West Coast Connection Forum
DUBCC - Tha Connection => Outbound Connection => Topic started by: Elano on October 08, 2010, 10:30:20 PM
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(http://www.watkykjy.co.za/uploaded_images/yo-landi-700560.jpg)
believe it or not,they are signed to Interscope
(http://www.watkykjy.co.za/uploaded_images/antwoord4-732767.jpg)
(http://www.watkykjy.co.za/uploaded_images/antwoord2-787964.jpg)
(http://www.watkykjy.co.za/uploaded_images/antwoord1-787838.jpg)
(http://gostbrand.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/yo_landi_visser_01.jpg)
(http://www.decadentlifestyle.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/yolandi-visser.jpg)
(http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxxgqxF0NO1qb4owko1_500.jpg)
(http://i527.photobucket.com/albums/cc354/LuckyL053r/Screenshot2010-03-02at60804PM.png)
(http://cache.interscope.com/images/local/250/e4892526-8c54-4995-9b6c-53e05cdd14ee.jpg)
Release Date: 10/12/2010
http://www.youtube.com/v/Q77YBmtd2Rw
http://www.youtube.com/v/KRzt6QngMzg
http://www.youtube.com/v/f1KbfFdUTQ4
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These guys are dope. My friend Zion introduced me to them.
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they are playing soldout shows almost everywhere :o
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What in the hell?
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What in the hell?
It's good music with no meaning with shock value as a marketing scheme, and when you break it down to that, not shocking at all. Lol.
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What in the hell?
It's good music with no meaning with shock value as a marketing scheme, and when you break it down to that, not shocking at all. Lol.
I guess I didn't give it a fair chance to be honest. I kinda shut the video off after I saw a guy with a boner in his boxers. Maybe I should just stick to the audio.
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What in the hell?
It's good music with no meaning with shock value as a marketing scheme, and when you break it down to that, not shocking at all. Lol.
I guess I didn't give it a fair chance to be honest. I kinda shut the video off after I saw a guy with a boner in his boxers. Maybe I should just stick to the audio.
Indeed. They really focus a lot on junk. Lol.
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What in the hell?
It's good music with no meaning with shock value as a marketing scheme, and when you break it down to that, not shocking at all. Lol.
I guess I didn't give it a fair chance to be honest. I kinda shut the video off after I saw a guy with a boner in his boxers. Maybe I should just stick to the audio.
you should pay attention to the cameltoe of the blonde girl
(http://i527.photobucket.com/albums/cc354/LuckyL053r/Screenshot2010-03-02at60804PM.png)
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What in the hell?
It's good music with no meaning with shock value as a marketing scheme, and when you break it down to that, not shocking at all. Lol.
I guess I didn't give it a fair chance to be honest. I kinda shut the video off after I saw a guy with a boner in his boxers. Maybe I should just stick to the audio.
you should pay attention to the cameltoe of the blonde girl
(http://i527.photobucket.com/albums/cc354/LuckyL053r/Screenshot2010-03-02at60804PM.png)
That's much better.
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Die Antwoord: 'Are we awful or the best thing in the universe?'
(http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2010/9/7/1283876535650/Die-Antwoord-006.jpg)
When Die Antwoord checked their emails on 2 February this year, among the 5,000 or so messages the group had received overnight was one from Neill Blomkamp, the District 9 director and a fellow South African. The subject line read: "Oh my god." And the message? "I fucking love you guys."
Since then, their fame has travelled further. David Lynch loves their videos so much that he invited them round for coffee. David Fincher wanted to cast singer Yolandi (stage name: Yo-Landi Vi$$er) as Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (she turned him down) and two weeks ago they shared a stage with the Aphex Twin at the LED Festival. So how did this South African "zef" rap-rave outfit, from "a tiny fishing village in Cape Town", come to be championed by hipsters the world over?
The 3 million people who've now watched their first video, "Die Antwoord – Zef Side", will be familiar with Yolandi, a diminutive blonde, and Ninja, a tattooed, lanky guy endowed with a sinuous physicality which he puts to good use as he dances and raps in an arresting Afrikaans/English hybrid. They'll also be familiar with an infamous close-up of his genitalia flapping in exuberant slo-mo beneath a pair of Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon shorts. Die Antwoord's name is Afrikaans for "the Answer" and at the end of the "Zef Side" video the narrator asks: "The answer to what?"
Ninja, joined by the teeny Yolandi and the tubby, mute DJ Hi-Tek, slouches against a wall, squinting. He raises his arm and lets it fall to his side. "Whatever, man... fuck." If Ninja doesn't know the original question, neither does anyone else. After the website Boing Boing seized on the video at the start of February, it was sent zipping round the globe, "taking over the interwebs", in the band's parlance, and increasing their YouTube views from around 800 to 500,000 almost overnight.
Each posting was invariably accompanied by some combination of "wtf?", "are they for real?" and "is this a joke?" Surely no serious rap could begin with: "Uh, yo, for real/ That's what I'm talking about/ Check it out", as the track "Beat Boy" does?
But for the huge crowd rammed into Berlin's Magnet club to see them, Die Antwoord are no joke. Neither, it turns out, is their live show. Their set has the whole crowd thrashing and rapping along, often in Afrikaans, to every word. When they can keep up, that is, because Die Antwoord's outrageous aesthetic makes it easy to overlook just how good Ninja is. Relishing its guttural smacks and hard edges, he makes Afrikaans sound like a language that was made for hip-hop. It's testament to his charisma, too, that he can mutter an incidental "fokken fok" into the microphone and elicit the kind of audience reaction worthy of Martin Luther King.
When not rapping, he shoots bug-eyed glances to his sides from beneath a lowering brow, looking very much like a pre-Country Life John Lydon. Meanwhile, Yolandi, sullenly passive in the videos, is ferocious on stage. At one point, she yells: "Germany! Now you've fokken heard of me!" They've more than heard of her – at least three women in the crowd sport her haircut: an uncompromising combination of undercut and mullet, with a brutally short fringe. "The Yolandi" may yet become 2010's hipster equivalent of "the Rachel".
At one point, the pair lead the crowd in a chant of: "Jou mae se poes in a fispaste jar", which Ninja translates, politely, as "your mother's private parts in a fish paste jar". Their lyrics get much filthier than this. So filthy, as Yolandi will tell me later, that when they first became famous, "all these conservative Afrikaners thought we'd sprung from Satan's dark pit".
My interview was originally postponed due to an ominously vague explanation: "Ninja's being... difficult." The band's publicist tells me the last journalist used the phrase "white trash" and called Ninja by his real name (the incongruously grand Watkin Tudor Jones). She closes her eyes and shakes her head, as though his reaction was too horrific for words. None the less we venture, with some trepidation, up a dark staircase to meet them.
Backstage, in a brightly lit room, Ninja is holding court while eating pitta bread and hummus. He clasps both my hands and does a little bow and a series of ingratiating head tilts, an odd and endearing courtly dance that's repeated when we say goodbye. Gesturing to their rider – tiny dishes of prunes, nuts and sweets: were it not for the Jägermeister bottles, it could be a table set for a children's birthday party – he gabbles: "Have some food, it's all free!"
Complimentary peanuts may soon lose their thrill, but for now, you can't really blame them for getting excited. Die Antwoord are not the first hip-hop group to inject humour into what they do. They are, however, the first rap-rave group from South Africa to become a global phenomenon, delivering a slap in the face to anyone moaning about the homogenisation of culture or the pervasiveness of Anglo-American pop music.
When I meet them the following week in London at their record label – they're newly signed to Polydor – they're hunched inside their own-brand tracksuits looking morose. Then Ninja starts expounding on the meaning of "zef" and he comes alive. "It's like the underbelly of Afrikaans; an embarrassing thing they want to hide away. The zef swearing, for me, is so fucking extreme that it's like cartoon language – this weird, like, freak mode fungus style. Because it's not just a language, it's..."
A whole culture?
"Ja and we just, like, dived into that and made that our thing."
"Zef's kind of like you don't give a fuck and you have your own flavour and you're on your own mission," says Yolandi. "It's associated with people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit. Zef is, you're poor but you're fancy. You're poor but you're sexy, you've got style."
Ninja – or rather Watkin – has long been involved in hip-hop groups ("I've been fucking around with lots of, like, conceptual stuff for a while"), but the thinking behind Die Antwoord, as the 36-year-old explains, "was kinda throw away the conceptual stuff and just let it be South Africa and South African style. Yolandi sort of pushed me because it was right there and sometimes you can't see what's right in front of your face". Yolandi, whose age remains a secret, "was doing nothing" before Die Antwoord except, as Ninja adds with some pride, "causing trouble, going to rehab and getting expelled".
Ninja's engaged in an anecdote about their beef with one of the producer Diplo's DJs when he lets slip that he has a daughter. A daughter? "Ja, ja" he says, impatiently. With Yolandi? "Ja, we're just friends, but we had this kid by accident. We're a good fucking mum and dad on that level, whatever." I'm reeling at the image of either of these two changing nappies. Ninja, however, is speeding on. "A lot of people wanted to ban the interweb to stop us getting known. And you can't stop it. We've got this fierce fucking following – like the cutest, most freak-mode, wildest kids, and also older people who are super-duper in tune with what we're doing, and that's not going away – it's getting bigger fucking fast. Bigger and bigger.
"It's, like," he continues, "is this [Die Antwoord] fucking terrible, like fucking retardedly the worst thing ever or the most amazing thing in the entire universe?" I'm with David Lynch et al on the answer.
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I didn't read the interview, so maybe it's in it, but they are just characters, the main guy has more egos, this is one of them
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http://www.youtube.com/v/4tb7PejciFw
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Great dudes. Just posted their 2 videos in G Spot. Would like to have Yo Landi Visser for me only.
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i like to think im open minded and i listen to a lot of different music but i just dont get this at all. the dues voice is offputting, his 'rapping' is awful and her whiny voice just pierces my ears (and i like joanna newsom lol).
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http://www.youtube.com/v/BFx9WJrLMOQ?fs=1&hl=en_US
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they are playing soldout shows almost everywhere :o
Not that hard to do when you're playing small venues lol
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Hopefully Ill get to go on their show.
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lol wtf
Wack
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white south africans got it harder than most these l.a. gang bangers 8)
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white south africans got it harder than most these l.a. gang bangers 8)
Fokkin aye.
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u know he is the south africa version of ali g right?
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u know he is the south africa version of ali g right?
Ninja.
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id rather be forced to listen to country western while repeatedly punched in the nut sack then listen to this trash.
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lol wtf
Wack
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asscheeks, i think my ears may actually be bleeding :-\
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lol wtf
Wack
thanks god, its the proof of the quality of this group.
if you think that something is wack it must be good then :D
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lol wtf
Wack
thanks god, its the proof of the quality of this group.
if you think that something is wack it must be good then :D
Clever
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lol wtf
Wack
thanks god, its the proof of the quality of this group.
if you think that something is wack it must be good then :D
Clever
ya and you are stupid
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from pitchfork.com
When we chatted with Ninja on the phone, he was at an L.A. cafe marveling at a limited edition figurine of the well-endowed Evil Boy drawing that helped inspire the subsequent song and video. The figurine is one of many multi-media projects the crew are currently working on-- action figures, a video game, a feature film, a short film with director Harmony Korine, and a video for "Rich Bitch" are all in the works, according to Ninja. He speaks about as fast as he raps (which is very fast), his thoughts pinging around like a jet-fueled bouncy ball. He's got a lot to say-- about America's cultural hegemony, South African monsters, penis-cutting rituals, Diplo's hair, and more-- and we pretty much let him say it.
Pitchfork: The "Enter the Ninja" video came out of nowhere early this year and was a huge hit online. But now that a lot of people know who you guys are, were you worried about topping it with the "Evil Boy" video?
Ninja: It's funny because we were feeling the opposite way about "Enter the Ninja". I almost got frustrated in a weird way when "Enter the Ninja" came out and blew up because it's not even the tip of the iceberg-- it's like a little sliver of the iceberg.
We had this explosion, but the explosion was building up inside us for a long time so when it occurred-- [makes boom noise]-- we just wanted to keep going with the same force and speed. So while we were on tour this year in all different countries like Japan, Switzerland, Norway, and Canada, I was writing notes the entire time and drawing illustrations and designing all the "Evil Boy" sculptures.
With the paintings in the "Enter the Ninja" video, I wanted to take the elements of drawings by retarded people and children and criminals and make that type of art three dimensional. So with the "Evil Boy" video I wanted everything to move so it'd overload the senses. We put care into every single detail so that the background got as much force as the foreground. The point was to make your brain unable to get it all in so you can watch it a lot of times and see something different, which is quite nice.
Pitchfork: Even though some of the verse by guest rapper Wanga (above) is translated in the video I feel like a lot of people may still be confused by it.
Ninja: It's quite an in-depth thing. It's basically about tribal circumcision. It's part of a tradition that's in the black Xhosa tribe in South Africa. When you turn 19 you have to go into the bush for like one week with a blanket and your underpants-- no shoes-- and get your penis chopped up with a kitchen knife. No disinfectants; no pain killers. You get the ash from the fire and you rub it onto the penis and you rub it around your face.
We've known Wanga since he was a street kid. He lives in this house in Cape Town and squats on a farm. This year, Wanga was supposed to go to one of these rituals because he wasn't circumcised. We thought maybe he just shouldn't go because 60 kids fucking died this year because their penises didn't work properly afterward and shit. So I asked him what would happen if he didn't go to the bush, and he said that he wouldn't be a man and he wouldn't be able to speak to the other men. So I asked him why he was speaking to me and he said, "Because you're cool, Ninja." Then he looked at my tattoo and said he wanted to be "Evil Boy for life."
The worst words in the Xhosa language are "umnqundu wakho." It means you're a bumhole. You're not even supposed to say that aloud because people freak out about it. So we were like, "Oh fuck, you should start your rap with that." So when you play "Evil Boy" in South Africa around a group of people who know the language, you'll hear a lot of African women shrieking as if someone just stole their baby.
Pitchfork: Wow.
Ninja: Another element in his verse is about how the real Xhosa men with the circumcised penises are unbelievably fucking homophobic. Wanga doesn't give a fuck-- we're not anti-gay, we're just like, "whatever." The rap is actually a taunt, when he says, "Don't touch my penis/ I'm not a gay." That's pretty much the worst insult to Xhosa men-- who are anti-gay yet they take 19-year-old boys' penises into their hands. It's pretty weird to touch another man's penis when you're not a gay.
A lot of Americans are a little bit sensitive and shit but it's not really our problem because people have their issues and they should keep it to themselves. Our DJ Fishsticks is gay, and we make gay and straight jokes the whole time. So Wanga's verse is his about how he'd rather be a superstar than a dead kid lying in a fucking ditch with a fucking chopped up penis.
Pitchfork: Do you expect people who aren't from South Africa to get the meaning behind that without knowing the cultural history?
Ninja: You can only get so much. If you go to Japan, for instance, you'll go as a tourist and see weird shit like a beetle as big as your hand. But you have to stay there a while to actually get it. We're basically just exporting our South African experience. We want to bring it to a certain fun level so that people get into it. But Americans are like, [American accent] "I get it"-- they say that a lot. Americans think they need to get it. The thing is, in South Africa, there's a lot of stuff that you're not necessarily gonna get from the get-go.
American topics and culture are kinda over-exposed. The whole world knows a whole lot about America-- from the Wild fuckin' West to gangsta rap, Hollywood to the fuckin' Deep South. So we're very influenced by the presentation, but South Africa is like undiscovered real estate. There's still a lot of shit that no one knows about going on in a lot of different countries in the world. Like, who's your favorite Polish pop star?
Pitchfork: I don't know.
Ninja: Yeah, me neither. It's kind of weird to be like the first thing to come out of South Africa that's going like freak-mode large. We didn't know it was gonna be like that. So we want to keep bringing stuff from our experience out into our art and music. Once again, we're just getting warmed up.
Pitchfork: I feel like when Americans are faced with something strange and different like you guys, it can be confusing in a good way.
Ninja: Yeah, it is good. For us, it's an even bigger freak-out. We're from this little fishing village in the bottom of Africa where nothing fucking happens. And, all of the sudden, we're getting trucked around this fuckin' whole world like a science fiction adventure.
Do you know that TV series "The Office"? When they brought it to America, they made it American. They Americanize everything. The weird thing is, you can't Americanize your own work. People were like, [American accent] "Can you guys please rap in an American accent and explain all your lyrics?" But our stuff does a weird thing to your brain because you're getting some of it but there's a lot of stuff you're not getting. And I think that's what people are most amazed about. We didn't know it was gonna happen. We're the most tripped-out by this.
We're just trying to blow up while we're still alive instead of like Michelangelo, who blew up just after he was outtie 5G. We're trying to avoid that.
Pitchfork: Back to the video, who made that huge Evil Boy sculpture that turns in the background?
Ninja: With that, I drew some three dimensional sketches and then contacted the people who designed the ships from District 9. Then this lady Marcia [Vermaak] sculpted that giant.
Pitchfork: Was that a weird project for her?
Ninja: Yeah, she's never sculpted such a big penis in her life. She was really into it though. She designed all the trees in the forest and then suggested putting a lot of penises on the trees. It's quite funny-- all these penises growing out of trees.
Pitchfork: What's the deal with Diplo's haircut in the video?
Ninja: He did the beat and I told him that he if he wanted to be in the video he had to cut his hair. He got pissed off because he had been growing the back for a long time and he really wanted a tail but I shaved it off. He was sulking a bit while I was cutting his hair, but then he got over it.
Pitchfork: How did you meet him?
Ninja: We didn't know who Diplo was, but then someone said Diplo wrote about how he was was obsessed with Yo-Landi's voice. Then he sent one of his retarded emails to us and we started writing back and forth. Diplo can't even spell properly and his e-mails are really dumb. He has dyslexia and stuff. But he's kinda funny.
Then he sent us this beat and we liked it but we forgot to tell him we liked it. So he got insecure and said, "Oh, this beat sucks, just ignore that I ever sent it." And we were like, "No, you idiot, we really like this beat." Then we made the "Evil Boy" song and now we're really best friends. He's one of my favorite people.
When we e-mailed him to tell him the "Evil Boy" video was out he was in Jamaica and couldn't see it. So then Yo-Landi told him that we weren't able to use any of his shots in the video because he looked fat. And then he said, "Please give me another chance!" He was actually starving himself for three weeks before the shoot, but then ate like ate 23,000 peanuts on his way from Florida to the shoot in South Africa. But then he saw himself in the video and he didn't look that fat.
Pitchfork: [laughs] Not really.
Ninja: But he shaved off his mustache because one weird black chick in South Africa told him that he looked like Hitler and that it was hot. He got all insecure about it and shaved his mustache off like a pussy. But I still think he looks cool, like Mickey Rourke from Angel Heart.
Pitchfork: Is there any symbolic meaning behind the hairy monster (above) in the video?
Ninja: The monster! Oh my goodness-- that's called a Tokoloshe. It's the most feared African demon; the African people are really superstitious. It's just a little black hairy thing, a little man with a big fat stomach. He's really terrifying and comes out at nighttime and he's got a penis as big as a horse's. And African ladies explained to us that if they're having a wet dream, it actually means that the Tokoloshe is boning them in their sleep and their husband will never be able to satisfy them again because of the Tokoloshe's mega-penis. That's why if you go into the ghetto now a lot of African women have their beds on top of piled-up bricks.
Also, you can put a curse on someone in Africa by getting a witch doctor to send them a Tokoloshe. The witch doctor mixes medicine and blood and herbs and then pours this mixture over a Tokoloshe voodoo doll. And the voodoo doll will come to life and the witch doctor can command it to come to their house and fuck it all up. A Tokoloshe can ruin your financial situation or make you divorce your wife. Another thing that people can do to make a Tokoloshe-- and they do this in the ghettos in South Africa-- is have sex with the animal.
Pitchfork: OK ...
Ninja: Like a man will have sex with the animal and then the animal gives birth to a Tokoloshe. Only children can see a Tokoloshe; it's invisible to adults. So we thought it'd be quite cool to have the Tokoloshe in the video. Someone said that it looked kinda like the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are.
Pitchfork: So are you paying tribute to that myth?
Ninja: Well, it's not a myth. Some people seriously don't wanna fucking talk about that shit. We were just thinking of different Evil Boy elements, so the Tokoloshe is pretty much an Evil Boy himself. He's just a little mischievous man-boy thing with a giant demon penis. It came from one of my lyrics: "I'm gonna roll to the club like a Tokoloshe/ Ninja's hung like a fuckin' horse."
Pitchfork: Are you going out of your way to expose these taboos of South African culture?
Ninja: It's not really a taboo, it's just there. What does taboo mean again?
Pitchfork: Like things that people don't want to talk about.
Ninja: No, they do want to talk about it-- they talk about it all the time. They just don't really make music about it. It's cool to make music about things around you.
Pitchfork: What about the girl in the video who has no nipples?
Ninja: Yeah, that girl was born with no nipples. She was at one of our shows and I was gonna sign her boobs and I was like, "You have no nipples. That's the most amazing thing ever. Do you wanna be in the video?"
Pitchfork: What are you guys up to next?
We're doing a short film in a few weeks time with Harmony Korine that will screen at the Rotterdam Film Festival this January. [Korine] wrote the script and we made it a little more Zef. It's come out fuckin' wild. It's a short film called Wat Kyk Jy-- which means "watcha lookin' at?"-- which I tattooed onto my penis as well.
Pitchfork: Did that hurt?
Ninja: Yeah, a little bit.
Pitchfork: Just a little bit?
Ninja: Yeah, I was quite sore. If you can imagine tattooing something with a little sewing needle. But it looks really cool.
Pitchfork: What song are you doing a video for next?
Ninja: We're shooting the "Rich Bitch" video in December. It'll drop probably around the New Year. It's like a super-pop video that I've been working on for a long time. We actually got signed [to Interscope] because of the "Rich Bitch" video idea; we told [Interscope chairman] Jimmy Iovine the idea and he was freaking out. It's like a hostile pop takeover video. Basically, "Enter the Ninja" is like us crawling out of the hole, "Evil Boy" was like sinking our roots in, and "Rich Bitch" is about the hostile pop takeover. It's like a new alien-breed form of pop.
Pitchfork: I'm excited to see it.
Ninja: Me too.
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lol at Jimmy Iovine freaking out!