Words by Tia Clarke
Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Chances are, you will have heard South African duo Die Antwoord’s somewhat demented debut single ‘Enter The Ninja’ at the tail-end of this summer. It’s hard to forget the dizzying combination of Ninja’s aggressive raps and Yo-landi Vi$$er’s squeaky pixie vocals once you’ve been directly exposed to it. Yolande’s chorus is utterly baffling at first: “Aye aye ai / I am your butterfly / I need your protection / Be my samurai.” Take into account Ninja’s mid-song rant – “Fokk… this is like… the coolest song I eva ‘eard in mai ‘ole life” and “Fokk all of you who said I wouldn’t make it. You said I was a no-one. You said I was a loser. You said I was a Fokkin psycho! But luk at me now, all up on the interweb! Wurlwide! Two tousand ten!” and it initially sounds like an amateurish joke, like it had come directly from some misguided fool’s basement.

But it isn’t, and the further down the rabbit hole of Die Antwoord’s weird, weird world you fall, the more intriguing their story becomes. Ninja and Yo-landi Vi$$er (and DJ Hi-Tek) aren’t bedroom rappers with delusions of grandeur, rather ambassadors of a fresh new music scene coming out of South Africa.

Die Antwoord (which means ‘the answer’ in Afrikaans) hail from Cape Town and make rap-rave music that represents South Africa’s Zef scene – a rough equivalent of American white trash. This counter-culture movement has been described by the band as a style which is “modern and trashy” with “out-of-date, discarded cultural and style elements”. In their videos, Yo-landi and Ninja jump around like scruffy, futuristic street urchins, spitting rhymes to a backdrop of artistic scribblings that looks like they have been created by “children and mental patients” (to quote Yo-Landi). Yet in interviews, the pair come across as clued in, cool and – yes – very, very weird.

Ninja’s uncompromising South African accent, with its mongrel mix of Dutch and English undertones makes his rapping even more distinctive. There’s a definite sense of urgency and rawness. The latest single, ‘Evil Boy’, deals with the practice of ritual circumcision with unsterilized knives in South Africa. If young men do not participate in the ceremony than they are not considered ‘a man’ and deemed gay and effeminate. Many are ostracized from their communities. Guest rapper Wanga sings about rejecting this tradition and instead choosing to be an “Evil boy for life”, an issue he struggled with his whole life.

Die Antwoord, also draw influences and identify with the South African-set sci-fi film District 9 . In the video for ‘Evil Boy’, Ninja wears an oversized ‘prawn’ or alien hand and has previously proclaimed the D-9 director Neill Blomkamp as his hero. The band have hinted at making a movie with him based on their rise to major-label fame.

The band’s penchant for bonkers videos has certainly helped the Die Antwoord phenomenon. ‘Enter the Ninja’ has had over eight million views on YouTube, whilst ‘Zef Side’, which purports to introduce DA in their home town, has hit 7.4 million over a couple of videos. But Die Antwoord haven’t just arrived from nowhere. Ninja burst onto the South African hip-hop scene in 1994 with the Sony-signed The Original Evergreens. Constantly reinventing himself in an attempt to keep it real, Ninja has rapped under an impressive number of pseudonyms, including The Man Who Never Came Back, MC Totally Rad, Max Normal and Watkin Junior Jones. Die Antwoord, as we know them, performed their first live show at the Ramfest festival in February 2009.

Since then, the South African oddballs have been steadily creeping into the hipster consciousness, including an appearance at California’s Coachella music festival in April 2010. “The crowd didn’t know what the fuck they were watching,” Yo-landi later said. Uber-hip producer Diplo produced their latest ‘Evil Boy’ and makes a cameo in the video, while they even popped up on stage with Aphex Twin at the London Electronic Dance festival at the end of August. More bemused fans watched as they donned costumes and rapped along to Aphex’s dubstep beats and trippy visuals. Hipster bibles like Dazed and Confused and Vice are all over Die Antwoord like a cheap pair of skinny jeans. What they do next is anyone’s guess.

As we journey further into the age of technology, the internet is creating what M.I.A. sang about in 2007 – a ‘world town’, where information and music is shared freely. Increasingly, music bloggers and music fans are turning to far off destinations to sate their appetite for fresh new sounds, including Shangaan Electro, a very different sound from the South African underground – joyous music that combines Midi keyboards, Marimba solos, 180 bpm rhythms and street dancing. In a pre-internet world, the Die Antwoord and Shangaan Electro buzz would have never travelled. We should be grateful that the means exist for minds to be blown across the world.

The album $O$ is out now on Interscope.

www.dieantwoord.com