Africa - The Best of Toto
How to explain Gen Z’s obsession with Africa, Toto’s pillow-soft yacht rock meme-weaver that became an analogue anthem for the digital age? Laden with yearning for an entire continent the band had never visited, it’s a curious candidate for veneration by a generation unforgiving of white men who “bless the rains down in Africa”.
If there were any concerns about culturally insensitive lyrical content at the time (upon first hearing the song guitarist Steve Lukather apparently said: “Dave [Paich] man, Africa? We’re from North Hollywood”), then the video director’s response appears to have been: “Hold my beer”:
Africa and the album it sprang from, Toto IV, were actually a last roll of the dice for Toto in 1982. Three albums deep, the band were under immense pressure from their label Columbia to repeat the success of their eponymous first LP, telling them they needed to “pull one off” – meaning deliver a significant hit – or face being dropped.
A concerted effort to rediscover the radio-friendly sound of Hold The Line gave rise to Rosanna, the album’s Grammy-nominated and bacon-saving first single. Africa was an eleventh-hour studio afterthought that no one in the band really believed in, and which almost didn’t make the final cut.
Certainly no one expected it to chart. “If this is a hit,” declared Lukather, “I’ll run naked down Hollywood Boulevard.” But chart it did – it’s still the band’s only US number one – and went on to become Toto’s defining song.
Even less explicable is its late-2010s meme-culture resurgence, catalysed by a flurry of TV synchs like Stranger Things, South Park and Family Guy that helped turn it into internet catnip for millennials and zoomers. In 2017 Africa appeared on a list of the UK’s most streamed songs alongside 21st century pop royalty such as Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande.
As to the perennial question of whether Kilimanjaro really does rise above the Serengeti as the lyric has it, most authorities agree that the former cannot even be seen from the latter. None of which appears to have had the slightest impact on millions of people’s enjoyment of Africa down the years, so who are we to argue!
