Admit it, when you first saw the video for “Enter the Ninja,” you smirked, maybe even cringed, shook your head and wondered, “what the hell?” Some of you turned away and never looked back, but according to this trio’s meteoric rise through internet obscurity to landing a contract at Interscope in just about a year, many of you asked for more – many, many of you. The nature of Die Antwoord’s path to success isn’t necessarily from the realm of the unknown in the era of Biebers and Boyles, but it’s more so the culture where they have been embedded for years that helps to sustain a certain air of mystery that surrounds their authenticity. Lead vocalist Watkin Tudor Jones, aka Ninja, had been fixed in the South African hip-hop scene well before Die Antwoord, notably leading groups such as MaxNormal.tv and The Constructus Corporation, even pairing with fellow Cape Town native and Antwoord seductress Yo-Landi Vi$$er in the process. In 2009, Ninja, Vi$$er, and the obscure DJ Hi-Tek self-released a preliminary version of their first LP $O$ on their website that featured many prominent names in the relatively small South African hip hop circuit before making the video that would ultimately springboard them all the way to Coachella.
5, Die Antwoord’s first release on Interscope, is a bit of a sampler as the group prepares to release their first proper full length; on it you’ll find three untouched tracks from 2009’s preliminary version of $O$ (which is still streaming on their site), a more recent track released earlier this year, and a remix of “Enter the Ninja” by DJ Fishsticks. The latter is the song that introduced most of us to Die Antwoord from the beginning, and it continues to be the track that best characterizes this “zef” culture that permeates their brand of hip-hop. The track’s strobe-like techno beat flutters around a deep buzzing bass line that’s as catchy and easy to remember as Vi$$er’s playful hook. Ninja’s flow is rapid and symmetric, hurdling over his thick accent to remain just cohesive enough so we can keep up without stumbling, but what he has to say amounts to little more than the familiar hip-hop declaration of “we are the greatest thing of all time” – almost as if he could see the millions of internet hits coming from a mile away. What’s important to note here is that Ninja’s presence is impressive, and not just a caricature, and while the subject matter of any song that starts off with “My life is like a video game” is never really going strike much of an emotional chord, that’s not how Die Antwoord made it to this point in the first place.
The rest of the beats on this EP are cut from the same rave-like cloth, especially the bombastic “Wat Kyk Jy,” an Afrikaan phrase that loosely translates to “what are you looking at?” Here, Yo-Landi and Ninja thread slurring verses in both English and Afrikaan in between pounding, relentless hooks before the song completely takes off and turns into something sort of vicious; it’s a good choice to counter the more light-hearted “Enter the Ninja” and really defines the unpredictable nature of their production. “I Don’t Need You” is a sleepy cut built around Ninja’s monotone rhymes, spacey beeps and buzzes, and catchy vocoded chorus. Ninja’s egocentric verses personify a character uncomfortable with anything but a room filled with an overpowering beat and a wall-to-wall audience – “somebody say something, the bass pumping, the place jumping/I don’t need you.” “Fish Paste,” the newest track of the bunch, is a straight forward banger whose barren but smoothed out percussion may remind you of a product of the Cool Kids or Pharrell, but Vi$$er and Ninja turn it on its head and have some fun with it.
And that’s exactly what these three performers have ultimately done with this genre; amidst their near instantaneous climb to internet superstardom, Die Antwoord are putting together a respectable repertoire of both hard hitting techno and hip hop while introducing a widely unknown culture of music to the world. Their authenticity continues to be questioned; perhaps due to the element of the unknown that comes with this rarely touched “zef” culture, or because of the very little anyone can really know about Ninja, Vi$$er, or Hi-Tek after clicking through few Youtube videos. What we do know, however, is that this group from Cape Town has already found an audience all over the world after just about a year under their belts, a serviceable EP on the shelf, a full length record on the way (a revamp of $O$), and a growing live presence from New York City to California. Not bad.
