Praise be to W magazine for its vanguardism! They have finally and single-handedly put the rest of the world on to how hip, cosmopolitan, and modern the city of Johannesburg truly is! At long last someone has acknowledged the existence of a “multiracial creative class utopia” in downtown Johannesburg. The city is even home to […]
No we’re not on a mini-Spoek Mathambo marathon today. Intrigued by Spoek’s remix of Seun Kuti and the trailer for his new album, we googled Spoek anew and stumbled upon this video of a 2011 presentation Spoek gave at TedxSoweto (it was only uploaded onto Youtube at the end of last month). What I find useful […]
What Die Antwoord always wanted was to play with the spectacular to get people’s attention. As one does as an artist, I assume. In their new video, they get official help from Roger Ballen. Die Antwoord play the game well; whether they play it fair is open for interpretation.
And with this, we hope to close our current chapter on Die Antwoord. Bruce Lee and Rolanda Fisher, ‘outraged by the copying of their style and demand[ing] recognition and money,’ decided to mock Die Antwoord’s appearance on Taxi Jam* from a while back. * Taxi jam is a South African ”series of intimate acoustic gigs shot in the back” of […]
By Lily Saint* Die Antwoord skirts–and often dabbles in–homophobia and racist depictions in their videos and lyrics. Ostensibly to shake white South Africans out of their “middle class stupor.” Most of the time it does not work. Which is why we wondered what the large portraits of Yolandi Vi$$er and Waddy Jones (Ninja) were doing […]
Remember when South African artist Gazelle postured with his crew for the cover of the Chic Afrique album in 2009, dressed as a white caricature of Mobuto Sese Seko surrounded by his house composer, his bodyguard and wives? It made a mockery of the photographs usually taken by colonial photographers (and anthropologists) in the early part […]
We promised ourselves we won’t get drawn into this. This is the week in which Cape Town viral rappers Die Antwoord released the music video for their new single “Fok julle Naaiers.” The music video contains some Die Antwoord staples (spiders and scorpions come out of rapper Ninja’s mouth while he throws around the word Nigger, […]
If you’re wondering what took us so long to say something about South African rapper Spoek Mathambo’s new music video — for his cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” [corrected], well, we can’t make up our mind about it. The video, above, got a lot of attention when it first came out in late […]
The work of South African photographer Alexia Webster. That’s ‘Evil Boy,’ from Die Antwoord. See here and here.
The South African group Die Antwoord has a new album coming out next week with a major American music label. You can’t but admire their hustle. Yesterday they debuted a new video for which they recruited a young black rapper called “Wanga,” allegedly a street kid they’ve known for years–flanked by black dancers in blond wigs–who rails against people coming to circumcise him and manages to offend gay people in the process.
