‘The Jean Genie’: the David Bowie classic that was denied a number one by a song with the same riff
The story goes that David Bowie once told James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, “You can’t steal from a thief, darling”. This declaration came after the New Yorker had openly informed Bowie of his love the Starman’s work and that he had stolen from him “liberally”. Whilst it says a lot about Murphy’s artistic debt to Bowie, this exchange says more about Bowie’s career-long penchant for cherrypicking from others than it does anything else.
There are many examples of Bowie “creatively borrowing” segments of work from others, but one of the most prominent is his 1972 hit ‘The Jean Genie’, the lead single from 1973’s Aladdin Sane. Boasting one of his most famous riffs, played by the late Mick Ronson, the track is inspired by a handful of other artists.
According to legend, the song originated as the impromptu jam ‘Bussin” while on the tour bus between shows in Cleveland and Memphis during ‘The Ziggy Stardust Tour’. It started when Ronson played a Bo Diddley-inspired riff on his new Les Paul. The jam became the first song Bowie penned for Aladdin Sane in the autumn of 1972, completing its creation when in New York City. During this period, Bowie spent a considerable amount of time with Andy Warhol associate Cyrinda Foxe, and he later admitted that he wrote it for her. He said: “I wrote it for her amusement in her apartment. Sexy girl”.
The swaggering R&B chug of the riff has long been likened to The Yardbirds’ style and, particularly, their cover of Bo Diddley’s classic ‘I’m a Man’, which is very similar. Elsewhere, it has also been compared to the dark blues of Jacques Dutronic’s 1966 piece ‘La Fille du Père Noël’.
With that, the song’s title is often taken as an allusion to author Jean Genet. In 2005’s Moonage Daydream, Bowie ambiguously discussed the title and riff, as he explained: “Starting out as a lightweight riff thing I had written one evening in NY for Cyrinda’s enjoyment, I developed the lyric to the otherwise wordless pumper, and it ultimately turned into a bit of a smorgasbord of imagined Americana … based on an Iggy-type persona … the title, of course, was a clumsy pun upon Jean Genet”.
Most ironically, controversy arose in the UK when Bowie’s fellow RCA act, The Sweet, released the single ‘Block Buster!’ in January 1973, which contains a very similar central riff to ‘The Jean Genie’. Written by the hit-making songwriting partnership of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, ‘Block Buster!’ hit number one in the UK charts, whilst ‘The Jean Genie’ sat in tenth place – effectively keeping it from the top spot. It is uncanny how alike the riffs of both songs are.
Interestingly, all parties involved with both pieces maintained that their similarities were – as Nicky Chinn put it – an “absolute coincidence”. He would go on to describe a meeting with Bowie, where ‘The Jean Genie’ songwriter “looked at me completely deadpan and said ‘C**t!’ And then he got up and gave me a hug and said, ‘Congratulations…'”
Revisit both songs below.
