Die Antwoord has held me in appalled fascination for months. Every time I decide they're a spoof, an exaggeration so over the top the can't possibly be serious, I listen to something that sounds so very, very self-important that it could be an American pop-rap star swaggering about with a 1989 Casio keyboard and Windows 3.1 for making beats. And yet those beats are a lot fatter than you expect.
Whatever. You can tell by that train wreck of a paragraph that I just don't know what to think of them. Super Evil, for instance, is clearly a parody and one that I quite like. And there are things like I Fink U Freaky which is actually a pretty funky song, if a bit heavy on the cursing, and $copie, a song so wrongly right I can't get it out of my head.
And so it's on that side of Die Antwoord, the side that I'm almost sure is part social commentary on South Africa and part mockery of self-congratulatory American rappers. The idea that anyone finds Ninja sexy besides his wife (that's be the tiny-voiced Yolandi) seems far-fetched. I mean, he does kind of look like Vanilla Ice, aged appropriately. Have a listen while I suppress that though ruthlessly.
Categories:
drum and bass,
electro,
world beat
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