12, after nearly a year of Die Antwoord’s incessant touring, performing at packed shows and festivals across North America, Europe and Japan, its debut album, "$O$" finally reached retail, landing at No. On the strength of Die Antwoord’s viral popularity, the group triggered a bidding war among five major labels and signed a five-album deal with Cherrytree/Interscope Records in May. We laugh ourselves to sleep every night.”įrowning, his face a grave rictus of sober intent, he added: “Conceptual art, I don’t even know what that is.”įor now, neither fans, art lovers nor the machers controlling record label purse strings seem to care. Seated at a Mid-City hotel restaurant, the greyhound-thin, heavily tattooed lead rapper, Ninja (Watkin “Waddy” Tudor Jones), scoffed with undisguised scorn: “Yes, it’s a joke. But given the bandmates’ well-documented pre-Die Antwoord past - as members of the jokey “corporate” rap group MaxNormal.TV and the experimental music collective the Constructus Corporation - what its core constituency of hipsters and bloggers really want to know: Is Die Antwoord punking the world à la Ali G? Or worse, is it conceptual art? The group is poised to become the biggest international rap cross-over since Falco in the 1980s.
Chalk up the head-scratching to the Cape Town trio’s singular synthesis of throw-away cultural effluvia: its bawdy sex rhymes and naked celebration of a uniquely South African white trashiness called “Zef,” its employ of imagery equally inspired by children and the criminally insane as well as the sense of cultivated mystery that has shrouded Die Antwoord for the last nine months.