Die Antwoord – Enter the Ninja
2010 · Directed by Rob Malpage & Ninja
702K Likes
Best comments
1.“Die Antwoord is a strange mix of trying to figure out if you actually like it... and wondering what the fuck you need to smoke to come up with this.”
More comments
- 2.“Who said meth never gave us anything positive?”
- 3.“My dad showed me this when I was like 5, and I still don't understand why.”
The story
On February 1, 2010, Boing Boing posted two videos from a Cape Town rap-rave crew called Die Antwoord, and the thing took off. This was the big one. Ninja raps while Yolandi Visser lip-syncs the hook in a bedroom plastered with pictures of him and crawling with rats, swapping a school uniform for an oversized T-shirt under a mullet one critic compared to a mistreated Skipper doll. By the end of 2010 it had more than eight million YouTube views, and people were still arguing over whether they were a real band or a very committed piece of performance art.
Some context helps. Ninja is Watkin Tudor Jones, who had already rapped as Max Normal, and Die Antwoord built its persona on zef, a South African subculture rooted in working-class Afrikaner style. He co-directed the video with Rob Malpage. Standing in for the group's producer DJ Hi-Tek is Leon Botha, a Cape Town painter and turntablist who went by DJ Solarize and was one of the longest-lived people with progeria. He died in June 2011, one day after his 26th birthday.
The weirdness paid off. Interscope signed them in a deal reported at a million dollars, the single reached the UK chart, they played it on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Myspace named it the video of the year. All this for a band whose debut album had been streaming free on its own website.
