The Jean Genie by David Bowie

The Jean Genie is a David Bowie song recorded with the Spiders from Mars in New York on October 6, 1972. RCA released it as a single on November 24, 1972, the first single from the album Aladdin Sane. It climbed to number two in the UK, his biggest hit up to that point, and stalled at number 71 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States.

Mick Ronson came up with a chugging riff in the style of Bo Diddley on the tour bus during the American leg of the Ziggy Stardust tour, somewhere on the road between shows in Cleveland and Memphis, while playing around with a new Les Paul. The band jammed on it and gave it the working title Bussin'. The riff is close to the Yardbirds' version of I'm a Man, which itself came from Bo Diddley.

Bowie turned the jam into a finished song in New York that autumn. It was the first thing he wrote for Aladdin Sane, and he later called it his first New York song. He said he wrote it to amuse Cyrinda Foxe and described the lyric as a smorgasbord of imagined Americana. Its main character drew on Iggy Pop, though Bowie was careful to say the figure was not literally Iggy. The title plays on the name of the French writer Jean Genet, a pun Bowie later dismissed as clumsy.

The session took place at RCA Studios on East 24th Street in Manhattan. Bowie sang, played rhythm guitar and added harmonica. Ronson played lead guitar and sang backing vocals, Trevor Bolder played bass, and Mick Woodmansey played drums and tambourine. Bowie produced it with Ken Scott. Bolder remembered the session taking about an hour and a half. He came into the chorus early on the take that was kept, and Bowie liked the mistake enough to leave it in. The track was mixed the following week at RCA Studio B in Nashville. The single mix sits in a narrow stereo field, while the album mix spreads the instruments wider.

Shortly after the single came out in the UK, the Sweet released Block Buster!, and its riff was close enough to Ronson's that people noticed at once. Block Buster! went to number one while The Jean Genie was still in the Top 10. Bowie's single spent 13 weeks on the chart and peaked at number two, kept off the top by Little Jimmy Osmond's Long Haired Lover from Liverpool. Everyone involved said the likeness between the two riffs was an accident. Nicky Chinn, who co-wrote the Sweet's song, later recalled that Bowie met him with a rude joke and then a hug and congratulations.

Outside Britain the single did well across Europe, reaching number three in Ireland, number five in the Netherlands, number seven in the French-speaking part of Belgium and number eight in Spain. It went silver in the UK and gold in New Zealand. Reviews at the time were mixed. Record World found it disappointing and complained that Bowie had borrowed an ancient riff, and the biographer David Buckley later called it derivative and plodding while admitting it was catchy. Critics' lists have been kinder since. Uncut placed it 11th among Bowie's songs, and it also appears in rankings by The Guardian, NME and Mojo.

Mick Rock filmed the promotional clip in San Francisco in October 1972. It cuts concert and studio footage together with scenes shot around the Mars Hotel, with Foxe playing alongside Bowie. Bowie wanted Ziggy to come across as a sort of Hollywood street rat, and casting Foxe was part of that plan.

On January 4, 1973, the BBC broadcast the band playing the song live on Top of the Pops, with Ronson stretching out on an extended solo. The BBC later wiped the tape, and the performance survived only because the cameraman John Henshall had kept a copy, shot through his own fisheye lens. That copy was screened at the British Film Institute in December 2011, and the BBC aired it again on a Top of the Pops 2 Christmas special that same month.

The Jean Genie became one of the songs Bowie played most on stage. It turned up on almost every solo tour he made, missing only the Hours and Heathen tours. He played it as a long jam with Jeff Beck at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, as a slow cabaret number on the Diamond Dogs tour, as the closing encore of the 1976 Isolar tour, and paired with Satisfaction on the 1987 Glass Spider tour. In 1996 he tried it as an acoustic piece, and Billy Corgan joined him for it at his 50th birthday concert in 1997. Live versions appear on David Live and Live Santa Monica '72, and the studio track is on compilations from Changesonebowie onward. The key and BPM page for The Jean Genie lists the song's key and tempo.

The line about a character so simple-minded he can't drive his module gave the Scottish band Simple Minds their name. The BBC police drama Life on Mars used the song, with DCI Gene Hunt calling himself the Gene Genie, and the follow-up series Ashes to Ashes used an instrumental version as Hunt's theme. Anton Corbijn put it in Control, his 2007 film about Ian Curtis. Dozens of artists have covered it, including the Dandy Warhols, Shed Seven, Paul Young and Scott Weiland, and OMD played it live on BBC Radio 2 in 2019.