John Lucas

One of my favourite articles to write in recent years was this Georgia Straight cover feature on South African rap act Die Antwoord. It’s not that the group was a great interview—it was actually tricky getting decent answers out of Ninja and Yo-Landi—but writing the story gave me the opportunity to research an area of global pop culture that was quite literally foreign to me.

You can read the full article here, but here’s an excerpt:

As a condition of interviewing Die Antwoord, all reporters are instructed to visit the group’s website and watch a video titled “Straight From the Horse’s Piel”. In addition to offering a flash of Ninja’s tattooed penis, the eight-minute mini documentary purports to answer the above questions, and then some. Like everything else Die Antwoord does, though, it really seems designed to make you wonder what the hell you have just witnessed, with Ninja’s obfuscations taking viewers further down the rabbit hole. Addressing the band’s much-discussed authenticity, for example, the lanky rapper offers the following: “It’s actually a deep question, that question, you know. ’Cause the only real things in life is the unexpected things. Everything else is just an illusion.”

By that yardstick, Die Antwoord is as real as they come. No one outside of South Africa—and few outside of Cape Town, for that matter—knew of the group before February 1 of this year. That was the day Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin posted the videos for “Zef Side” (aka “Beat Boy”) and “Enter the Ninja” to the popular U.S.–based blog. Both clips instantly went viral, with the latter racking up more than 7.6 million YouTube views to date, thanks in large part to its off-the-chart WTF quotient. It’s a safe bet that no one watching the “Enter the Ninja” video had ever seen anything like it before. While Ninja spits head-spinning rhymes about decapitating haters, Vi$$er does a Lolita routine in a bedroom plastered with pictures of her bandmate and crawling with rats. While she lip-synchs the song’s helium-voiced hook, she changes out of what looks like a school uniform and into an oversized T-shirt that hangs off of one shoulder.

“Enter the Ninja” is striking enough on a musical level, its melodramatic, synth-swept beat topped by Ninja’s rapid-fire flow of English peppered with Afrikaans slang. But it was probably the physical appearance of Die Antwoord’s frontpersons that seemed so foreign to a North American audience accustomed to picture-perfect pop stars. Impossibly long and lean, and covered with what look like homemade tattoos, Ninja is menacing in a comic-book-villain sort of way, while Vi$$er’s petite frame and postlobotomy mullet give her the look of a Skipper doll whose platinum locks have been attacked by a toddler armed with a pair of scissors and a malevolent streak.…If Die Antwoord shocked North America, the feeling was mutual.