..Die Antwoord. Like if 2 Unlimited or CnC Music Factory grew up as redneck Zef-rap Afrikaaners, played their gameboys, baile funk/carioca, old skool electro and Eminem rather too much, met a strange funsized blonde, met a 24 year old progeria suffering DJ, wearing clothes with an obvious Keith Haring influence then recorded a funny hiphop album with hooks that Black Eyed Peas would reject as too kawaii* sometimes with a donk beat that the Bolton massif would go nuts for. Brilliantly nuts, basically.
So here’s Enter the Ninja – this year’s Tatu meets 2Unlimited meets GLC hybrid. What? You weren’t looking for that? Kak!
As you could have guessed, severely NSFW…
and Zef Side (Zef is Afrikaans for redneck) – love their manifesto/mantra
“To sum it all up, in this place, South Africa, you get a lot of different things: whites, coloureds, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, watookal. I’m like all these different things, all these different people in one person.”
Thanks to BoingBoing for turning me on to this…I ignored the original posts but the follow ups and Leon Botha (a very good artist) intrigued me…they are blowing up bigstyle (although mostly Internet fame you can’t cash down the bank). And a good interview here – as Yo-Landi put it their philosophy is ‘drive fast and play kak (shit) music loud. It’s a zef rap-rave jol (party), with lasers, smoke machines, 3D graphics, rappers… and everyone’s gonna be there.’ (my translations). Sounds good to me!
For a more academic take on Ninja and co go here – I read Koos Kombuis’s book about Voelvry and James Phillips (odd bloke) so it’s an interesting comparison but some of the politics mentioned there is dodge – yes there are and were progessive Afrikaners but it’s not a far stretch to connect apartheid with Afrikaners since they were in power and nearly all supporting those policies (why Voelvry was so sharply political, and did help the fall of apartheid – cos the ‘good’ Afrikaner kids weren’t supporting their parents bigotry – but it is a stretch to connect Die Antwoord with this movement!). But I can understand the attraction and tensions between British and Afrikaner white South Africans – John grew up there as a Scottish import (must have been annoying to be referred as ‘Inglesman’ when there were more than the English in SA 😉
Anyway I think the ladies doth analyse too much – hearing Afrikaans in humourous GLC-style rap is really funny, fokken lekker 😉 And I’d rather these guys and gals get famous than the blandness that is B.E.P…they might be surreal performance art and all playing roles from a previous project – or be the ZA version of The Streets – but when it’s this fun, who actually gives a fokk?
* Japanese for cute, allegedly.
Leave a Reply to TimCancel reply