Toto, Africa, and Cats - The Greatest Invasion that Never Was
Africa was written by cats to create an insanely popular ear worm of a song to subdue the human masses into complacency for their eventual invasion of earth. Cats have had this plan in the making for millennia. As we all know from the studies of Kagrenac, Tolkien, and CS Lewis, music (or “tonal architecture” if you’re dwemeri/TESlore inclined) is the fabric of the universe, and manipulating the threads of music can cause effects up and down and all around the time and space stream. Other races of beings have attempted to use music to ascend to godhood or transcend reality, but sometimes they get lost in the void or become the skin of a giant face stompy robot.
The Cats (beings we believe come from the region of the constellation of Leo) avoided the pitfalls of those other beings and attempted to manipulate music for control. Some say they decided to forgo musical transcendence because of their lack of rhythm, others say they preferred the base pleasures of existence so much (i.e. licking, eating, sleeping, more licking) that they believed a new existence would cause them to lose their favorite pastimes. Either way, after the Klaxon-Egrinox Felinus War of a Thousand Timeless Stars (a story for another day) the Cats were forced to flee their home galaxy, beaten and shamed and almost completely destroyed. They sought a race that they could dupe into becoming their lackeys and their tools in order to establish galactic dominance. They found just the lackeys: Earthlings. Specifically human earthlings. Homo sapiens if you will. Or Homo Erectus…whichever one came first down the evolutionary line.
The cats infiltrated Earth and early human communities, subjugating the minds of the humans with their “fuzzy wuzziness” (the scientific term for the effects of cats on weak willed beings) and began their cultural and mental subjugation. The Egyptians, one of the oldest civilizations, began to worship the cats as gods, exemplified by the goddess Bast, a chief god of the Egyptian pantheon. The Egyptians held the first music festivals for cats, the cats’ first attempt at tonal subjugation. However, cats being cats, they got complacent and just kinda slept and licked themselves throughout the centuries and contented themselves with just watching humans adopt the feline arts of war and destroy themselves. This pattern continued for centuries, because, as stated above, cats enjoy sleeping and licking themselves (seriously cats spend about 50% of their days sleeping. Idk about you guys but I’m super jelly).
This pattern ended around the 80s, the peak of the Cold War. Cats were worried if humans blew themselves up they wouldn’t have their mindless lackeys to enact their revenge on the universe. So they began to tinker. They saw the success of Micheal Jackson and how that made humans go crazy, so they took the backing band from his most famous album (Thriller) and sought to use them as their tools of earworm conquest. Using their knowledge of the cradle of human civilization (which they actually didn’t know much about cause, you know, sleeping and licking themselves all the time) they created a song that pandered to the lack of understanding of humanity, exotic locales that could never be realized, and of course, catchy choruses. Thus was Africa born, and the cats were set to control humanity and conquer the stars…but for one fatal mistake.
As we know, the 80s was a time of extensive cocaine use. Like so much cocaine use that if you have money fro the 80s there’s a 90% chance that it has traces of cocaine on it (wash your hands after touching money kids). Cats, being creatures of base pleasures, fucking loved cocaine. The cocaine had addled their minds enough that, when they attempted to unlock the tonal mainframe of existence to control humanity, they struck the wrong notes. If Africa was in E major the world may be a different place…but nope it’s in A major. The tonal shockwave from the overplaying of Africa caused the cats to become more docile and forget how good cocaine was, instead instilling within them a love of a random member of the mint family (Nepeta cataria, which produces nepetalactone, the stimulant in cat nip). So hey at least they didn’t turn into the skin of a robot! However, every few years the cats remember their galactic conquests, and every so often Africa comes back into the public conscience. Perhaps this is the year the cats finally break through and control the minds of man….but until then…
