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I know that I must do what’s right

As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

Where to start?

For one thing, Kilimanjaro doesn’t rise above the Serengeti. You can’t even see it from the Serengeti, unless you get in a hot air balloon and take a telescope: they’re about 300 kilometres from each other. Kilimanjaro rises above the Tsavo (see picture).

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.

An unhappy collision of contrary rhythms

So let’s get on to that. Here we cite Adam Bradley’s The Poetry of Pop, a wonderfully patient examination of modern doggerel, to validate our own count: the line scans with an already outrageous fourteen syllables — iambic pentameter it is not — but Paich then jams twenty-one syllables into that space. Bradley drily observes:

“the rhythmic and melodic structure of the line forces the lead singer, Joseph Williams, into circumlocutions of stress that end up mangling the final word of that longest line; instead of “Serengeti”, the rhythm and melody of the song force him to pronounce it as “Serengeti”... I understand this moment now as an unhappy, though fleeting, collision of contrary rhythms. The song still moves me, however, all the more now for this small window into the world of its rhythm.”

Mr. Bradley is clearly a glass-half-full sort of chap.

“Olympus”?

A correspondent writes:

Sorry but you ALL HAVE IT WRONG!!! THE LYRIC IS “RISES LIKE A LEOPRESS”... THIS HAS BEEN BUGGING THE F OUT OF ME FOR YEARS. I think Weezer screwed up the whole world in this lyric... read his lips in the video

Now while I respect the the vigour with which this argument is put, I cannot agree with it. Firstly, the video cuts away to Steve Lukather who, rather like a tone-deaf footballer singing the national anthem, has forgotten to sing along at the key moment.

We must allow Mr. Paich some facility with logic and common sense, even if not much, and while Olympus clearly does not rise above the Serengeti, or another part of the African continent, being a mountain, it does at least rise above things like plains.

As for “leopresses”, who can say? What even is a “leopress”? It has escaped the compliers of the OED and, for what it is worth, Websters. I take it to be some kind of creative contraction of “leopardess” on Mr. Paich’s part. This cannot be right, for two reasons:

Firstly, female leopards, however described, do not really rise above things like plains. They may be fast, but in two dimensions. Leopards are wholly earthbound. The sorts of things that do rise above plains are mountains, rainclouds (mainly in Spain), and hot air balloons (as per the above, I am told, it is only from a hot air balloon, that has already risen high above the Serengeti, that one can even see Kilimanjaro.)

Secondly, the “leop’r’ess” contraction strikes me as implausible, particularly as elsewhere Mr. Paich gives the strong impression that he is not in the habit of making literary contractions for the sake of space. After all, he has already jammed twenty one syllables into a line apparently requiring only fourteen. Why start now?

See also

• Kilimanjaro
• Serengeti
• Tsavo
• Toto
• The worst rock lyric in history