The first is here<\/a>.)<\/p>\nThis entry is both about the song and about the radio station on which I heard it the most as a kid.<\/p>\n
Tom Tom Club was a side project of married couple Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, members of Talking Heads. In Tom Tom Club, they branched out from Talking Heads more avant-garde sound into dance-oriented music. Which made sense as they served as Talking Heads rhythm section, Frantz on drums and Weymouth on bass.<\/p>\n
\u201cGenius of Love\u201d was the biggest song of Tom Tom Club\u2019s career. It topped the the Billboard Disco chart and reached #2 on the Hot Soul Singles chart. More on that in a second.<\/p>\n
That success on the Disco and Soul charts wasn\u2019t enough to drive strong pop chart success. \u201cGenius of Love\u201d slowly simmered on the pop charts for three months before it finally cracked the Top 40. From its peak at #31, it dropped a massive 54 spots to #85 in early May and was gone soon after.<\/p>\n
Yet the song made its mark. Thanks to its overall funkiness and its shoutouts to legends of the Black music world, it got serious airplay on Black radio. From that exposure, it became one of the most sampled songs of the 1980s, both in other dance and R&B songs, and in hip hop.<\/p>\n
My early knowledge of the song came from its more obscure chart success. In the early \u201880s, my mom bounced around in her default radio stations. She would listen to pop stations, to adult contemporary stations, and to Kansas City\u2019s only soul station, 103.3 KPRS.<\/p>\n
KPRS was a whole new world to me when we moved to Kansas City from a small town in southeast Missouri. My parents had long listened to \u201cBlack\u201d music, but it was to crossover artists like the Commodores, Earth Wind & Fire, Donna Summer, and so on that they heard on pop and disco stations. When we moved to Kansas City in 1980 and they began listening to KPRS, I was hearing all kinds of soul artists that I had never heard before.<\/p>\n
More importantly, KPRS was truly a Black station. It was the first Black-owned radio station west of the Mississippi, and remains the oldest continuously Black-owned station in the country. All the DJs were Black. It featured a nightly news bulletin from the National Black Network, which certainly brought a different perspective than what the AM news-talk stations were providing. Biggest was how KPRS ran ads from Black-owned businesses you just didn\u2019t hear on Q\u2013104, KY\u2013102, and ZZ\u201399. Harold Pener\u2019s clothing store is the most memorable example. Listening to KPRS in the early 1980s opened my ears to a whole different world.<\/p>\n
So how do we tie together \u201cGenius of Love\u201d with KPRS? Well, KPRS played very few white artists back in the day.