Song of the Day 9/28: “Africa,” Weezer w/ Weird Al Yankovic

If you’re one of those people who hated Toto’s 1982 soft-rock hit “Africa” — and they were pretty easy to find back then — I have some bad news for you. While the rest of us were going on with our lives, the internet developed a taste for the song, to the the point where it’s become a meme.

Nobody really knows why, though theories abound. My favorite comes from Kate Miltner, an internet researcher at the University of Southern California. “There’s currently a fetishisation of the earnest and the pure within internet culture. You may see a photo of a dog and a deer snuggling, captioned ‘Too pure for this world,’” said Miltner, who thinks the internet has embraced the song in part because it’s of a time when earnestness was far more socially acceptable.

Whatever the reason, the “Africa” frenzy reached Weezer last year, when a fan started an internet campaign asking the ’90s rockers to cover the song, and they complied with a straight-ahead version that fails to equal the original only because singer Rivers Cuomo can’t match David Paich’s vocal range. They got a great return on the investment, as the song soared up the charts, reaching No. 3 on Billboard’s Adult Top 40 chart.

Last week the band dropped a video for their version, featuring stand-in actors for band members, including Weird Al Yankovic impersonating Cuomo, in a near-recreation of Weezer’s first hit song, “Undone (The Sweater Song)”.” Don’t ask why, just bless the rains down in Africa.