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HOW TOTO MADE “AFRICA,” AND WHY WE STILL LOVE IT NOW

AN EARLY-EIGHTIES BAND IN NEED OF HITS, A MID-TEMPO SONG ABOUT A CONFLICTED
MISSIONARY, AND A CATCHY-AS-HELL KEYBOARD HOOK. WHAT HAVE YOU GOT? A BONAFIDE
POP CLASSIC.

The Telegraph
 * James Hall

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Toto: Steve Porcaro, David Hungate, Steve Lukather, Bobby Kimball, David Paich
and Jeff Porcaro in May 1982. Credit: Michael Ochs Archives



Take an early-Eighties band in need of hits, a mid-tempo song about a conflicted
missionary on a parched savanna, a catchy-as-hell keyboard hook and one of the
most syllable-heavy lines in pop music. What have you got? A bonafide pop
classic.

Africa by Toto, released 41 years ago, is a song whose appeal appears to grow
with every passing year. Television shows from Stranger Things to South Park
have featured the song, it’s been sampled by hip hop artists including Nas and
Wiz Khalifa, and covered by everyone from Chris De Burgh to the
none-more-hipster Hackney Colliery Band. In 2018 Africa re-entered the pop
cultural orbit – or should that be seabed? – when rapper Pitbull covered the
song for the Aquaman movie. Within hours of its release, the internet was more
divided about Pitbull’s version than the Red Sea when Moses stood before it.

Peter Robinson of music website Popjustice hailed the cover as “an
end-of-year-list-destroying masterpiece”. One YouTube viewer wrote: “We’ve
peaked as a society.” But many disagreed. “I’ve found the worst song in recorded
history… its awfulness is a spectacle to behold,” was a typical comment on
Twitter. But the fact that Pitbull’s song has made such a splash (and amassed
150,000 YouTube views in just 14 hours) stands testament to what a cherished and
familiar song Africa is.

“We always end our nights with Toto somewhere in the mix,” says Sean Rowley, the
founder of Guilty Pleasures, the popular club night that celebrates cheesy
classics. “It’s an omnipresent track that connects with all ages. Everyone knows
the words and belts it out.”

Dave Fawbert, one of the founders of power ballad club night Ultimate Power,
says that Africa is “without fail” one of the biggest tunes of the night. In the
club’s 11-year history he can’t remember an event when they haven’t played it.
In 2012, the song was listed by NME as having one of music’s all-time most
explosive choruses. And now it has been appropriated by a scaly superhero.



The new-found appreciation for the song is partly explained by millennials’
fondness for Eighties “yacht rock”. There’s certainly a heavy dollop of irony in
their love of this slick and sincere music. And what of the rampant cultural
appropriation in Africa’s video, which features the khaki-clad band – who’d
never been to Africa – and a prowling African tribesman with a spear? Not a
problem for today’s woke youth, it seems. Besides, it was years before they were
born. Not an issue.

Perhaps Aquaman’s producers were tapping into this pan-generational and knowing
appeal when they commissioned the song for the film. For years now it’s been
impossible to go to a festival, wedding or karaoke bar without hearing Africa
somewhere in the mix. So why not put it on the silver screen too?

Popjustice’s Robinson notes that Pitbull has stripped the song to its “total
bare minimum” of just verse-chorus-verse-chorus, with no pre-chorus, post-chorus
or middle eight. But while this may make the song more immediate for
cinema-goers, it belies the complexity that made the original song the much
loved masterpiece it became. “I’m so sorry Toto,” wrote YouTube subscriber Pug
after he’d heard the Aquaman version.

Drill down, experts say, and Toto’s Africa is an expertly crafted and subtly
layered piece of music played by virtuoso musicians. “It’s a really remarkable
bit of songwriting,” says Prof Joe Bennett, a musicologist based at Berklee
College of Music in Boston, USA.

Jeff Porcaro of Toto performing in 1988

In 1981, the Los Angeles band were desperately in need of hits. Their first two
albums were successful but their third record, 1981’s Turn Back, flopped.
Columbia Records was on the verge of dropping them. Their next album needed to
be something special. Luckily Toto IV was just that, selling 12 million copies
and winning them six Grammys. And its standout track was Africa.

Singer David Paich was messing around with a new keyboard and he alighted on
what would become the song’s vaguely exotic and dreamlike opening riff. He then
hummed a melody. “‘Hang on,” I thought. “I’m a talented songwriter but I’m not
this talented,’” Paich told the Guardian in 2018. Meanwhile drummer Jeff Porcaro
worked on the percussion, adding conga drums, a cowbell and a shaker to a
mid-tempo beat from a kit. He created a tape loop. As a child, Porcaro was
inspired seeing the drummers in the African pavilion of the 1964 New York World
Fair. That memory infused his beat.

Lyrically, the song was written from the point of view of a missionary in
Africa, torn between his lover flying in presumably to take him home and his
love for Africa itself. Unsurprisingly, some bandmates were sceptical of Paich’s
song. “‘Dave, man, Africa? We’re from north Hollywood. What the f--- are you
writing about? ‘I bless the rains down in Africa?’ Are you Jesus, Dave?’” was
the precise reaction of Toto guitarist Steve “Luke” Lukather, according to an
interview this year. He promised to run naked down Hollywood Boulevard if it was
a hit.

But a hit it was, reaching number one in the US singles chart. Musicologist
Bennett says the song stands out on many levels.



Firstly, there’s the structure of the original. Africa starts slowly and builds,
with each element layering on top of the one before. There are essentially two
keyboard riffs: the main one is immediately followed by a kalimba thumb piano
motif (played on a keyboard, naturally). And there’s a pause at the end of each
verse, leading to heightened anticipation for the chorus. Musical elements creep
in, like acoustic guitar and a subtly more complex bass part. The song is a
journey.

“What we’re hearing in Africa is virtuoso musicians playing simple things really
well,” says Bennett. “It’s very tastefully played. Lukather is a virtuoso
guitarist who could have solo-ed all over that track. Yet there are whole
sections with no guitars at all.”

This subtlety comes hand in hand with an emotionally wrought singalong chorus,
the higher pitch of which encourages listeners to belt it out. (Its four-chord
progression is what’s technically known as the “six-four-one-five” loop – you
also can hear it in Beyoncé’s If I Were A Boy, and Coldplay’s Paradise.)

Toto in 1997

But the main reason that Africa stands out is because of its lyrics and
narrative wistfulness. Yes, it’s cheesy and vaguely ridiculous, but the use of
imagery is exemplary. We have echoing drums, the moon and stars reflecting off
the wings of an incoming lover’s aeroplane, a wise old man, and wild dogs crying
out at night. We also have a narrator who’s utterly conflicted, telling Africa
that it would take an awful lot – not even “a hundred men or more” – to drag him
away from it. Then, of course, there’s the song’s most memorable line. “As sure
as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti,” Paich sings.

The line may be daft: Kilimanjaro is well over 300km from the Serengeti and it
is vastly higher than Olympus, making the comparison strange (this hasn’t
stopped Toto-obsessed mathematicians from developing equations to establish
whether the line could be true, in fact). But, as Bennett points out, the melody
doesn’t change as Paich sings this line, meaning you can “hear him pushing and
struggling” to fit the words in, adding to his sense of mounting anguish.

As a song, Africa is an impressive package. But the arrangement, the dynamics,
the musicianship, the production, the lyrics and the tune that made the original
so memorable are missing in the Pitbull cover. It’s a bluntened version of the
song. It’s Africa shorn of its complexity. Watered down, if you will.

Does this matter? Not really. If the Aquaman version can prolong the song’s
longevity than that’s perhaps not a bad thing.

Besides, Toto have had cinematic connections in the past. Toto’s current singer,
Joseph Williams (son of film score composer John), provided the adult singing
voice of Simba in Disney’s The Lion King.

It was always likely that Toto’s song would be the mid-tempo gift that kept on
giving. And so it has proven this Christmas with the Aquaman soundtrack. Some of
the negative comments may be as pointed as Neptune’s trident. But the fuss
simply demonstrates this four-decades-old song’s enduring appeal.

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How was it? Save stories you love and never lose them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This post originally appeared on The Telegraph and was published December 14,
2018. This article is republished here with permission.

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