achieves very well. It’s a love story that is more about the feeling of romance than actually worrying about coming up with complicated prose for those deeper desires. Considering that there’s a longer cut of this song that’s seven minutes long, the choice to suggest that this moment in your life has no beginning or end makes sense. This is a beat that sounds like you can stretch it for triple the length, playing from a speaker as you whisper sweet nothings to each other. We don’t care where we are in the song, so long as we’re together. Time isn’t present. We can go on forever.

The message is straightforward for the most part and you would be forgiven for not thinking much of Weymouth’s infatuation. Sure, some lines like “It is one time I'm glad I'm not a man” suggest that she’s enjoying his manly ways (i.e. sex), but these are all normal states. Still, one has to wonder what the bigger point of the song is when the rest of things start kicking in. Why do we need all of those references, or how there are several breakdowns that sound transposed from different songs? 

Then there’s this line, the one that has captured the imagination better than most when it comes to speculating what this song is really about:

The way he'd hold me in his warm arms

We went insane when we took cocaine

The immediate portion following this is where the weirdest parts happen. While we got a sample of it early on with “Oops! Your mama said uh,” but it was subdued. It didn’t overwhelm the melody at all. It’s after this point that things begin to pile on. Somebody whispers “Bohannon” in the background, creating a sense of paranoia. As the instruments drop out, leaving the drums, there is this sense of realignment in the song, as if we’ve come down from the high and are reaching a moment of clarity. 

I think the most brilliant part of this song is that there’s room to interpret what all of it means. Why there are endless shout-outs including James Brown, Bootsy Collins, Bob Marley, Sly and Robbie. On one level it’s just mentioning great artists that influenced their sound. This is an ode to the fusion that they helped inspire on “Genius of Love.” However, I think the consistent need to reference dance and music reflects the feeling that their music gave them. This was their dance moment when time would stand still and they would just get lost in the pointless bliss. I still don’t know why, but I also think that one or both of them wound up in jail for drug possession.

This was a post-modernist love song, replacing the more classical motifs for something new and exciting. It makes sense why this song would become a hit. Everything about it had this ability to be played continually without ever feeling it exhausted its welcome. There was nothing like it, and the success allowed them to become a staple during The Talking Heads’ tour. Through the course of its run, they went from an opening act to something more crucial. By the time that they shot Stop Making Sense at the Pantages Theater, they were capable of playing mid-set so that David Byrne could change costumes. 

There is another fun fact about the day that they shot this film. Earlier that day, they filmed a segment for Soul Train. They became only the second white act to appear on the show after David Bowie.

Of course, this weird Talking Heads spin-off had a legacy that anyone would envy. Much like the artists that they referenced, they too contributed to the rap music genre in unexpected ways. The most prominent came with the Mariah Carey hit “Fantasy,” which repurposed the melody and chorus. Other artists who have referenced the song in some portion include Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, and Paramore. It’s a song that’s also been everywhere in film and TV, including a noteworthy appearance in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

While the group wouldn’t have as many hits in the future, “Genius of Love” continues to be a big hit no matter where it’s played thanks to its distinctive, minimalist sound. Tom Tom Club would record a sequel of sorts in 2000 with “Who Feelin’ It” that uses a similar approach of creating a post-modern love song full of references to contemporary artists. As far as I know, it’s one of the only places where you can hear shout outs to Ol Dirty Bastard, The Beastie Boys, Federico Fellini, and the X-Men in one song. While the song would be featured in American Pyscho (2000), its success was less impressive when compared to the original.

If I’m being honest, Tom Tom Club will always be fascinating to me and their other songs prove to me that they’re far from a novelty act. They’re just an extension of the art-rock movement that gave us The Talking Heads, and they out-weirded even David Byrne and his big suit. Nobody really knew what they were about, and that was their currency. Even if I have an idea of what’s going on after taking a close look at the lyrics, I can’t say for sure that it’s a foolproof answer. As they sang so succinctly: who needs to think when your feet just go? Why do we dance, or fall in love? That’s the genius of love. It’s chemical, something unseen, and we just have to trust our instinct.