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Then, there are the lyrics, simple and innocent: I'm in heaaa-ven/With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend …

The tune is mesmerizing and hip — it's been sampled by musicians ranging from Mariah Carey to the X-ecutioners — and can currently be heard as background music during a commercial for Kia Motors.

It almost defies the imagination that "Genius of Love," by the Tom Tom Club, is 21 years old.

"It's the song that wouldn't die," says Chris Frantz, an alumnus of Shady Side Academy in Fox Chapel, who, with his wife Tina Weymouth, started the band as a side project while they were members of the Talking Heads. "In the business, it's known as an evergreen. The song doesn't go out of style, and it sounds just as fresh as it did in 1981."

The Tom Tom Club will appear Friday at the Bitz Building for "H'Art & Soul of Haiti," a benefit for Hopital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti.

The Tom Tom Club? Yeah, they're still around, even as Frantz admits it was something of a struggle in the 1990s, when the group's profile waned.

"If you ask the question in San Francisco (where Frantz and Weymouth reside) you might get a different answer, but if you ask somebody in Pittsburgh, or even Philadelphia — 'Have you heard anything about the Tom Tom Club?' — chances are they'll say 'no,'" he says.

Which is sad considering that Frantz and Weymoth were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year with former bandmates David Byrne and Jerry Harrison as members of the Talking Heads. That quartet, started at the Rhode Island School of Design, was, with the Ramones, Television and Blondie, America's answer to the punk explosion taking place in England in the late 1970s.

The Heads, however, answered the challenge of the Sex Pistols and the Clash with an idiosyncratic take on art rock. Their music was smart, snappy and challenging, and critics and fans often assumed Byrne was the group's genie unleashed. But behind Byrne's hyperkinetic performances were Frantz's percussion and Weymouth's bass acting as the band's backbone. Listen closely to the snaking bass line in the cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River," the throbbing pulse of "Life During Wartime," or the tropical and African rhythms of the album "The Name of This Band is Talking Heads," and you can hear Frantz and Weymouth shaping the music.

To this day, Weymouth still can't understand why Byrne took it upon himself to dismantle Talking Heads. When the band's legendary show at the Stanley Theater during its "Speaking in Tongues" tour in 1983 is recalled, she audibly sighs.

"We were so shocked when David said 'Oh, that's it, I'm not doing this anymore,'" she says. "It was, the movie ('Stop Making Sense') will tour for us. But there you go. So now we've got this band, and I guess you've not seen Tom Tom Club live."

Few have, although the band is experiencing a bit of a revival by way of an unusual route. The past couple of years have seen Tom Tom Club playing at jam band festivals.

Weymouth traces Tom Tom Club's alliance with that musical faction to 1988, when the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir would come to catch the band during a residency at CBGBs, the legendary New York City punk club. Later that year, the Dead members asked Tom Tom Club to join them for its annual New Year's Eve show. More recently, Weymouth notes, Tom Tom Club has been embraced by fans of Phish.

"They have much more in common with the audiences before MTV," she says. "They really don't care about your gender, your age, your color. … All they care about is can you play, which is what music is about."

"They don't care if you have a hit record," Frantz adds. "They like people who have soul and people who have chops."

And Tom Tom Club still has both. The band's new double CD, "Live at the Clubhouse," features the group at its peak, with stirring versions of "Take Me to the River," "Wordy Rappinghood," and, of course, "Genius of Love." If it sounds familiar, Frantz says, just listen to what is played on the radio.

"I think if you listen to contemporary R&B or hip-hop, a band like Destiny's Child, except for the color of their skin, is really totally modeled on the Tom Tom Club," Frantz says. "The beat, the kind of harmonies, the phrasing, the sort of soft quality in the vocal, as opposed to a more gospel shouting.

"And it's not just Destiny's Child. If you listen to WAMO in Pittsburgh, you'll hear the influence of the Tom Tom Club pretty strongly, I'll say. Although a lot of people don't know who the Tom Tom Club is or where they came from. They don't know the guy who played those funky beats came from Shady Side Academy."

Maybe now, they will.

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