Reader’s Choice/Tom’s Top Tunes…Song #58/250: Africa by Toto

In today’s post we are going to be talking about a song that was one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. “Africa” by Toto went all the way to the top of the charts. It was the followup single to the song “Rosanna”, which made it all the way to chart position no. 2. If you add in the classic rock staple “Hold the Line” from their debut album, you have the three songs that were Toto’s biggest hits and the ones they are most commonly associated with. One of the most notable things about Toto’s three hits is that all three songs are just as popular today as they were when they were released forty years ago or so. In fact, the song “Africa” has found new life as the foundation for an entire internet meme cottage industry. There are certain songs with catchy choruses and hooks (such as Toto’s “Africa” and Abba’s “Dancing Queen”) that have entered that rarified space in our social consciousness where their popularity appears to be almost universal. To have achieved such a feat is truly an accomplishment. This is especially true when you consider that the members of Toto initially regarded the song as a joke and one band member even offered to run naked down the middle of a busy Los Angeles thoroughfare if the song got any airplay at all on the radio. I am not sure if that bet was ever cashed in but the song itself has certainly achieved more success than almost anyone could have imagined. Good for them. And to think that the song is not really even about Africa. Wait! What!?

Before we go forward with this story, it is important to take a step back in time first. Toto was formed in the late 1970s in Los Angeles. The core members of the band all knew each other in high school. The key early guys who came up with the idea of going from guys fooling around with songs in basements and garages to being an actual band were keyboardist David Paich and drummer Jeff Porcaro. Both of these young men were from musical families. Not only did they experience a home life that was rich in exposure to all genres and eras of music, they had family members who were professional session players. As such, the boys grew up at a time when Steely Dan and Boz Skaggs, for example, were recording albums. Thus, the boys got a chance to experience life as industry insiders. As they grew up and honed their skills, they met other young musicians such as David Hungate (bass guitar), Steve Lukather (lead guitar), Steve Porcaro (brother of Jeff, keyboards) and singer Bobby Kimball and decided to come together as a band and write their own original songs. Because these guys all came from musical families and/or had experience as session players themselves, they were what was known as “studio rats”. They were guys who were always hanging around recording studios, ready to play with anyone who had recording time and was in need of a backup band or individual musicians to fill out their sound. When they weren’t working on the projects of others, the boys who would become Toto would steal away to any empty studio and sneak in some recording time. They had to supply their own equipment, including their own master recording reels. Because they were never actually paying for studio time in those early days, they had to haul everything in with them when they arrived and take everything out again when it was time to go. Because of this, the band got used to labeling their master reels very clearly. At first they didn’t have a band name to call themselves on these reels of tape so they used the short term “Toto” as a placeholder name until they came up with a real name for their band. “Toto” was selected, as you can imagine, after the dog from the movie The Wizard of Oz. After the band had recorded most of the songs that would end up on their debut album, the boys sat down to discuss what their band should be called. As they sat down, surrounded as they were by reel after reel of their songs, all labeled as “Toto this” and “Toto that”, someone mentioned that the Latin phrase in toto meant “all encompassing”. As they thought about that, they realized that the phrase perfectly summed up who they were as musicians. They were all a bunch of guys who had a range of skills and experiences within the industry. They felt the phrase suited them. In the end, they viewed their original decision to use “Toto” as a placeholder name as having been some sort of divine intervention from above. Thus, they called themselves Toto and released their eponymous debut album in 1978. Their days as session players had come to an end.

From that debut album came the hit rock song “Hold the Line”. This song was an instant hit and is one of the songs that formed the soundtrack to my high school years on Cape Breton Island. The late 1970s/early 1980s was a time when arena-rock was big on the radio. Bands like Foreigner, Journey, Kansas, Boston, April Wine and Trooper were all big back home. With the immediate success of “Hold the Line”, it appeared as though Toto was set to join the ranks of the headlining arena rock bands. But this is actually where the seeds of inspiration began to be sown for the song that a few years later would become “Africa”. No one in Toto expected the songs on their debut album to take off the way that “Hold the Line” did. When they recorded the album called Toto, they did so while still having the mindset of being session players. There is a certain level of anonymity that comes from being a session player. You are paid to play on the projects of others. There is no pressure on you, except for maintaining a certain professional standard of skill. But other than that, you come into a studio, you get to learn and grow at the feet of others more skilled and experienced than you and then, you get to go back home and live your life. Being a session player is really all about the craftsmanship of being a musician. The business of the music industry isn’t often your concern. Well, with a big hit song on their hands, the members of Toto suddenly found their world populated by marketing executives and advertisers and tour managers and more. There were now tours to arrange, crews to hire, interviews in every city and town to hold and, all the while, there were growing expectations being placed upon the band for more hit songs just like “Hold the Line”. Sudden success had changed the nature of how the band members viewed their music. The former joy of making music as session players had been replaced by the work needed to be this business of a band called Toto.

One of the things that bothered the guys in Toto most was the fact that they never viewed themselves as being just arena rockers. They had worked with icons such as Steely Dan; a band that incorporated Blues and Jazz into their music which helped to produce some of the most creative and distinctive music of its era. The members of Toto all wanted to diversify their musical signature. The record label had other ideas and only wanted “Hold the Line-II”. Needless to say, there were growing pains as the band figured out how to be who they wanted to be while still running a successful business enterprise that was funded by a seemingly monolithic corporation. Their next two albums had disappointing sales figures and no hits to speak of. By the time it had come for the band to record their fourth album called Toto IV, they were told that if there were no hit songs in this album that the record label was dropping the band. The pressure was clearly on. Many bands would have crumbled under the weight of such demands and expectations but for Toto, they came up with their most successful album to date and two of the three hits songs that have come to define their career.

By the mid-1980s, keyboardist Steve Porcaro was dating actress Rosanna Arquette. From everything I have read, it seems as though they had a pretty good relationship back then. Songwriter David Paich used that relationship (as well as drawing inspiration from several relationships of his own) and wrote the song “Rosanna”. This song was not a hard rock song like “Hold the Line” but was, instead, more of a traditional Pop-Rock offering. The song took off up the charts, settling in as high as No.2. Fans seemed to like the idea of one of the boys in the band having a starlet for a girlfriend. Again, from what I have read, it appears as though Rosanna Arquette was a willing partner in allowing the world to believe that the song was solely about her and Steve Porcaro. While there were some fans who felt as though having Steve Porcaro proclaim his undying love in such a public way was sorta cringy, the success of the song took the heat off of the band in the eyes of their record label. It also gave people something to think about because Toto had now produced two hit songs in different genre styles. It caused them to be viewed as having a diversified sound. From the band’s perspective, it made them tougher to pigeonhole. The next song to be released as a single was “Africa”.

“Africa” has gone on to become one of the most universally loved songs of all time. It climbed to No. 1 on the charts and has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. It is, beyond any question or doubt, the song that most people associate Toto with. But when it was still just a gleam in a songwriter’s eye, before it was ever recorded, there was much debate within the band as to whether this song was even worth recording. The debate centred upon the lyrics used to tell that song’s story. Some in the band thought that the lyrics were cheesy. Some others worried about  whether a band of white males should even be writing songs about Africa. In the end, songwriter David Paich settled the debate by explaining that the song was actually about them. Here is the story of “Africa’ by Toto.

The song “Africa” is set in Africa but it is not about Africa. However, the song was inspired by real events in Africa at the time. Confused? Let me explain. The early 1980s was the time that the world came to learn about the great African famine. When news reports first were broadcast on TV in Europe and North America, people were uniformly horrified with what they saw. The images of the fly-covered bloated bodies of dying children shocked all who saw them, particularly in western countries where everyone seemed to have so much food, money and personal possessions. How could such a tragedy happen in a world of plenty? The reaction to these news broadcasts was swift. The most well known response came from Sir Bob Geldof in the form of the supergroup Band-Aid and the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” *(you can read a previously-written post about that song here).  The financial success of Geldof’s project inspired copycat projects in the U.S. and in Canada and around the world, as well. The musicians and bands who participated in these mega charity single projects were the A-listers of the music world. The weight of their influence propelled these songs to the tops of their respective music charts. However, with such notoriety came a sense of a saviour’s complex. That these white male musicians who had never been to Africa were now, all of a sudden, experts on the politics and geography of an entire continent of people and were explaining it all to the world in song. As the afore-mentioned post mentions, eventually a global backlash set in with regard to the many false statements made about Africa and African peoples in “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. Meanwhile, watching the same news reports as Bob Geldof was David Paich, who wrote many of Toto’s songs.

Even though Toto had two hit songs under their belts, they were not considered to be swimming in the same waters as the likes of bands such as U2, Queen and the Rolling Stones. Thus, they were not swept up in the tsunami of coverage that came with the initial charity singles meant to aid those suffering in Africa. Like the good session players that they were, the band went about the business of commenting on the situation in Africa in a very quiet, professional and business-like manner. David Paich was as appalled and upset as anyone when he viewed those initial news reports from the aid centres in Africa. As he watched those news clips, he was overcome with sadness, not only for the suffering being experienced by those onscreen but also, the loss of the romantic ideals about Africa that many westerners held at the time. Paich thought about this in relation to what he and the band had been experiencing in their own lives with their music careers. None of the guys in the band had gotten into playing music because they wanted to be rich and famous. They picked up their instruments because they loved the art of making music. Somehow, in the rush to chart success, that romantic ideal of why they became musicians in the first place was being lost as well. So, Paich wrote a song that reads almost like a movie plot. The setting is in Africa and the storyline is about staying in the land that the protagonist loves or else, leaving it to follow a girl. In the context of what we know about the band, the continent of Africa stands in for the pure love of making music that got the guys interested in being in a band in the first place. The romantic relationship portrayed in the song represents the temptation that comes with money and fame in the music business. Overall, the song “Africa” came across to most listeners as not a song about Africa and African peoples and more a song about life and living the kind of life that brings you joy and happiness and how one decides which path in life to follow to make those sort of dreams come true. The distinction between Toto’s declaration of simply wanting the world to be better as compared to Band-Aid’s “mansplaining” of the situation while acting as spokesmen for an entire continent they knew very little about is what has spared Toto’s “Africa” from the backlash accorded “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” It is also why “Africa” has become such a heartwarming story of success for generation after generation that has followed. There is just something universal about wanting things to be better and for people to be happy in their hearts. For this reason, “Africa” has increasingly become a song that the internet generation has turned to in order to express their own frustrations, anxieties, hopes and dreams. I encourage you, whenever you have time, to go to your favourite search engine such as Google and type in the phrase “Toto Africa memes”. You will be amazed at how many people have created memes based upon lines from this song! Some of these memes are humorous. Some of these memes are political. But most of them are simply about happiness. It is all wonderful in its own way. 

The band Toto never had another hit like “Africa” again. However, because of the enormous success of that song, along with “Rosanna”, they really didn’t need to. Over the decades that followed the twin hits from the album Toto IV, the members of the band have dropped out and returned at various times and on various albums and tours. Toto still tours today. Like many bands that have existed for as long as Toto has, I cannot say for sure how many of the original guys are still actively playing in the band. But what I do know is that every time, at every concert, when the opening notes to “Africa” are played, the audience loses their minds with collective delight. Some of the best crowd sing-along videos that I have seen for any band have been ones involving Toto and the song “Africa”. There is just something about the desire to be happy that makes people want to sing out loud at the tops of their lungs. For me, that is what music is all about. Good for them in the band and good for them in the stands. The world needs more happiness. “Africa” supplies that in abundance. Nothing else matters. It is all good. Now go and sing “I bless the rains down in Africa” with no inhibitions at all…and be happy.  

The link to the official website for the band Toto can be found here.

The link to a live, sing-along rendition of the song “Africa’ by Toto can be found here. A choir version is here. ***The lyrics version of the song is here.

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