round 2

(6) DONNA SUMMER, “MACARTHUR PARK”
ended the run of
(3) toto, “africa”
185-184
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 13.

I SEEK TO CURE WHAT’S DEEP INSIDE: VOYAGE TO THE HEART OF THE INTERNET WITH TOTO’S “AFRICA” by james charlesworth

“The whole weird history of American culture is in this song somewhere.” —Rolling Stone, 2018 

1. She’s Comin’ In, 12:30 Flight…

A couple years ago, a woman I hadn’t seen in two decades flew from her home city to visit me in Boston. It was one of those Facebook reconnection deals. You know how they go. A timid message in the guise of a casual greeting plops down in an inbox. Hey there, figured I’d see what you’ve been up to these last twenty years haha… The recipient (we will call her Rosanna) opens and reads with skepticism that blooms strangely into nostalgia. An electronic correspondence sparks and a shared past is collaboratively revisited, memories and half-truths grinningly thumbed through like the vinyl section at a music store. Everyone I knew seemed to be reconnecting via the internet with some long-lost and regretted missed opportunity. I’d always found it weird, maybe symptomatic of existential crisis. Still, thinking she’d probably say no, I asked Rosanna if she’d like to come visit. Maybe go hiking? She said sure.
I’m reminded of this correspondence and the strange reunion that followed as I sit down to write an ambiguous essay about a song that has long been a guilty and bewildering pleasure of mine. The allure of Toto’s 1982 uber-hit “Africa” seems somehow similar to that internet-driven nostalgia that causes us to send messages to forgotten semi-romantic acquaintances we haven’t seen in two decades. For well over a quarter century, the last-minute hit by a band of session musicians has been an earworm and a karaoke standard, its famously nonsensical but passionately delivered line about blessing precipitation challenging car singers everywhere with its harmony and high notes. (So high, in fact, that former Toto singer Billy Kimball was only able to successfully record one take of the highest harmony).
“In the America of [today],” Rob Sheffield summed it up in a 2018 Rolling Stone article, “all roads lead to ‘Africa.’” The official YouTube video has over half a billion views. A Twitter account called @africatotobot continuously tweets lines from the song to its fifty-thousand followers, who obediently retweet these random lyric fragments to their own legions. Recently, for its “Giz Asks” feature, the media website Gizmodo recruited “a small group of neuroscientists and music enthusiasts” to “scientifically determine” the greatest song in history. And though the resulting article consists mostly of a mundane Q&A regarding the physiology of taste and the general characteristics of quality—and quickly devolves, like so much we encounter on the internet, into the vacant husk of click bait—it seems unnecessary to mention that, in the ultimate determination of Gizmodo (to the extent that they make any determination at all), the greatest song in history is in fact “Africa” by Toto.
Yet here I am, attempting to write an essay that confirms (or denies?) that the very same song belongs (or does not belong?) on a list of the worst songs to hit the top five in the Billboard charts between 1970 and 1989. And how are you to vote? Does a vote for “Africa” in this tournament mean you love it? Or that you hate it? Is it even possible to parse the strange mix of appreciation and irony that guides our aesthetic choices? Is Africa so bad it’s good? Or so good it’s bad?
My own opinions will soon become clear. But if I’ve learned anything from writing this essay, if I’ve gleaned anything from four months of googling this song and this band, it’s that Rob Sheffield was right. In the America of today, all roads do lead to Africa. Including, it turns out, the Ted Williams Tunnel, which is where I found myself on a day two years ago, stuck in traffic on the way to Logan Airport to pick up a woman I hadn’t seen in twenty years, anxious at the entrance of an echo chamber of bleating horns and brake lights, while two-thousand feet up and twenty miles away, the landing gear clunked down from the belly of an Embraer 190.

2. The So-Called “World Music” Industry

It begins with the groove. An intricately layered arrangement of percussion splayed across a two-bar drum loop. Congas and marimbas and gongs are employed. In live performances, this anticipatory mood-setting intro sometimes lasts a minute or more. Hands held high above the head are clapped in unison for a tension-building interval. Band members engage in embarrassingly stiff dance moves. Finally, the keyboard arrives. The crowd roars with a blissful release.
Buh-duh-bum-bum ba-dum-bum BUM!

The story of “Africa”—the story of an experiment that ended up starting an industry—opens at an undisclosed location outside Los Angeles, California, with two men in lab coats and synthesizers.
The two men were David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, keyboardist and drummer, respectively, and founding members of Toto. The year was 1981. The location an anonymous R&D facility owned by the Yamaha Corporation—I picture it far out in the suburban valleys east of L.A., a faceless steel and concrete rectangle on the fringe of a somber industrial park. Paich and Porcaro had been chauffeured here in the back of a black limousine with tinted glass, were frisked at the door and signed non-disclosure agreements before being fitted with the stark white lab coats and led along a dark corridor to an elevator while Yamaha engineers and security surrounded them. When the elevator doors slid open, they did so on a dark room vacant but for some studio equipment and, at the center, two twin synthesizers.

Paich and Porcaro’s clandestine mission, on this day in 1981, was to test play Yamaha’s newest synthesizer prototype, the GS1. As highly renowned session musicians, this was not the first time the alliterative duo had been called upon to perform such duties. Technological advances in music production have resulted in the relative extinction of the session musician, but once upon a time these secret fixers of the music industry were on-call twenty-four hours a day, summoned in moments of desperation to record the parts of songs that musicians in bands couldn’t master, to rework dud songs and write solos, to compose lyrics and come up with vocal harmonies. Since meeting at Grant High School in the San Fernando Valley, where they’d played together in a band called Rural Still Life, Paich and Porcaro had followed in the footsteps of their fathers, both seasoned L.A. session musicians, and developed reputations through their studio work with a slew of acts including Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan, and Sonny & Cher. Still, it had been an unprecedented move when, in 1978, they’d joined forces with a handful of other session musicians—including Jeff’s brother Steve, a guitarist they knew from Grant High School named Steve Lukather, a bass player and Missouri transplant named David Hungate, and a singer hailing from Texas and Louisiana named Billy Kimball—and started their own band.
By the time this day in 1981 rolled around, however, their early success had given way to critical ambivalence. Their previous album, Turn Back, had constituted an unsuccessful foray into arena rock; now for their fourth effort—the last of their initial four-record deal with Columbia—Paich and Porcaro were searching for a new sound, something beguiling and unprecedented. In the soundproofed room in the top secret facility surrounded by a team of engineers holding clipboards, Paich rolled up the sleeves of his lab coat and relaxed into a syncopated shuffle, alternating between A and C#m, a little Abm thrown in as a head fake. Picking up on Paich’s groove, Porcaro fiddled with the dials on his synth to make it mimic a karimba, filled the rest with a flute-like run along an arpeggio.
Within a few minutes, they’d thrown together the makings of a verse, and that was how, in a laboratory east of L.A., from the minds and hands of two 26-year-old white guys dressed in lab coats playing state-of-the-art synthesizers, the so-called “World Music” industry was born.

Let us pause here to deal immediately with important certainties. Nostalgia notwithstanding, there are plenty of valid reasons to despise Toto’s “Africa.”
The late Jeff Porcaro—you know him as the bespectacled drummer seen grooving and tapping a conga from the 43 to 48 second mark of the attached music video—once described the song as follows: “A white boy is trying to write a song on Africa, but since he's never been there, he can only tell what he's seen on TV or remembers in the past.” David Paich—the featured star of the video, seen pondering dusty hardcovers and wandering library stacks and then, in the perplexing denouement, discovering the missing corner of a torn page (gasp!) as the library catches fire and collapses around him and a tribal-mask-adorned bookshelf prevents a mysteriously flung spear from impaling its unspecified target—admits that he grew up “obsessed” with Africa after attending a Catholic school where most of the teachers were former missionaries. The lyrics are little more than a romanticized amalgamation of his imaginings of their lives with some details plucked from National Geographic articles and an ambiguous love story intermittently inserted—as well as a few requisite emblems of exoticism such as wild dogs howling at the moon and wise old men stopped at waypoints along vague vision-quest style journeys.
Seen in this context, it can be difficult not to view this song as the musical equivalent of some mass-produced piece of “tribal art” situated as a “conversation piece” on a crystal side table in the high-rise corporate office of some aging white CEO. As author Steve Almond quipped in a speech given in 2009, “There are of course many muddled romantic fantasies with artificial backdrops in the pantheon of pop music. The remarkable thing about [“Africa”] is that it expresses so many quintessentially American attitudes at once.” It’s impossible for today’s listener not to cringe at the oh so American tendency to lump the over fifty countries that make up the continent of Africa under one homogenous heading, as if Tunisia bore any similarity to South Africa, as if Botswana shared any characteristics with Kenya. Perhaps all that really needs to be said about “Africa” and the dangers of a song of its ilk is that, in 2013, during Nelson Mandela’s funeral, someone at CBS thought it would be a great idea to use Toto’s “homage” to the continent as the soundtrack for their television coverage, which even Toto thought was beyond the pale enough that they felt the need to get out in front of the backlash.
"We honor Nelson Mandela and will continue to support initiatives he committed his life towards,” Paich later said in a statement. “As the co-writer of the song, if I’d been asked for sync approval, the answer would have been a decline with a recommendation they honor the musicians of South Africa, setting their sights on indigenous repertoire.”
So yeah. Like I said, plenty of valid reasons to despise this song. But culturally tone-deaf as they may have been back in 1981, from the moment Paich and Porcaro stumbled upon the opening groove that day at the Yamaha warehouse, they must have known they had tapped into that unique new vibe they’d been searching for. Then again, as long-time session musicians, they’d seen countless ideas that sounded great in a studio but didn’t add up to a song. They’d been called in last minute to clean up the messes of countless bands who’d gone in search of a “new sound” and created nothing but a catastrophic mess. According to one estimate, throughout the course of their careers, the collective members of Toto have combined to perform on 5,000 albums that have received 225 Grammy nominations and sold half a billion records. They were the backing band on Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
Despite any faults you might rightfully assign to the men responsible for “Africa,” one thing is true: David Paich and Jeff Porcaro knew a hit when they heard it. And this strange bit of synthesizer hocus pocus was most definitely not a hit.
Not yet.

3. The World Comes Undone

In December 2017, just months before I sent my first Facebook message to Rosanna, a fourteen year old girl living outside Cleveland (we will call her Pamela), started a Twitter account with the express purpose of convincing her favorite band, multi-platinum artists Weezer, to record a cover of “Africa.” 

I used to like Weezer a lot. As a teenager, I spent several months obsessed with their debut album, which came out the summer before my senior year, and I seem to remember once standing up with a friend during a quiet moment of a high school football game to shout at the top of our lungs—while hundreds of classmates and football fans glared at us from the surrounding stands—the chorus to “Undone (The Sweater Song)”:

If you want to destroy my sweater (whoa whoa whoa!) hold this thread as I walk away (As I walk away!)

The details regarding what specific combination of intoxicants inspired that impromptu performance are lost to me, but we thought we were hilarious. Admittedly, I still think it’s pretty funny, though I have no idea why. What was it about that brash spectacle—the confounded looks from our classmates as our voices strained over the autumn-cool sports field, even the players and the referees looking up at us—that we found so sidesplitting? We loved that song, but we were also being ironic of course. There was a winking emoji behind our performance, the same winking emoji that is fundamental to everything about a band like Weezer and antithetical to everything about an unflaggingly earnest band like Toto. Perhaps young Pamela was conscious of this incongruence and intrigued by the possibilities. More likely, she was just setting out from the remote outpost of northeastern Ohio across that vast virtual desert of the internet in the hopes of arriving one day in the distant fabled land of Meme.
She was basically successful. After a little prodding, Weezer’s drummer Patrick Wilson responded, the story grew legs, and for five months the world waited while Weezer played coy. It should be noted that “Africa” is not a song that lends itself naturally to innovative reiterations. The instrumentation and complex melodies make it a challenging song to reproduce, even harder to reimagine, and so I picture Weezer killing those five months by brainstorming ways of satisfying the wishes of their fourteen year old fan while simultaneously remaining sufficiently glib and uncaring. Meanwhile the internet grew more and more irate at the universe’s unwillingness to do its bidding. Reporters were dispatched to track down Pamela’s email or, on at least one occasion, travel to Ohio to get the scoop on how she was dealing with the stress. In her inbox and on her doorstep, they implored her for answers to questions more elusive than what they purportedly were asking. They sought from her some deeper understanding of why this particular song has lived on—and how had she even known about it to begin with, recorded as it was some twenty years before her birth? Had she heard it playing during a heated teenage love scene on the pilot episode of the Netflix hit Stranger Things? Did she know it from Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake’s ironic skit on Saturday Night Live?
I picture her standing on a weathered front porch in a stiff breeze off Lake Erie, a fourteen year old kid incapable of imagining a world before the internet. “I don’t know how I knew about it,” she says, truly perplexed by the question. “I just knew about it.”
Finally, in May, the world was saved from this idiotic drama. Weezer tweeted that they had given in to the all-powerful internet, had appeased it with a cover of a Toto song. And indeed, it turned out they had.
Problem was, it was a different Toto song. The ironists had prevailed. The song Weezer had covered was not “Africa.”
It was “Rosanna.”

I found her seated on her luggage on the curb at the airport terminal, playing with her phone.
When her eyes lifted to assess the human being in the car that had parked next to her, she didn’t quite seem disappointed. She seemed not to recognize me. She wore a stylish windbreaker and her hair was up; her nails were painted bright red, the first thing I noticed as she tapped a message with both thumbs. Even as I got out of the car and came around to her side, my hands jammed in my pants pockets as I leaned backwards against the passenger side door, she remained seated and typing. Her first words—eyes still trained on her phone—were, “Do you remember…” and she named someone we’d gone to school with, a name I hadn’t heard or considered in decades. But before I could figure out what this person had to do with anything, she looked up, grinned. Stowed the phone in a side pocket of the stylish windbreaker while we hugged and heaved her suitcase and hiking pack into my trunk, spoke smiling on the curb until the stern bleat of a horn and the verbal reprimand from a cabby got us moving. In the car she dissolved with laughter at the fact that my vehicle has an actual CD player in the dashboard, loud and teasing laughter that made me smile. I remembered that laugh. Without hesitation the phone was back in her hands and whispering music into the space between us as we moved slowly through the gridlock toward the onramp for the numbered interstate that soon led us out of the city and into the growing evening, the lights of urban buildings at fading dusk replaced by long dark tunnels through woods. A bilingual sign reading Welcome to New Hampshire! Bienvenue! As the oncoming night made it easier to get away with, I kept glancing at her face illuminated in the dim glow of her phone. Thinking: Who is this person? People always tell me I look young for my age, but perhaps not from the perspective of someone like her, someone from the same small hometown of high school football games and restless vices, someone with the same disappearing youth and stubborn regrets. Perhaps she had zeroed in instantly on the crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes, could not help but notice the little speckles of grey in my halfhearted beginnings of a beard.

4. Enter the Four-Chord Song

I hear the drums echoing tonight / She hears only whispers of some quiet conversation…

The musicality of the verse is ornate, nuanced, the vocals arriving as the chords modulate a full step from A to B, mimicking a key change—though it’s probably not, just another strange unbalancing step in this peculiarly soothing sonic landscape we’ve found ourselves. The bass walks down to a low fifth while the chords underneath move in parallel, back beat on three with a half-time feel. Ebm. Abm. B/F#, A/E, Abm. A single measure in 2/4 time abbreviates the end of each line of the verse before transitioning back to a bar of the opening groove, creating the illusion that it has snuck up on us. Then quickly the pseudo-key-change up to the B for another round of lyrics.
Buh-duh-bum-bum ba-dum-bum BUM-BUM!
     It’s at this point that we spot the old man, minding his own business along the side of the road. Does he happen to know of any old forgotten words or ancient melodies that might salve our existential crisis? He turns to us as if to say (but apparently not to actually say—he’s the strong silent type, this one): “Hurry, Boy, it’s waiting there for you!”
What is it and where is there? Now is not the time for contemplation; we’re clearly transitioning to a chorus. A pause. An anticipatory drum fill. Something dramatic approacheth. We feel it arriving, but we are still not prepared for it.

When last we left David Paich, he was trying to figure out how to turn the weird pseudo-African groove he and Jeff Porcaro had come up with in a laboratory outside L.A. into a song people might dig. During the several months the band spent recording Toto IV, Paich toiled on his secret song, spent hours perfecting the verse with its complex melodies and intricate chord progressions. (Of course he did not pause to consider the ridiculousness of what he was doing, of trying to write a song that evoked Africa when he’d never been there; this is not what earnest people do.) From time to time he would run it past Porcaro, who would urge him to maybe save it for a solo album, industry code speak for Yeah, that kinda really sucks dude… It seemed perhaps this labor of love would result only in frustration—until Paich wised up and fell back on the oldest trick in the songwriter’s playbook.
It’s called the four-chord song.
Everyone from The Beatles to Green Day to U2 to Shakira to Red Hot Chili Peppers to Taylor Swift to The Rolling Stones to Kenny Chesney to The Cranberries to Aerosmith to The Misfits to Lady Gaga and on and on and on has recognized its power and capitalized on its irresistibility. The most prevalent and reliable chord progression in the history of western music, the harried songwriter’s go-to in times of crisis, the four-chord song is so ubiquitous that the comedy act Axis of Awesome has made a name for themselves by performing a medley of hit songs that use this exact progression. Our western ears love it so much, and so unconditionally, that it is almost impossible to throw together these four chords—relative minor (F#m in the case of “Africa”), IV major (D), tonic or keynote (A), and relative fifth (E)—and fail to write a hit song.
So it’s really no surprise that David Paich turned to it as well. I picture him pausing there on the side of the road, shoulders slouched with defeat and this strange old man telling him (or just implying via stern gaze) that some mysterious it is waiting right over there. And then he just says screw it. Enough with this whole pseudo-Africa vibe; let’s make a hit! Billy Kimball comes in on vocals, the lyrics darting up an octave while the line Gonna take a lot to drag me away from you! (though it has little to do with what’s been going on up to this point—this is the first appearance of the “you,” for one thing) pulses with catharsis. There’s no mistaking what key we’re in now; after the wandering melodies of the verse, the vocal now becomes a high A note repeated unsubtly for nearly two measures. But wait, what’s this now? It’s a second vocalist, harmonizing with the first, dropping down to follow the scales of the chords while the first voice lingers on the A note. There’s nuthin that a hundred men or more could ever do! (Hold up, I’m confused: who are these hundred dudes and where did they—) Forget it. We’re so along for the ride at this point, that when a third harmonized vocal comes in, and Billy Kimball hits his impossibly high F# note on the word “rains!” it’s such a smorgasbord of classic western melodic concepts amplified and quadrupled on a twenty-four track that we can’t help but sing along, even though we probably can’t come close to hitting the notes and we’re also thinking to ourselves, What the hell are they talking about?? I left my brains down in Africa??
Paich admits he made up the chorus lyrics on the fly, drunk on the hitmaking power of those four magical chords. The hundred men (or more) and the blessing of the rains were initially meant as placeholders, and yet they somehow felt more evocative than anything his conscious mind was able to conjure later. Plus, they had to rush if the song was gonna make the album. When Toto IV hit stores on April 8, 1982, “Africa” appeared as the last track, like an afterthought. Don Henley of The Eagles, listening to the final cut in the studio, immediately proclaimed it a hit. Others wouldn’t go quite that far. Guitarist Steve Lukather still calls it, “the silliest and most oddball song of our entire catalogue.” When he first saw the lyric sheet, he said: “I bless the rains down in Africa? What does that even mean, Dave? Who are you, Jesus or something?
“If that song’s a hit,” he told Paich. “I’ll run naked down Hollywood Boulevard.” And though Lukather never made good on his promise, those mindless spontaneous lyrics will be sung and ridiculed and pondered over and memorized forever. A fitting confusion for this Frankenstein monster of “world music” and the four-chord song. If the lyrics made any sense, it wouldn’t make any sense.

5. Watch Me Unravel

In the end, Weezer relented. They gave the internet what it wanted:

Less than a week after shocking the world with their epic troll of poor Pamela, they released their expertly timed punchline: a cover of “Africa” complete with an accompanying music video featuring Weird Al Yankovic and some of his cronies aping around on a stage. Ironic as all get out. For the first half of the video, Weird Al and his pals maintain the illusion that they are performing the song, but as things move along, they get caught up in the hoopla. Weird Al performs the solo on his accordion, facial expressions mocking the orgasmic contortions of a shredding guitarist from some long defunct hair band. The keyboard player performs desperate glissandos across the keys before pulling the whole thing down on top of himself. The drummer stands and roams the stage, his sticks tapping maniacally at the air.
Ostensibly it’s a parody of the video for Weezer’s own most famous hit, “Undone (The Sweater Song).” Or maybe they are mocking the phenomenon of a hit itself, the mysterious and overwhelming mania that multiplies exponentially when a certain song touches a susceptible nerve in the collective music-listening unconscious. Yet beneath all this satire and spoofing remains the fact that Weezer’s version of “Africa” is little more than a faithfully rendered note-by-note recapitulation—tuned down a half-step, and with plenty of guitar distortion in the chorus to muddle the autotune on the vocals—as if even Weezer understood that no matter how much irony they tried to throw at “Africa,” it has a lunatic earnestness they could not touch.
As for Pamela, there’s no indication of what might be next for her. I know because she was asked this question. “What’s next for you?” some reporter wanted to know in the aftermath of her greatest triumph. Standing there on her porch, Pamela shook her head, her gaze straying into the middle distance, contemplative in the aftermath of her arduous struggle. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just let me enjoy this for now.”

A few weeks ago, while I was trying to decide between a couple possible endings to this essay, I heard from Rosanna for the first time since her visit.
It was not that we had not enjoyed each other’s company. That weekend, we woke early on Saturday and hiked a mountain. Three mountains, actually. Ten hours spent gasping up the steep boulder-strewn switchback-less trails, pausing where the trees opened up to granite promontories looking off into deep green gorges, the sun blazing to take the edge off the chill of the higher elevations, lunch on a flat bare summit beneath a crumbling fire tower with friendly gray jays hovering. Ten hours spent discussing every person we recalled from our youth, and then when we’d run out of people to discuss, returning to talk about the most interesting ones some more. A hundred pictures neither of us would ever post on Facebook. It was not that we had not enjoyed this, yet somehow it had been clear—maybe from that moment at the airport—that reality had made a compromise of our expectations, that twenty years had undone the nostalgia that had led us here, had unraveled the loneliness we mistook for connection.
There was a moment, however. A moment when a certain song came on Rosanna’s phone that made us gasp at each other with delight, made us sing along like mindless laughing idiots. Drum fills on the steering wheel and the passenger side dashboard an imaginary conga while we tried to hit those high notes and harmonize and failed so miserably that the only recourse was to just carry on with twice the gusto while my crappy old car hurtled along some narrow road in northern New Hampshire.
To an outsider, someone watching from the side of road, folks we passed at small-town convenience stores and gas stations, that performance must have looked no different from the one at the football game all those years ago. But on the inside, it felt different, loaded with a different kind of intimacy and shared experience. And it is somewhere in that unnamable difference that, for me, Toto “Africa” rises above its own preposterousness. In that cathartic moment—the release that arrives when you hit that chorus, when you hear those four magic chords and those vocal harmonies—lies a power more palpable than irony.
Anyway. That was one of the endings I was considering a few weeks ago when Rosanna’s face appeared in a tiny thumbnail on my phone. A message out of nowhere, a link to a website. “Have you heard about this?!?” An accompanying emoji showed a face in tears, either from sadness or laughter, you couldn’t quite tell.
I clicked the link.

6. Gonna Take Some Time to Do the Things We Never Have…

On October 20, 2019, just days before I began work on this essay, Toto played the final show of its 40 Trips Around the Sun Tour at the Met in Philadelphia to a packed house.
Never mind that they were actually well into their forty-second trip around the sun as a band—that this world tour that began in February 2018 to coincide with the release of a greatest hits album had by now circled the planet a half dozen times, had logged 140 dates on five continents and in thirty countries. Never mind that, of the six original members, only two took the stage this night; that Jeff Porcaro had passed away in 1992; that David Hungate and Bobby Kimball had long ago moved on; that just two months prior, David Paich had been riding a tour bus in Finland when he’d suddenly grown dizzy and fallen to his knees. Turned out it was a seizure that forced him to retire permanently from touring.
What was important about this night was the news that had broken just earlier that week, the news that this was to be Toto’s final show ever.
“We worked really hard and this is a great way to …,” Steve Lukather said before trailing off. “I don’t know what the future-future’s gonna be, but I do know that’s gonna be the last show in Philly for the foreseeable future. And certainly the end of this configuration of Toto.”
And so there was nothing left to do but to leave it all out there, to kick off the show with the hit that made them famous back in ’78, the crowd erupting with the opening keyboard riff of “Hold the Line.” Midway through the show, a ten-minute rendition of “Rosanna” with Lukather taking center stage for an extended guitar solo. For two and a half hours they play, a versatile combination of their own hits and reworks of old favorites, and yet throughout these two and a half hours, there’s an energy that is not quite distraction, a sense that the audience (or a significant part of it at least) is really here for one thing. The song for which everyone knows they will have to wait until the encore. The strange experiment that somehow became an emblem of the eighties, an earworm and a karaoke standard, and finally, thanks to Pamela, a meme.
Throughout this final night in Philadelphia, a keyboard has sat unmanned on the side of the stage, just out of range of the floodlights. Now as the band members at last take their places for the encore—urged back to the stage after their obviously fake departure—a spotlight falls on that empty keyboard, an old Yamaha GS1. The crowd roars with anticipation, seems to understand what is coming even before that familiar percussion begins, even before David Paich emerges from offstage and waves stiffly to the crowd. He’s been told that he can no longer tour with his band, but he would not miss this moment for anything. He settles behind the old GS1 and, letting his hands rest upon the keys, he begins.
Buh-duh-bum-bum ba-dum-bum BUM!

Those were my original endings. The singing in the car with Rosanna. David Paich returning to the stage to play for the final time that simple riff that started all this lunacy. A beginning at the end, the circle is complete.
They were pretty good endings. But when I clicked the link Rosanna sent me, I knew they were not the ending. Because it turns out there is no ending to this song. In the America of today, all roads lead to “Africa.” From Los Angeles to Cleveland to New Hampshire, it is loved and it is loathed but it is indomitable. You can try to avoid it the way you can try to avoid the internet, but it will find you somewhere: on your favorite TV show, on NPR, or emanating from the car next to you at the stoplight where two idiots shout the lyrics at the top of their lungs.
And now, thanks to the absurd truth buried in the strange corner of the internet that Rosanna found and sent to me, it is immortal.
In January 2019, a sound installation was set up in the Namib Desert by a Namibian-German artist named Max Seidentopf. The exact location is undisclosed; a crude map on Seidentopf’s website offers no specifics other than a rough circle outlining the entire 31,000-square-mile 55-million-year-old desert with a heading reading: “APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF INSTALLATION.”
The installation is called “Toto Forever.”
Long after David Paich and Rosanna and Pamela and Weezer and you and I are gone, seven small white pillars will stand tall in a remote desert, an otherworldly artifact amidst the dunes. Six pillars arranged hexagonally facing out in all directions, each mounted with a tiny speaker, and atop the tallest and center pillar? A solar-powered MP3 player with a playlist of one song set on repeat.
Long into the future-future, deep in the ancient desert where only the wind and sand can hear them, three harmonized voices will shout their immortal message at the universe:
“I left my brains down in Africa!”

James Charlesworth grew up eighty miles east of Pittsburgh and lives in Boston. He’s the author of the novel The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, which was published in 2019.

MOIRA MCAVOY ON “MACARTHUR PARK”

A car ride to or from school has to be where I first heard “MacArthur Park,” the first song of Donna Summer’s to hit number one in the US. That fact alone seems improbable; Summer’s “I Feel Love” helped to popularize disco as we know it, igniting the airwaves and encompassing clubs across the country in 1977. The song is maximalism perfected; innumerable manufactured layers coalesce in precise harmony, precariously walking the line between cacophony and synthetic symphony, sticking the landing to the latter. Synths and drum machines swirl around Summer’s melodious voice, the one that made her famous on the German theater scene, as she repeats a handful of lines over and over, the final product a hypnotic ride that, when listened to at a high enough volume or on good enough headphones, feels all-consuming: body, mind, emotions.
Yet, this song did not hit number one, nor did her first breakout single “Love To Love You Baby,” a track which introduced the disco sound to a wider audience. No, instead the song that finally made the Queen of Disco the Queen of the Airwaves was “MacArthur Park,” her seven minute long cover of a Richard Harris (yes, that Richard Harris) folk ballad from years prior. The Harris original is frequently cited as one of the worst songs of all time, what with its lyrics both maudlin and confusing, non-linear melody, and a lacking vocal performance from the actor-attempting-turned-singer. That version, to be clear, is an absolute train wreck, and rightfully deserves the slander it has received for decades. It has too many elements melded with too little artistry. It takes a concept built of excess and tries to fit it into a genre of restraint, doomed from the start.
Pulling off maximalism in folk may have been the high sell which sank Harris, but I would argue the song’s excess—in lyrics, melodic movements, concepts—is what makes it such a successful target for someone like Donna Summer, a broadway actress working to invent a genre defined by toomuchedness. Here we have a landscape where horns and vocals and drums and a synth line can all work to complement each other. There’s no one player vying for the spotlight like in Harris’ folk rendition, but instead many working to be a seamless unit. Here we have a place where an extended instrumental interlude can not only work but seems necessary, a break between narrative acts, lending a sense of artistic credence to the otherwise semi-nonsensical lyrics. Here we have an environment where the most basic part of the song—a deep sadness, a desperate longing—can be elevated past its own mawkishness into something transcendent without being self-indulgent. This song, as written, is not perfect, but it is certainly perfect for disco, for someone with such a command for the maximalist as Donna Summer.
I listen to music constantly and voraciously: while lying in bed procrastinating getting ready for work, on the commute to work, at work, on the way home, while shopping, while cooking, while cleaning, while falling asleep and beyond, the algorithm dictating a playlist unheard until I awaken bleary-eyed and confused hours later. I love music for a multitude of reasons—it’s fun; it’s heartbreaking; it allows me to better communicate my emotions to others; it allows me to better communicate my emotions to myself.—but as much as i love music, I hate silence. The openness and possibility makes me uncomfortable, eager, awkward and anxious. I will talk when I have nothing to say just to fill the air with something. When living alone for years, I blasted my iPhone and tv simultaneously in a desperate attempt to fill every lonely corner with even the possibility of meaning or connection. I want something else everywhere, all the time.
This, of course, is not unique to me in the slightest; it’s not even unique to me in my family. My love of music and fear of silence was inherited from both of my parents, and the majority of my prominent early childhood memories are built around music: my father braving the crowds of young children to take me to an Aaron Carter concert; my mother teaching me to do the Hustle in my grandmother’s kitchen; my father making up songs to sing my brother & i to sleep, the same melody every time until eventually deciding to sing us to sleep with “Silent Night”. Music was everywhere, and no place more obviously than the car radio on the way to school, or Mass, or a Girl Scouts meeting, or a road trip to New Jersey. I grew up on the border of the boondocks, so there was ample opportunity to hear my parents’ choices of music while growing up and going literally anywhere. My father liked country, Twisted Sister, and ABBA whereas my mother was pure oldies, particularly the girl groups of the sixties and the divas of disco a decade later.
As she worked as a librarian at my elementary school, she drove my brother & I to school more days than not—and still often dictated the music when she did not—which practically guaranteed us a steady flow of disco for the nearly two hours we’d spend commuting each day. When the radio stations were playing too many commercials (often) or not enough of the Good Stuff (also often), my mother would opt to delve into the overstuffed metallic silver CD case she kept in the front seat, fishing for a suitable substitute. One of her favorites was a Donna Summer greatest hits collection which prominently featured the seventeen minute long mix of the “MacArthur Park” suite, a sequence of four songs played live together as one movement. There were other incredible tracks included (including her 1978 classic “Heaven Knows,” a pop song so poised in its desperate lyrics and uptempo musicality that the likes of Robyn and Janelle Monae should bow to it), but the one that always stuck out to my brother and I was “MacArthur Park.” We mostly requested it as either the cake song, after the prominent image of a cake being destroyed by rain in the eponymous park, or the Dumbledore song, as we were young children in the early 2000s wherein Harry Potter was our only frame of reference for most things. Of course, my mother complied, thrilled to have an opportunity to play the music she loved without judgment or whining from her children.
That’s how I remember it, at least. While fact checking a detail for this piece with my mother, she reminded me that we saw Donna perform MacArthur Park on the Today Show when we were five, an event I completely forgot. The only thing I remember from that trip to New York is eating hot dogs for any and every meal possible and seeing dinosaurs at a museum. Further, she mentioned that we almost never asked for the song on car rides, and that we only began to tolerate it after she told us about the Dumbledore connection. More gallingly to me, she said that we preferred the Richard Harris version, which I choose to believe was because we were children; we liked things that were familiar instead of things that were good.
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the music in my life as a child as I’ve gotten older. There’s the shining memories, to be sure, but there’s more: the pop music I played on my walkman to drown out my parents arguing, the everpresent static over the Radio Disney station that hummed in the background of my childhood insomnia. Music has continued to be a means of escape in my adult life, so it makes sense that it developed as one as a child. Our family car rides were not always pleasant; more often than not they were mired with at least one fight, if not more, and I was frequently the antagonist. The music was occasionally an annoyance but it was more frequently a mediator, a distraction. Disco played over our discord, absorbing it and amplifying it until it dissipated.
The most interesting aspect of the Donna Summer rendition of “MacArthur Park” is not just its leaning into maximalism, but its total reimagination of what was already widely known. The best covers are those which either strictly adhere to the original or which wildly re-envision it: anything less and the weakness shows. Here, we see an artist take something abhorrent and make it endearing, a dirge into a dance. Memory is what we make of it, and here, she made it into a hit. It’s easy to romanticize the past, but it’s another thing entirely to reconstruct it.
I love it now, but maybe I didn’t like “MacArthur Park” at the time, or if I only liked the connection to Dumbledore, or maybe I reveled in the absurdity of a song I, as a child, thought to be literally about cake. The why mattered less then, and the specifics matter less now. As an essayist, I feel compelled to be driven by the facts, but I’m hesitant to place weight on them compared to what I feel in response to these memories, altered or otherwise. What matters was that we together embarked on all seventeen minutes of the song (before tiring after three or four), and would listen as my mother lip synced over the steering wheel, making jokes about cake and characters, bonded by this sound all around us. 

Moira McAvoy genuinely loves many bad songs and appreciates the opportunity to defend their virtue in writing. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Financial Diet, Storyscape, and others. You can find her destroying her hearing at a show, or more immediately tweeting at @moyruhjo.