If you want to work with wildlife – Africa is the place.
Posted under: Africa
There are some things in life that you feel you’re not really supposed to enjoy. Things like – a box of luxurious chocolates, Big Brother, TV soaps, flowers from a service station, disco music. Guilty pleasures, but the last is frequently the one that gets most people going – music.
We each have our favourite types of music and we all think that other styles aren’t as legitimate. Someone recently said that Eric Clapton wasn’t really a guitarist. Well to someone who doesn’t play the guitar, that’s an odd thing to say. Music is rarely objective, it is usually subjective.
There is one particular song that is always likely to be top of the list of unstylish tunes that we really shouldn’t like. However, this song somehow evokes an amazing sense of a certain place. If it comes on the radio, you can’t help but imagine a sunrise, hear animal cries and bird calls, and see the plains stretching out in front of you as a herd of elephants makes its way past and a lion watches through the long grass. If that is the kind of thing that sets your pulse racing then click here.
Band member Jeff Porcaro says that the song’s percussion tracks were influenced by an experience he had as a child: “I was about 11 when the New York’s World Fair took place, and I went to the African pavilion with my family. I saw the real thing; I don’t know what tribe, but there were these drummers playing, and my mind was blown.”
The song, of course, is Africa, and many of us will instantly start singing when we read the lyrics:
“The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company
I know that I must do what’s right
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
I seek to cure what’s deep inside, frightened of this thing that I’ve become
It’s gonna take a lot to take me away from you
There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never have.”
For anyone, older or younger who is planning to do some animal volunteer work in wildlife conservation in Africa, download that song and put it on your iPod. Then, as you arrive at your destination, just listen. Go on, be unfashionable for once!
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