Toto - Africamy birthday is coming up and i'm in the mood today to tell a fairly embarrassing story - this goes back to the high school years. oh yeah.
i was lucky to go to a public school with a magnet program - i got a really good education provided by the state without the stigma of "Beverly Hills High". i went to a
real LAUSD public school. gangs, guns, violence, and a precarious racial balance.. you had to be a little careful. with that in mind - i was in the "music academy." my first year i was playing bassoon over 2 hours a day. i had the lung capacity of a small hippopotamus - and the mean streak, too.... but that's another story.
anyway, after a couple years being an orchestra geek, i started getting the attention of the instructor of the theater program. long story short i got sucked into "the program". basically if you were willing to put up with the gays, you got to hang out with hot girls. this is where i learned that the gays are pretty funny (i think it's a survival mechanism for gays at that age). anyway, part of getting sucked into the program is the instructor making sure you can sing. so eventually that 6th period woodwind ensemble was replaced by a vocal group. not like choir. think more lame, less classy.
Vocal fucking Jazz... unaccompanied white kids singing the worst arrangements of "jazz" songs you can imagine. oddly enough this was a pretty hot-shit group at my school. i mean this was where the kids - the WHITE music school kids - who could sing were put. we went to fucking competitions and shit. this was the vocal equivalent of big time cheer leading. i was really only in that group as part of my indoctrination into the musical theater program - lest you think this DOESN'T all come down to money, musical theater was the real meat and potatoes of the music academy's fund raising. old rich white people donated money to the program because they could come see a bang-up rendition of "hello dolly" at their local high school.
anyway, here's where today's track comes in. at competition you get like a 10 to 15 minute set or something. anyone who's watched american idol knows that song selection is crucial. one year the director found this arrangement that was pretty wild and good taste be damned, we were gonna DO it... he had a vocal jazz group of 25 white kids get up on stage in white coats and red sequined bow ties sing motherfucking
Africa by
Toto. I'm talking about milky white blond birds chirping the "doo doo doot da doo do doooooo!" while the guys sing "wild dogs cry out in the night" in four part harmony.... i mean Toto is a little gay in general (to put it mildly) and
Africa was the pinnacle of said gayness and we
REALLY put a shine on it. big smiles with lots of teeth as we flew past "there's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever dooooooo!"
anyway, i can't remember if we took second or third or if we even placed at all that year. it's really less important than the fact that i knew full well how gay it was, but i swallowed it. i stood there on my riser and Africa'd my hippopotamus lungs out with the rest of the gang because the girls were hot and that's what the blue haired old folks pay for. and THAT's what i think about when i hear Toto.
