It’s been dismissed, reviled (not least by the band), accused of cultural appropriation, its video accused of racism. But more than four decades after its release, Toto’s Africa seems indestructible.
It’s been streamed over a billion times on Spotify and over a billion times on Youtube and its appeal spans generations – it’s been used in countless TV shows from Stranger Things to South Park, from Family Guy to The Simpsons, and in thousands upon thousands of memes.
There is even a sound installation in the Namib desert that uses solar power to play it on a constant loop; as long as the sun keeps generating light and heat (ie for at least the next 5 billion years) it will be heard by whatever lifeforms chance across it. Africa will long outlast humanity.
Back in 1981, it was something of an afterthought. At the time, Toto badly needed a hit. It had been three years since their breakthrough hit Hold The Line and the albums since – 1979’s Hydra and Turn Back from 1981 had only performed modestly. “They (the record company) came right out with it,” Steve Lukather explained to CBS News in 2022. “Like if you guys don’t pull one right out now, you’re done. Then we just said we should just go back to doing what we do – write good songs and record them.”
And so the band set to work on a new album, and with Rosanna in the bag, felt certain that they had something they could throw Columbia’s way. Africa was the last track to be recorded for Toto IV and its composer, David Paich needed to persuade his bandmates to commit fully to it.
In a 2005 interview with Mix, Paich explained how he came up with the idea for the song: “Over many years, I had been taken by the UNICEF ads with the pictures of Africa and the starving children. I had always wanted to do something to connect with that and bring more attention to the continent. I wanted to go there, too, so I sort of invented a song that put me in Africa.”
“I was hearing the melody in my head and I sat down and played the music in about 10 minutes. And then the chorus came out. I sang the chorus out as you hear it. It was like God channeling it. I thought, ‘I'm talented, but I'm not that talented. Something just happened here!’”
Famously, Paich had not set foot in Africa when he wrote the lyrics (nor had any of the band for that matter). “It was totally aspirational,” he told CBS. “I just wanted to see the world, you know. That was just me writing ‘what if… what if?’
Paich collared drummer Jeff Porcaro and convinced him of the idea of making percussion the central part of the track. “Jeff got out African sticks with bottle caps that his dad (Joe Porcaro) had used on National Geographic films. He brought in a marimba and a wooden xylophone kind of thing. This was pre-synthesizer. We didn't have samples back then. You're hearing bass marimba, that other instrument, and you're hearing probably one of the first loops that was ever done.”
Porcaro and percussionist Lenny Castro worked up a rhythm on bass and snare drums, hi hat and congas. Over that they overdubbed a cowbell and shaker. Speaking to Modern Drummer in 1988, Porcaro remembered: “We went back in, cut the tape and made a one-bar tape loop that went 'round and 'round and 'round.”
“We took that tape, transferred it onto another 24-track for six minutes, and David Paich and I went out in the studio. The song started and I was sitting there with a complete drum set and Paich was playing.
"When he got to the fill before the chorus, I started playing the chorus, and when the verse or the intro came back, I stopped playing. Then we had piano and drums on tape. Then we had to do bongos, jingle sticks and big shakers doing quarter notes, maybe stacking two tracks of sleigh bells, two tracks of big jingle sticks and two tracks of tambourines all down to one track. I was trying to get the sounds I would hear in a National Geographic special.”
With the percussive bed in place, the rest of the band were overdubbed. Paich recorded the opening refrain on a Yahama CS80. “Then David Hungate put his bass on, Steve put a guitar on, I put some more piano on,” Paich told Mix.
“We did the track and I was still working on the lyrics. Everyone tried to sing the song — there were a lot of lyrics to fit into a small amount of space. Bobby (Kimball) tried to sing it and he couldn't phrase it right. Steve tried, but I ended up doing it by default. I'm an Elton John fan and he fits a lot of words into his songs. When we get to the chorus, it's Bobby, Steve and Timmy Schmidt singing. The legendary Jim Horn came in and played recorders in the second verse.”
But having spent so long on the track, the rest of the band were tired of Africa, and Paich had to fight his corner for its inclusion on Toto IV. “I didn’t think it should be on the album,” synth player Steve Porcaro told Billboard in 2018. “Now that’s not to say I didn’t kill myself on it, I worked very hard on Africa. But all along, I never thought it should be on the album. I just didn’t think it fit, I didn’t think it was us. Lukather felt the same way.”
The guitarist famously contended that he would run naked down Hollywood Boulevard if Africa was a hit. “Not because of the groove or the track,” he insisted to Billboard in 2018. “But because of the fucking lyrics! I’m going, ‘We’re from North Hollywood! What the fuck do we have to sing about Africa?’”
Nevertheless, despite Lukather’s misgivings, it made the album and the lead single Rosanna gave Toto their much-needed hit, reaching Number Two on Billboard in the summer of 1982. When club DJs started picking up on Africa, the record company decided to release it as the follow-up.
Talking to Billboard in 2018, Paich recalled: “I think that Sony in New York at the time had popped it into a dance place or a disco, and it started getting some legs. So they followed through and thought, ‘Well, let’s release one last thing here,’ and decided to put it out there.”
Africa reached Number One on Billboard in early 1983 and even went Top 3 in the UK at a time when soft rock was hardly flavour of the month. Together with Toto IV, it rebooted the band’s career – the album went four times platinum in the States alone and the band scooped no less than six Grammys at the 1983 awards.
But Africa has had many lives since then. Soft rock went out of favour and the song became a sitting duck of sorts – a bunch of hairy white dudes singing about a continent they’ve never visited epitomised the complacency and self-satisfaction that came to be associated with that generation of US rock.
There have been accusations of racism thrown at its video (reviewing it on Stereogum in 2020, David Breihan called it “shockingly racist”) and about the use of marimbas and that kalimba-sounding synth to denote ‘ethnicity’. But whilst a similar-of-its-time track like Illegal Alien by Genesis has been discreetly placed at the back of rock’s dusty wardrobe, Africa has only grown in popularity. Why?
Part of the reason must be two converging trends: guilty pleasures and the revival of interest in so-called yacht rock. During the 1990s and for much of the Noughties, Toto and their hirsute contemporaries were dismissed as out-of-date jokes, but since the advent of streaming, there has been a renewed interest in their melodic, sumptuously-produced music.
At the heart of the guilty pleasures phenomenon was a reclaiming of songs once regarded as critically beyond the pale. In this, Africa fitted perfectly. It’s a hard track to get angry about – it’s undeniably catchy, musically well-crafted and, seen through the lens of history, Paich’s lyrics have a kind of bumbling, well-intentioned-and-endearing quality to them (best exemplified by the line about Kilimanjaro rising ‘like Olympus above the Serengeti’ – in reality they are over a hundred miles from each other.
Critic Carl Wilson said of Africa in a 2018 Billboard piece that: “It kind of went from being an ‘80s period joke to a kind of evergreen, humorous-but-also-serious classic-level embrace. It’s kind of become detached from its context.”
“I think it’s too dumb for anybody to insult their own intelligence by mounting a serious critique of it. Like, you’d be the biggest fun-killer in the world with your politics if you were like, “I want to seriously talk about Toto’s Africa now.”
It’s been memed, covered, debated, laughed at, poked and prodded in its forty year life, but even once-doubtful band members have now made their peace with it. Speaking to the Guardian in 2018 Steve Lukather said: “I have to sit here and eat my words because Africa has become a standard and I’m very proud of David for it.”
“I mean, I’d been playing it since 1982. But we’ve outlived our haters and it’s been very good to me. I never did run naked down Hollywood Boulevard. These days, I’d be lucky to hobble down it.”
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