"Genius of Love" (Tom Tom Club)

“Genius of Love” (1981) has become such an ol' skool R&B staple that many people fail to realize that Tom Tom Club was actually a side project of Talking Heads.  Specifically, Tina Weymouth (bass/vocals) and her husband Chris Frantz (drums) took a break after touring to promote Remain in Light (1980) and headed to Nassau, Bahamas, for a little r&r (rum and rock lobster…rest and reggae…reefer and relaxation…okay, I’ll stop now). 
During their stay, Weymouth and Frantz often would unwind by listening to music and jamming with various musicians and friends.  They called the ragtag bunch “Tom Tom Club” in honor of the Bahamian club where they’d first rehearsed.
As Frantz notes in a 2011 Vulture article, they weren’t listening/jamming out to New Wave or post-punk during these get-togethers; they were listening to dance music.
“When we wanted to relax and have a good time, we’d put on Bohannon or Parliament Funkadelic, not The Clash. They’re fantastic, but to unwind and have a good time, we preferred Smokey Robinson & the Miracles or James Brown. We also loved reggae music.”
So when their pal Chris Blackwell (founder of Island Records and Nassau’s Compass Point Studios, where Talking Heads had recorded several albums) invited them to the studio to record a single as Tom Tom Club, they pretty much knew what they wanted to do.
“There was this one song that I loved called ‘More Bounce to the Ounce’ by a group called Zapp, and ‘Genius of Love’ was inspired by that.”
In fact, the whole song is more or less a shout-out to the artists they liked to chill out to--which explains Frantz intoning Jaaames Brooown!  Jaaames Broooooown! at the end of the song.