TATU DIE ANTWOORD TOUR SERIES

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. 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. Die Antwoord are not the first hip-hop group to inject humour into what they do. 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!'Ĭomplimentary peanuts may soon lose their thrill, but for now, you can't really blame them for getting excited.

TATU DIE ANTWOORD TOUR SERIES

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. None the less we venture, with some trepidation, up a dark staircase to meet them.īackstage, in a brightly lit room, Ninja is holding court while eating pitta bread and hummus. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, as though his reaction was too horrific for words. 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). My interview was originally postponed due to an ominously vague explanation: 'Ninja's being. 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'. Their lyrics get much filthier than this. 'The Yolandi' may yet become 2010's hipster equivalent of 'the Rachel'.Īt 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'.

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. Meanwhile, Yolandi, sullenly passive in the videos, is ferocious on stage. 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. 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. Relishing its guttural smacks and hard edges, he makes Afrikaans sound like a language that was made for hip-hop. When they can keep up, that is, because Die Antwoord's outrageous aesthetic makes it easy to overlook just how good Ninja is. Their set has the whole crowd thrashing and rapping along, often in Afrikaans, to every word. Neither, it turns out, is their live show. 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.Įach 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?īut for the huge crowd rammed into Berlin's Magnet club to see them, Die Antwoord are no joke. fuck.' If Ninja doesn't know the original question, neither does anyone else. He raises his arm and lets it fall to his side. Ninja, joined by the teeny Yolandi and the tubby, mute DJ Hi-Tek, slouches against a wall, squinting. 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?' 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. 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.

Tatu die antwoord tour