Die Antwoord

Ninja, front man for Die Antwoord

For me, the only music worth buying is South-African music.
Being an artist in SA is no easy task particularly if you are a musician. I always got the impression that other people would look down on them as if to ask “when are you going to grow up and get a real job?” Thanks to Die Antwoord, that’s about to change.

I spotted them back when foOninjas was still up and even posted their ring tune for “enter the ninja” courtesy of the crazy guys over at www.watkykjy.co.za, not that I want to pull in on the whole “I told you they’d be big” thing, but if you don’t believe me, ask my dad who copied all their songs from me last December during my exile in South-Africa

It was with some shock that I discovered this weekend that Ninja used to be Max Normal. I say shock because I’ve owned (and I have to add the word legitimately here) some of his albums, hell, I even bought some of the tracks off the The Fantastic Kill album on Rhythm records when he was known as Watkin Tudor Jones and never even once suspected that Ninja was Max and Max was Ninja. The styles, beats, lyrics and the intelligence that went into his older works are in a league of their own and clearly shows that the man was ahead of his time. Not that the music from Die Antwoord is inferior, it just has a rawness to it and an angry violence that doesn’t really let up. It’s also understandable that so many South-Africans are appalled by their success with their generally high judgemental disposition.  An English friend commented that their videos are bad to watch, the kind of bad you experience when you watch car accidents on youtube where you don’t want to watch but can’t stop yourself. He may have something there since they just pushed over the 2.3 million views mark, a fucking far stretch from the 700k views the last time I saw their Enter the Ninja Video.

For what it’s worth, I’m a fan of Ninja and Yo-landie Visser. They’ve come a damn long way and they are more deserving than the shit people are forced to listen to in South-Africa, more so since they were signed this week with interscope. If I had it my way, they would sign the rock legends Fokofpolisiekar too.

Die Antwoord Featuring progeria survivor Leon Botha

I don’t care if people say it’s all a show, the guy clearly submerges himself into what he does. If that isn’t passion I do not know what is. If you haven’t checked out their Flex on the interweb, what are you doing hanging around here for?

- 19/03/2010 My friend Jester Thump just told me about this little gem filmed pre-Ninja:

and this one that’s slightly prophetic

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Tags: $O$, die antwoord, enter the ninja, interscope, max norma, ninja, progeria, the answer, watkin tudor jones, yo-landi visser, zef side

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 9:19 am and is filed under Say what?!?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.