Agent Palmer

Recorded in 1981 and released on September 30, 1982 as the third single on Toto’s fourth studio album Toto IV, “Africa,” has gone from hitting number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1983 to its current place in popular culture as a meme. Not being lost but being beloved during the course of that journey.

Now, I’ll admit that a friend of mine who remains steadfast that Hold the Line is the better song, which I respectfully disagree with, because it’s more of the I don’t want to go with the crowd pick.

This is a fun little exercise if you like Guns ‘N Roses. Take their Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II albums and create a single album selecting tracks with a standard CD length cutoff on time at 74 minutes.

Now, Use Your Illusion I comes in at 16 songs with a run time of 76 minutes and Use Your Illusion II is 14 songs with a 75 minute runtime, so why 74? Well, it makes it more challenging, and it’s easy to use what was the standard.

To me, and to many, Bob Dylan is a mythical figure. I understand that he’s as human as you or I, but there’s something different about him.

He was told that he was the voice of a generation and he didn’t even want it, which made people more convinced he was. And as an artist, he reinvented himself over and over and over, in fact he’s reinvented himself more times than most people find themselves.

“Hi, howya doin? I’m Arlo Guthrie and you’ve probably listened to or heard about a thing called Alice’s Restaurant.“

That is the beginning of the narrative that is spoken at the start of the movie, Alice’s Restaurant, and also used as the trailer for the film as an explanation of what the movie is and how it is based on Arlo Guthrie’s song of the same name.