Sometimes one wonders about the human capacity for mindless entertainment. There is on Twitter an account called @africabytotobot, which since August 2016 has done nothing but tweet out single lines from the 1982 single “Africa”by the soft rock band Toto. At the time of writing, it had offered the world 5,374 lines from the song, winning nearly 44,000 followers in the process. As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti, people love “Africa”.
“Africa” was written by Toto’s drummer, Jeff Porcaro, and keyboard player, David Paich. Paich’s lyric tried to describe his feelings about a continent he had never been to in words filled with false nostalgia and riddled with errors — you can’t see Kilimanjaro from the Serengeti, for example — yet it felt romantic and yearning. Paich had been obsessed with Africa as a child, when he had attended a Catholic school at which several of the teachers were former missionaries who had worked in Africa. As an adult he wrote a song about a woman flying in to meet one of those lonely missionaries in Africa, based on an idealised Africa from the teachers’ stories, and from copies of National Geographic magazine. It’s crucial that it’s not a song about Africa, but about the stew of ideas and half-truths from which we create our own romanticised notions of place.
Paich’s lyric was just mysterious enough, oddly reminiscent of Casablanca and accompanied by a video that echoed the films inspired by 1930s Saturday morning serials that were so popular in the early 1980s, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone. It was aided by a musical arrangement that was alluring without being difficult: the opening keyboard lineis a fanfare that tails off, unresolved, setting up the verses, which offer the reassurance that the fanfare does not. These days, no group would dare indulge in the cod-African solosin the song’s middle section, or use marimba to signify “foreignness”, but time is forgiving: they are part of its period charm now.
“Africa” was a huge hit at the time — a US number one, number three in the UK and top 10 around the world — because it was indelible. It was also cover-proof: it was such a distinctive combination of elements that you either copied it straight (as Chris De Burghdid, pointlessly) or you left it alone. But it was also a little cheesy, which is perhaps what gave it a substantial afterlife: “Africa” was perfect for the reclamation in the age of Guilty Pleasures. That, perhaps, is why it first started popping up in popular culture: on South Park and Family Guy, on Community and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. It had become popular with a generation too young to have known it first time round.
And from there it transitioned to the internet. Not just to @africabytotobot, but to the website ibless.therains.downin.africa, which plays the song’s video on a constant loop, and — more importantly — to places that allowed people who loved the song to share that love with others. That’s where “Africa”’s true popularity became apparent: when two middle-aged men performing the song in a Utah pizzeria can get more than 10m views on YouTube, or the owner of a recording studio in Norway can get 22m views for his own metal version of the song. You can even get half a million views playing the song on a squeaking rubber chicken toy, if that’s your thing. It’s easy to get lost in this stuff: there’s even a subreddit for people to share their own cover versions of “Africa”.
And then it crossed the line from private passion to public pleasure. As well as the individual performances, YouTube hosts mass singalongs of “Africa” in public places: flashmobs in Birmingham, Newcastle, Queensland; 1,000 people raising money for the Water Project by singing it outside the White House. Fan power spilled back into the recording industry, leading to the latest cover, by Weezer, after a Twitter account called @weezerafrica — run by a 14-year-old who had heard about the song via friends who followed the retro TV show Stranger Things — spent months bombarding the band with requests for the song. At the end of May Weezer relented, and their version duly went into the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart.
If it ever was about Africa, Toto’s biggest hit has long ceased to be tied to that. Now it is about the simply joy people take in melody. It is a song that exists to be sung — by flashmobs, by festival crowds at late-night discos, by families in long car journeys. It embodies what great music is all about.
We’re keen to hear from our readers. Is singing along to “Africa” a guilty pleasure? Have you ever taken part in an “Africa” flashmob? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Columbia, UMC (Universal Music Catalogue), Crush Music/Atlantic
Picture credit: Rob Verhorst/Redferns