TOTO "africa" classic or dud

Recently, I saw the video for the first time in many years and I was relieved to discover that it still doesn't make any sense. So he's got this ripped page from a book, and he's looking for the source book while wearing some silly outback hate and the band plays on this obviously fake pile of books and a bunch of random African tribespeople show up and try to kill him and the librarian is supposed to be this "Hot For Teacher"-type cutie (I think?) and then the library burns along with the book he was looking for but never found.

WTF?

"Rosanna," "I'll Be Over You," "99" and "I Won't Hold You Back" also get a fair amount of airplay in my household.

that they manage to squeeze that whole 'Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus over the Serengeti' bit all into one line makes it an all-time classic.

Why hasn't anyone sampled it yet?

A little bit better than "Hold The Line" I think, a lot better than the "The Flame", a bit short of "Boys Of Summer", a long way off matching "Don't Stop Believing".

Never could understand the narrative of the video.

>'Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus over the Serengeti'

Horrible lyric, and they DON'T manage to make that clunky line scan at all!

And then a couple of years later they did the soundtrack to Dune, which was also great. Result! As they say.

(To my knowledge I've not heard the Ja Rule track but that's probably because every other Ja Rule track I've heard sent me to sleep.)

And Piter de Vries! (I always had this weird idea that "Stranger in Town" was kinda their song *about* Paul Atreides -- if you stretch it all a bit. "The Sean Youngs think he's Jesus...")

Sure you could always criticize a band that consists of studio musicians that prefer to demonstrate how well and faultless they play rather than writing good songs.
But, they did write good songs back then.

my band covers this song

i think an OB-Xa was used for the main saw wave page and a ARP synth for the bell.

One of the ten best songs ever.

It's true -- it's all about that chorus.

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/a-hilarious-and-deep-look-into-totos-africa.334359/

Steve Hoffman
Your Host
Your Host
"Africa" by Toto. One of my favorite songs, I'll shout it from the rooftops.
Nov 13, 2013
theMess, OneStepBeyond, DrAftershave and 23 others like this.

I finally heard this Weezer thing and what bugs me the most actually is that they covered it IN A LOWER KEY

Tbf the notes are ridic high

I bless the key change of Africa

sure as kilmanjaro rises only 75% of the height of olympus above the serengeti

Half step down so more like 91-92%!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7n6iYXiBb8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzrToqsPmyw

bobby actually comments on this one complaining about the monitors lol

good rehersel imo

wow there's a really sad biopic to be made here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jafRIOpxoc

Name sounded familiar and turns out the author of this was in Hugo Largo.

http://www.realclearlife.com/music/weezers-africa-worst-pop-recording-time/

points off for referring to “Separate Ways” as “Journey’s ‘Love Will Find You’” but does make me want to hear Toto’s “Hash Pipe”

you can summon conceptually and creatively loathsome music like . . . anything by Oingo Boingo

GTFO with this

Rock’n’Roll is the sound of America’s disenfranchised, made electric.

Rock'n'roll has been The Establishment for at least 40 years if not longer, and you don't get to just blithely claim hip-hop as "rock'n'roll" for whatever the purposes of this argument are.

v difficult karaoke song ime

“All those little musical catchphrases that were in the hit are all there, but it’s taking place in a soundscape that’s the size of the Serengeti. You think, ‘This is background music.’ No. It’s foreground music. It’s a lot of what I listened to when I was doing First National Band, and one of the reasons why without [pedal steel guitarist] Red Rhodes I never would have been able to put it together. First National Band left a lot on the table. This is on the channel called Shitpost Wizard.”

basically somebody needs to play michael the 11 minute version of "don't you know" by the jan hammer group

http://www.citypages.com/music/82-hit-songs-from-1982-wed-rather-hear-than-totos-africa/491395521

haha that might as well be the top 82 numbers between 1 and 82.

re: the realclearlife link…Tim Sommer has in the past couple of years proffered very caffeinated, tedious hot takes for a couple of outlets. as I guess he's trying to be a pundit decades after Hugo Largo and having signed Hootie and the Blowfish. The most notable such outlet was the New York Observer well into the stewardship of one Ken Kurson, a one time punk rocker who worked for Giuliani 10 years ago and who gutted the legacy of the Observer, a paper I treasure having written for, on the say so of jared Kushner. Well into 2016 and Kurson having been a co-writer of one of President Diarrhea's statements re: the retweeted Star of David/cash meme, Sommer continued to associate with Kurson. So he can shut his fucking mouth re: that hair-ruffling line in his weezer/africa jeremiad. When it counted, he worked for a trumpworld lackey, and apparently still associates with the guy, who was up for a national endowment of the arts post until the feds found out that he's a shady piece of shit.

jfc

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-45608054

A music venue in Bristol is going to play Africa by Toto on loop all night to raise funds for an African charity.

DJ Michael Savage will play the US rock band's biggest hit on vinyl for "five hours straight" at The Exchange in Bristol on 30 November.
He said people can be sponsored for how long they last.

Band member Steve Lukather said in a tweet he would "kill someone after about five plays". He added: "Imagine if you will, we cut this 1981. You think YOU have heard it too much? LOL".

They should raise money by saying for every donation they get they will play it a minute less or something.

The local radio station plays this song once every day, so I feel like cumulatively I've listened to it for five hours already.

Lukather seems cool

https://s3.amazonaws.com/allaboutjazz/media/large/1/0/b/a8d54fc8acb569fe079f7f1dbd22b.jpg
checks out

Luke slays on beat it

Are you guys familiar with his guitar teacher?

Luke is a bit of a rockist crybaby

I was at a high school football game today. dJ playing exclusively hip hop until the game started, then switched to Weezer’s Rosanna and Africa

He met you all the way

There was no reason for a cover of this song.

Yeah it should be like those public radio "save a day" campaigns where they fundraise less if they meet their (totally arbitrary) goal.

"We're almost up to the amount where we can stop playing this fucking song!"

And I say that as someone generally well disposed toward the song. It's just that there is, in fact, a limit.

I hope the djs do what's right. Sure as taramasalata rises like a Memphis among the sarin Geddy Lee.

https://pitchfork.com/news/weezers-new-africa-video-stars-weird-al-watch/

Pitbull has released his own version of the song "Africa" by Toto from the #Aquaman soundtrack. pic.twitter.com/QeHaNwNhAv

— Lights, Camera, Pod (@LightsCameraPod) December 13, 2018

I would have never thought that Karl Wolf would have been ahead of the curve 10 years ago, but here we are.

I can't believe we're still not at peak Africa

PINK FLOYD RULES

Watching Weezer perform this on Dick Clark’s Primetime New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, as cheezy 20-somethings exhuberantly sing along.

I am literally standing in the middle of the Serengeti right now and I don't see Kilimanjaro anywhere. I call bs.

Definitely no snow either, but they did know it was Christmas.

We've passed peak Africa, with Pitbull as the shark-jump point. I played the LNTG remix out numerous times in 2018, and the one-ecstatic reaction to it is now on the wane. I'm probably going to retire it in 2019.

("once-ecstatic", duh)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRLfGwQ7Nsw

Africa by Toto to play on eternal loop down in the coastal Namib Desert

"Mr Siedentopf tells the BBC it is set to play forever, with solar batteries "to keep Toto going for all eternity"."

More Bobby Kimball content:

my favourite genre of video is 'bobby kimball from toto trying to perform africa now' pic.twitter.com/WOxzjQg4xY

— ▀▀▀▀▀▀ (@immolations) July 10, 2019

I forgot I'd remixed this

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3rp3s2nBlK/

https://youtu.be/unN7QvSWSTo

ECCOJAMZ

Original content

Lol at Steve’s wristbands in the video

wristband close up

Me reading the Wikipedia entry for this song:

He completed the melody and lyrics for the chorus in about ten minutes

Ah, so that explains why the lyrics are so--

Paich refined the lyrics for six months before showing the song to the rest of the band