Die Antwoord – Zef Side (Beat Boy)
2009 · Directed by Ninja & Sean Metelerkamp
95K Likes
Best comments
1.“This guy makes Sacha Baron Cohen look like a hack. Epic. How did I miss this genius?”
More comments
- 2.“I love how DJ Hi-Tek is like, '...don't look at his crotch... don't look at his crotch... just look at his face...'”
- 3.“Just to make things clear: the chubby dude isn't DJ Hi-Tek. Nobody knows who DJ Hi-Tek actually is.”
The story
This two-and-a-half-minute clip is how most of the world met Die Antwoord. Ninja asked Cape Town filmmaker Sean Metelerkamp to make it, and it came out in late 2009 as a short promo: the group talks to the camera about growing up in a public housing suburb (an origin story that was made up) before it rolls into their song Beat Boy, which samples Bronski Beat's 1986 Hit That Perfect Beat. Zef, for the record, is Afrikaans slang loosely meaning common.
Boing Boing posted it on February 1, 2010, and the band's website crashed under the traffic. A week later it had passed 300,000 YouTube views. By the end of 2010 it had more than five million and was one of 25 finalists, out of 23,358 entries, in YouTube Play, the Guggenheim's video biennial, screened at the museum in New York. That May, Interscope signed the group to a $1 million deal. Not bad for a fake backstory.
