Robert Nathan Sheff, known professionally as "Blue" Gene Tyranny, was an American avant-garde composer and pianist.
"His memorable pseudonym, coined during his brief stint with Iggy and the Stooges, was derived partly from Jean, his adoptive mother’s middle name," wrote Steve Smith, in his New York Times obituary for Tyranny. "It also referred to what he called 'the tyranny of the genes' - a predisposition to being 'strongly overcome by emotion,' he said in Just for the Record: Conversations With and About ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, a documentary film."