It started, as so many things do these days, with a tweet.
On 5 December 2017, a 14-year-old Weezer fan named Mary, from Cleveland, US, set up the ‘weezer cover africa by toto’ Twitter account @weezerafrica and sent her first missive:
’cover africa by toto please’
Then she tweeted all of the band members individually, just to be comprehensive.
And then another to the band account, just in case they’d missed the first one.
Within a day, she had a response, of sorts, from drummer Patrick Wilson:
So, a laugh. But no cover of ‘Africa’, the legendary 1982 track from the classic and imaginatively-titled record, released the same year, ‘Toto IV’.
Then? Silence.
Her mission to convince Weezer to cover the internet’s favourite song looked like it would fall on deaf ears.
But then, suddenly, last Thursday: WEEZER HAD COVERED TOTO.
Except, they hadn’t done ‘Africa’. They’d done ‘Rosanna’ instead.
“Well done,” said everyone. “Top trolling. That is quite funny and also that’s a nice cover of another brilliant Toto song so that’ll do to be fair.”
But bless you Weezer, and bless the rains down in Africa, because, five days later, they went and actually bloody covered ‘Africa’ didn’t they?
And here it is:
It’s really good isn’t it? They haven’t tried to be clever and ‘re-imagine’ it because why would you want to change one of the greatest songs ever written? No, they’ve just done a really solid, straight, Weezer-y cover. And it’s highly enjoyable.
Is it as good as Toto’s version? Of course not, but then no one has topped Einstein and that doesn’t mean we should give up on the whole science thing.
So how was Mary dealing with the culmination of her life’s work at the age of 14?
We know what’s next: get Weezer to cover ‘Hold The Line’ for a Totrilogy.
The campaign starts here.
(Image: Getty)
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