The worst rock lyric in history: Difference between revisions
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:''“You ever seen the dudes in the band [[Toto]]? Those dudes shouldn’t be singing about Africa.”'' | {{pe}} | ||
:''“You ever seen the dudes in the band [[Toto]]? Those dudes shouldn’t be singing about [[Africa]].”'' | |||
::—Mike Tyson | ::—Mike Tyson | ||
Is this line, from [[Toto]]’s monster 1981 hit, ''[[Africa]]'', the ''worst'' lyric in all of rock ’n’ roll history? Or is it the ''best''? It has, after all, an [[Ed Wood]]esque quality to it: it is so bad it’s good. No mere mortal could massacre the principles of metre, cadence and basic common sense as systematically as this. | |||
{{Totoafrica}} | {{Totoafrica}} | ||
{{draft}} | {{draft}} | ||
{{egg}} | {{egg}} | ||
Revision as of 11:56, 13 January 2020
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Towards more picturesque speech™
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- “You ever seen the dudes in the band Toto? Those dudes shouldn’t be singing about Africa.”
- —Mike Tyson
Is this line, from Toto’s monster 1981 hit, Africa, the worst lyric in all of rock ’n’ roll history? Or is it the best? It has, after all, an Ed Woodesque quality to it: it is so bad it’s good. No mere mortal could massacre the principles of metre, cadence and basic common sense as systematically as this.
I know that I must do what’s right
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti[1]
Where to start?
For one thing, Kilimanjaro doesn’t rise above the Serengeti. (It rises above the Tsavo National Park. Why, you might wonder, didn’t he put “Tsavo”? It would have scanned better.) You can’t even see it from the Serengeti, unless you get in a hot air balloon and take a telescope: they’re about 250 kilometres from each other. A correspondent writes with photographic evidence, in the panel: you can barely see Kilimanjaro from Mount Meru, 70 km away in the Arusha National Park, let alone from Serengeti, three times further away.
And not just because it is a long way away. It is literally over the horizon. Let’s be fully scientific about this. From the ground, all but the top 900 metres of a 6,000 metre mountain would be over the horizon.[2] 900 metres at 250km would appear about 4mm high, if you could even see it through nearby trees (with or without napping leopresses), haze, atmospheric perspective etc. This is not really rising at all, let alone majestically, like Olympus might (if it weren’t already rising above a national park in Greece, of course).
And Mount Olympus definitely doesn’t rise above the Serengeti. It’s in Greece.
To the extent you could say that something that has just sat there for millions of years does anything as energetic as “rising”, then Kilimanjaro doesn’t rise like Olympus, either. It rises like Kilimanjaro. They don’t look anything like each other. I mean, look.
And we haven’t even got onto the fact that THE LINE DOESN’T SCAN FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
- ↑ Written, allegedly by David Paich (well: no one else in Toto seems prepared to claim responsibility for it).
- ↑ Check it out for yourself at this earth curvature calculator.