A dark magick has been unleashed on the music industry, as reckless mortals have conjured the twin demons of Irony and Nostalgia for their own foolish ends, oblivious to the ghastly rupture in the fabric of space and time from whence occult creatures slither, gnashing and howling, in their sombrero-clad wakes. Today, the circle is complete and the Great Summoning is at hand, as yacht rock luminaries Toto have released a cover of Weezer’s “Hash Pipe” in response to Weezer’s chart-topping cover of Toto’s “Africa.”
Like Weezer’s cover, Toto’s starts off pretty straightforward, with chugging power chords and a chorus of “woooahh ohh ohhh”s. Two minutes in, however, shit gets extremely Toto, with a cosmic synthesizer line and noodling guitar solo to remind Rivers Cuomo and company that, as Toto guitarist Steve Lukather puts it in a press release, “the irony that we were smoking hash before these guys were alive was not lost on us.” Lukather and keyboardist Steve Porcaro add that they’re rather tickled by the whole thing, and picked “Hash Pipe” after conferring with Lukather’s kids and Porcaro’s neighbors, thirtysomething Weezer fans all. “We wanted to do something that rocked,” Lukather says.
You can find links to Toto’s cover of “Hash Pipe” on all your major streaming services here, and see the two bands covering each other live—with bonus “Weird” Al Yankovic in the Weezer footage—below.