Genius of Love (5:34)

“Genius of Love” is a 1981 song by Tom Tom Club from their eponymous debut album, Tom Tom Club.

Song

“Genius of Love” was Tom Tom Club’s second single. Although the album had not been released in North America, over a hundred thousand copies of the single sold as imports from Island Records’s UK, at which point Sire Records made a deal to release the single and the album in North America in late 1981.

“Genius of Love” was a huge hit making the top 40 on the US Billboard Hot 100 (Peaking at #31), in the clubs and on the R&B and dance charts, soon earning the Tom Tom Club LP a Gold Sales Award in 1982. Despite its relatively low chart position in the United Kingdom, the song received a great deal of airplay on UK radio and became a club favorite in Britain, helped by the popularity of the accompanying video. A song based on the keyboards-and-bass rhythm in “Genius of Love” was used in a long-running TV advertising campaign in the UK by the Bird’s desserts company in the second half of the 1980s, the commercials featuring a spin on the psychedelic animation of the Tom Tom Club video using rudimentary CGI. In 2002 it was also used in a popular TV commercial for Kia cars.

The song’s narrator implies that her boyfriend is a “maven of funk mutation” and compares him to James Brown, Bob Marley, Smokey Robinson, Hamilton Bohannon, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Sly And Robbie, and Kurtis Blow.