Weezer Covers One Of The Most Meme-able Songs Of All Time

We can all agree on one thing: the internet is an amazing and very weird place. And magic can actually happen. So, here’s what happened.

Weezer has been around for more than 20 years, and in that time they have covered a whole lot of songs, such as The Beatles’ If I Fell, Pink Floyd’s Time, Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, even The Muppets’ Rainbow Connection (featuring Hayley Williams). But last year, Mary, a 14-year-old Weezer fan, created a Twitter account called @weezerafrica (https://twitter.com/weezerafrica?lang=es) as a kind-of-a-joke campaign for the band to cover Africa by Toto, with the hashtag #WeezerCoverAfrica.

Weezer makes dreams come true

The thing is, six months later, the band actually covered Toto… Not Africa, though. Weezer got to troll Mary and everyone else by covering Rosanna instead…

hey @weezer … pic.twitter.com/93AwGv0FMS

— weezer cover africa by toto (@weezerafrica) 24 de mayo de 2018

…which is actually really good, it’s just that it wasn’t the song Mary was expecting.

#WeezerCoverAfrica turned into #WeezerCoveringRosanna ???

— weezer cover africa by toto (@weezerafrica) 24 de mayo de 2018

But not everything has to be terrible. A few days later, Weezer actually released their official rendition of Africa, and it’s awesome!

One of the funniest things about all this isn’t the fact that Mary’s campaign paid off, but that it had been about 9 years since Weezer hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and now their cover has made it to Nº 89.

But that’s not all. They were invited to perform at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and, of course, they played Africa. At first, it seemed a bit awkward, as frontman Rivers Cuomo sang while reading the lyrics from a laptop screen (yes, this was live). But as the instrumental bridge was coming up, guitarist Brian Bell (manning the synthesizer) yelled “Steve Porcaro from Toto!”. That’s right, Toto’s original keyboardist himself delivered the solo.