Genius of Love

This song always sounds so sad to me.

DRUGS! That is all i have to say about that! P.S. This is the song mariah carey samples in "Heartbreaker" and "fantasy" i spent days trying to figure this out.

Yeah, but it's also about how great black music used to be, it did...USED to be great...

This song so rocks!! One of the reasons I love it so much is that it's more than catchy, it's infectious. Once it gets in your brain it will never leave, it will just set up a little home there and always be there to cheer you up. With references to the rough underbelly of a musician's life, the female voices are just so incredibly upbeat and delightful, emitting a giddiness at the level of Japanese high-school girl.

The stacatto scratching of the name "Bohannan" and the other riffs thrown in make it an homage to the "evolution of funk", as someone briliiantly stated, in the same vein as "Groove is in the Heart" and presumably out of the same musical milieu. I really love the way the normal rhythm of the phrase "gen-i-us of love" is completely distorted, making "genius" trisyllabic followed by the two beats "of love", creating an asymmetrical 3/2 metric as the flow of syllables come to an abrupt stop.

This refrain reflects the theme of the whole piece, the boyfriend is the genius coming and going, the girlfriend is static, delirious when he's around, lonely when he's not. The boyfriend represents not only this particular musician, but every funk artist, the music itself, drugs, and yes, sex.

The plaintive "If you see him, please remind him..." at the end pulls the focus back from the artist onto the "lady who waits" herself. It recalls that wonderfully bittersweet song from the musical HAIR "Frank Mills" where the persona bewails the absence of her (one night) lover: "If you see him, tell him...

What's so deep is not some sort of physical measurement here, which would make no sense in relation to a male, but how deeply funk artistry has been able to penetrate down through the layers of civilization to renew that primitive rhythm of life, sex, and dance.

How can you not want to move your feet when you hear it?

GENIUS!!

Not really sure what this song is about other than a basic love song with an odd music video.

This song is pure genius. Tom Tom Club, as one of the pioneers of hip-hop, espouse their philosophy here. "Funk mutation" is the thesis: take what's out there and help it evolve. The roll call covers the gamut of influences (R&B, funk, soul, reggae, rap, rock), which should be obvious, except perhaps Jim Bohannon, a pop culture radio host who used bumper music. The fact that Mariah Carey sampled it, rappers have covered it, and Jim Bohannon uses the song as the lead-in for his bumper music, shows the cyclic nature of hip-hop.

Also, it's a love song. Weymouth is singing about Frantz. Considering the influence of the song, he really is a maven of funk mutation.

I don't remember hearing a sample of this in Heartbreaker?? I only remember it being in Fantasy..

Its about drugs, but how bad they are. All the name dropping of people you want to be, but taking drugs doesnt get you there - only further away. The boyfriend shows all these bad things and has indeed been in jail.

Oops, double post...great song by the way! One of my faves...

does weymouth say "nasty fun"in the stop making sense recording?