Genius of Love

Tom Tom Club is the side project of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, the drummer and bass player of the Talking Heads. They married in 1977 and released the first Tom Tom Club album in 1981. The group was a family affair: Tina's sisters Laura and Lani were backup singers, and their brother Loric wrote a song called "Booming And Zooming" for them. Frantz and Weymouth would have liked to start working on another Talking Heads album after their 1980 release Remain In Light, but David Byrne decided to do the soundtrack to the movie The Catherine Wheel and make an album with Brian Eno (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, released in 1981). The other Talking Head, Jerry Harrison, also made a solo album at this time. Chris and Tina thought about waiting it out, but their accountant told them they were short on funds - their last Talking Heads tour featured four additional musicians and wasn't profitable for them. So, they formed Tom Tom Club and released their self titled debut album in 1981. Thanks to "Genius Of Love," it went Gold, outselling not only the Byrne/Eno album, but any Talking Heads album released to that point.

The nimble beat on this song has been appropriated by many other artists, most successfully by Mariah Carey, who used it on her 1995 #1 hit "Fantasy." It was also sampled by Grandmaster Flash on "It's Nasty/Genius Of Love," and by Ziggy Marley on a remix of "Tumblin' Down," a song from Marley's 1988 album Conscious Party, which Frantz and Weymouth of Tom Tom Club produced. Money earned from "Genius Of Love" sampling royalties financed future albums from the group.

Free from the cerebral lyrical stylings of David Byrne with their group Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club created songs that focused on the grooves. They make this clear in the line, "Who needs to think when your feet just go?" In lieu of poetic missives, the lyrics are mostly a mention of various artists that influenced Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, including Smokey Robinson, Bob Marley, Kurtis Blow, Bootsy Collins, and James Brown.