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“I feel sorry for people who need to ask us: Is it real?” Ninja told me. They’re drawn to the burst of creative energy released by transformation. “People react to ‘District 9’ and Die Antwoord on the same level,” Ninja suggested. In “District 9,” the filmmaker Neill Blomkamp portrayed an Afrikaner transforming into something else completely - an alien - and emerging with improved moral character. The comic artist Anton Kannemeyer depicted Afrikaners having nasty sex and mangling their Afrikaans.
DIE ANTWOORD TOUR CANADA 2015 FREE
After apartheid fell, white artists were free to explore a wider range of personas. Under white rule, Afrikaans art was heavily sponsored by the government and presented a rigid image of Afrikaners as upstanding Christians - a natural ruling class. The band’s new album, “Ten$ion,” was even more inspired by colored style, he said. He was, however, unapologetic about the identity-bending aspect of Die Antwoord. Settling into a beanbag chair after the firecracker battle, he asked me gently whether driving through crime-ridden Johannesburg had been scary and offered me a cup of tea. Ninja didn’t “get really drunk wif some homies,” because he doesn’t drink. The tough-guy thing turned out to be something of a bluff. It was the closest thing to a fight I saw on New Year’s Eve. “Whooo!” he whooped, shooting a sparkler at Yo-Landi over the photographer’s car.
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Wearing nothing but Playboy underpants, Ninja ran into the parking lot to hand out firecrackers. How dare a white band hit the jackpot by imitating a community whose own musicians were still largely stuck in apartheid-created slums? One pundit pronounced Die Antwoord “basically blackface.” South African critics were agitated that Die Antwoord appropriated the distinctive gangster style of the “coloreds,” South Africans of mixed racial origins. The band’s new fans became obsessed with the question: Is it real? Word got out that Ninja’s real name is Watkin Tudor Jones and that he went to a tony Johannesburg boys’ school. “I’m sorry,” he said, petting one of the remaining doves paternally. Yo-Landi once posed with a live rat between her breasts. Inside, a cat crouched next to a ripped-open box of doves, surrounded by feathers. “Look what happened to the birds,” he said. When I went to check out the shoot, the photographer gestured toward the room next door. A makeshift studio was assembled on the second floor. The photographer who was commissioned to shoot the band showed up to the party house with two boxes of white doves for Ninja and Yo-Landi to play with. On the appointed night, though, things almost got too zef for Die Antwoord. It is bling and bruises and weed-whacker mullets like the one sported by Yo-Landi Vi$$er, the tiny blonde who orbits Ninja like a foulmouthed muse. “Dere are always fights in Fietas on New Years Eve which should be fun.” And so Ninja, the leader of the South African rap-rave crew Die Antwoord, invited me to ring in 2012 in the lair of zef, the scene the band brought to the world two years ago with a viral music video called “Zef Side.” Zef is the nasty, freaky, gleefully trashy underbelly of post-apartheid white South African culture. “We r taking 1 day / nite off 2 get really drunk wif some homies in a dodgy hood in Johannesburg called FIETAS on New Years Eve,” the e-mail read.