Review Summary: Bending the conventions of hip-hop, hype, and good music in one album
Die Antwoord are the foremost practitioners of a style of South African hip-hop known as zef. So wait, Die Antwoord are actually part of a music movement? There’s actually a name for the impenetrable fusion of rap, rave, absurdist comedy, and drunken bilingual gibberish pioneered by this motley trio? Wow. How our quaint little music world has evolved.
Die Antwoord can be perplexing, hilarious, perplexingly hilarious, and hilariously perplexing--often all at the same time. What this album basically is is three-quarters of an hour of drunken rap-ranting in four languages: Afrikaans, English, Gibberish, and an incomprehensible mixture of the three. (There’s even some Xhosa on the Diplo-produced cock-brag “Evil Boy”.) The group claims to represent a fusion of all South African culture’s elements, black and white, although this claim is fairly vague despite their cunning linguistics. Chances are, you’ll only understand a maximum of two out of four no matter what language you speak.
The one thing that’s obvious is just how hilariously dirty they are, even by hip-hop standards. While most artists only know one or two ways to be filthy, Die Antwoord have hundreds. However, they have two prevalent and highly effective techniques. The first is presenting flat-out pornography, such as on the ridiculously explicit Bronski Beat parody “Beat Boy,” in which lead MC Ninja raps for eight minutes about engaging in BDSM with a hermaphrodite and jacking off in a champagne glass. The other is spouting what are obviously profanities and innuendos in Afrikaans, letting the listener figure it out (the fantastic “Wat Kyk Jy?”)
Due to such outrageousness and weirdness, as well as their use of the internet meme as a marketing tool, many have written Die Antwoord off as nothing more than a novelty. Maybe they are a novelty, but if they are one, they are certainly not “nothing more” than one. Both Ninja and the group’s other lead MC, the ageless female Yo-Landi Vi$$er, are decent rappers, and DJ Hi-Tek's beats are simple but effective. Novelty though this album may be, it’s still good music, and I would advise anyone with a sick sense of humor who likes hip-hop and dance music (but not too much) to check this album out.
