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.

Best die antwoord videos