Fredrik Strage: Toto's hit Africa roars The silent desert landscape

Somewhere in the Namibian desert rises seven white pillars out of the sand. On them stands six speakers plus an mp3 player that is powered by solar cells and playing Toto's ”Africa” over and over again. Desert in southwestern Africa is 55 million years old. ”Hopefully, the song that played as long,” says the namibian-German artist Max Siedentopf which is located behind the installation. He does not want to reveal exactly where in the desert as the speakers are placed, but says to CNN that it is a tax that only the most dedicated Toto fans can find.

the Artwork, which has been named ”Toto forever”, has attracted the attention of the whole world. Some think that it is a fine tribute to åttiotalshitten which ten received a renaissance. Others believe that it is frivolous because the exoticism of the song will not have one iota with the real Africa that do (when CBS played it in a news report about Nelson Mandela's funeral said Toto themselves that it would have been more fitting with the south african music).

the installation above all, melancholic. Totos optimistic song about blessing the rains in Africa played far out in the scorching desert without someone to hear, without anyone seeing. Soon, the wind will blow the sand over the solar cells. The title ”Toto forever” is probably as overconfident as the line ”Watch my works, ye mighty, and despair”, as it says on the shattered kungastatyn which is buried in the desert in Percy Shelley's poem ”retired superhero with technological expertise”. Mankind's pettiness of reality can not be illustrated more clearly.

In the last year developed ”Africa” a different kind of melancholy in a youtube clip where the song plays in an abandoned shopping mall. ”Empty template”-remixes have become popular in recent years, in pace with AMERICA's shopping mall culture to die out because of online shopping. By filtering out the bass, increase the mid-range frequencies, and adding an echo to get the music to sound as if played through cheap speakers in a large and empty room. A picture of a derelict shopping mall, accompanied by a åttiotalshit that echoes far away, the americans, who spent large parts of his childhood in these places, to feel a stab in the chest.

The empty konsumtionstemplen and the speakers in the sand (called ”Totohenge”) to become a monument to our doomed civilization.

”the Longing and the comfort, stretched through emptiness”, writes Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker about the ”empty template”-the video of Toto's ”Africa”, viewed 2.2 million times. She draws attention to the similar remixes that are filtering the sound so that the listener believe themselves to be inside on a klubbtoalett, outside an arena where there is a concert or in a car when it rains. Tolentino believe that we yearn for music that distracted by the surroundings. When all the songs are available anytime, and anywhere, we recall with warmth how it was to hear music through the closed door to our older children's rooms. ”To hear a song that you love when it is played elsewhere is both insulating and encouraging,” she writes. ”You feel alone and taken care of at the same time.”

back toward the fleeting joy that people felt when they shopped, and amused themselves on these sites – and forward to the collapse. In the comments box during ”Africa” is expressed both nostalgia and depression: ”this provokes a wondrous familjaritet, as a result of an acute grief.” ”It must be the way it feels to die.”

The empty konsumtionstemplen and the speakers in the sand (called ”Totohenge”) to become a monument to our doomed civilization. They also recall that it used to be so scoffed at the Tote was quite brilliant. As one listener puts it on Youtube: ”Remember that this song is so good that they named an entire continent after it.”

Read more chronicles of Fredrik Strage, for example, if when he was not as convinced about Michael Jackson's kindness that many fans were