Top 100 - Africa, Toto # 91

Story by Robert

University years are a difficult time.  And I don’t mean ideologically, emotionally or intellectually – no, I’ll leave that for those more profound than me.  I mean financially – the harsh realisation that life fucking costs money man and if you don’t go out there and work for a living you’re homeless. This rationale brought entirely-unskilled-me to the automated sliding doors of a retail establishment and to three long working years which I’ll never get back. 

Being a large company (the type that can afford to employ marketing types), logic was often left at those automated sliding doors.  You see, in their minds, ours was a family establishment.  Which, when it came to deciding which musical effluent to have pumped through our PA system to entice shoppers to buy buy buy, apparently meant that it was an establishment with no musical taste.  Thus, our 7am to 7pm soundtrack was one that, in essence, cycled between some of Duran Duran’s lesser known songs with, periodically, the occasional interjection by Dire Straits. But amidst this symphonic playlist there was one perennial offender.  Not a day would go by where we weren’t subjected to – nay, blessed by – its mellifluous sounds:

Toto’s Africa. 

Rightly or wrongly, whether I consented or not, this song came to epitomise my time on the lesser rungs of the corporate ladder.  How could it be that a song allegedly about yearning, yearning for a lost time, yearning for a lost place – and yearning for another hit since ‘Hold the Line’ – could have become an anthem for three lost years of my life? 

As I clumsily shuffled boxes from aisle to aisle, pointed people in the (vague) direction of where products were kept and decried others’ inability to correctly operate a cash register, there was always, merely minutes away, yet another appearance from the only musical and geographic masters who could get away with crow-barring the words ‘Kilimanjaro’, ‘Olympus’ and ‘Serengeti’ into the one line. 

We may all have a chuckle at Africa from time to time, when we catch it while re-tuning our radios and find it involuntarily crackling through the speakers.  But I ask you: how many songs could transport us out of our dire existences mopping up baby vomit in aisle four as we dreamed about how others were spending their Sunday mornings? 

I know that I must do what’s right and reluctantly admit that this song, with its all-pervasive synth riff and incongruous marimba solo, remains a fitting legacy for my lost time and place.  Word up. 

Artwork by Karin