Owing to space constraints in The Times’ print product, not all the weirdness and wonderment of Die Antwoord could fit into an article about the group that appears in Monday’s Calendar section. This online version offers a longer take of that article.

 
 

Since February, the question has become so linked with South African “rave-rap” trio Die Antwoord  that you’d be forgiven for thinking the cuss-word-laden query is actually part of the group’s name.

“Die Antwoord? What the … ?!”

The trio’s name translates as “the answer” in Afrikaans. But that emphatic question has been posed all over the “interwebs” (the group’s misnomer for cyberspace) thanks to Die Antwoord’s hauntingly enigmatic homemade videos “Enter the Ninja” and “Zef Side,” which have become viral supernovas this year, racking up a combined 11 million YouTube views. Puzzlement with the group also reverberated through the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, where the trio confounded and dazzled festival-goers over the course of a riotous 20-minute set.

According to hard-rhyming, helium-voiced frontwoman Yo-Landi Vi$$er, Die Antwoord is growing increasingly comfortable with causing confusion. “It’s alien, all right?” she said. “It’s not really our problem. And not everyone’s confused.”

Chalk up the head-scratching to the Cape Town trio’s singular synthesis of throw-away cultural effluvia: its bawdy sex rhymes, 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.

In Afrikaans, the band name Die Antwoord means "The Answer." But one big unsolved question has followed the South African rap-rave trio since their deliciously bonkers music videos began circulating online months ago -- are they for real?

This is usually a silly debate in the artifice-obsessed world of pop music. But Die Antwoord so perfectly upends every au courant collision in urban, electronica and world music today that, well, larger forces seem at play. The band's founder, Ninja (Waddy Jones, a longtime rap-and art-scene veteran in Johannesburg), is a leonine, flat-topped MC covered in crude prison-style tattoos who's frequently onstage in little more than "Dark Side of the Moon" boxer shorts. The band's producer, DJ Hi-Tek, is a rotund and mute beatsmith fond of marijuana-themed bandanas and cutting tracks on his "PC computer" that he uploads to the "interwebs worldwide." And then there's the typographically exquisite creature of Yo-Landi Vi$$er, an age-indeterminate, gutter-mouthed Shiva in gold Lycra and a cascading mullet.

All members are white; all derive their musical signposts from discarded Ibiza trance compilations; all have a vast vocabulary of infectious patois where to be "So zef, so fres" is to occupy a state of post-racial, post-colonial zen bliss. They are rap's opposite -- and the fulfillment of its every possibility. And after their Saturday night set at the El Rey Theater, which was hastily rescheduled after the cancellation of HARD LA, they gave an apropos answer to their most fundamental question. Who knows if they're for "Real," but they did give a riveting performance (or piece of performance art).

Regardless of Die Antwoord's mythology, one fact not up for debate is its members' skills behind a microphone. Like another recently rehabilitated white rapper (that'd be Eminem), Ninja doesn't try to match a stereotypically "black" delivery but instead found his own rhythmically exacting flow that functions as a serving tray for his Afrikaans slang and droll boasting.

Vi$$er plays the role of sneering, unattainable sex kitten, a beloved trope in rap from Salt-N-Pepa to Nicki Minaj. She sees no schism between thrusting a hand up her crop-top and dropping low at Ninja's behest while wearing oversized sweatpants with a vulgar and definitive rejection notice printed across the rear. DJ Hi-Tek, alas, is afraid of flying, so they have a masked stand-in, the sonorously-nicknamed Vuilgeboost, perform in his stead overseas.

It's unfortunate that Die Antwoord's breakthrough single, "Enter The Ninja," veers closest to novelty. While the notorious (and suspiciously glossy) video is a Lynchian pandora's box -- Why is every picture in Vi$$er's apartment a magazine cutout of Ninja? Who is the unnerving little man that pops up between cuts? -- it's also their least satisfying track. Die Antwoord opened with it, and for a brief moment the crowd evinced the very modern pleasure of the Internet coming to visit you in person. But then the show took an intriguing turn. As Die Antwoord unloaded some truly thrilling bangers from their forthcoming album, "$0$," the audience grew uncertain of its obligation to actual, unwinking fandom.

The effervescent singalong "Fish Paste" sports one of the most casually genius, lost-in-translation Oedipal insults in global rap, and the spectacularly profane "Beat Boy" is built on a chilly, crescendoing trail of virtuoso beatboxing. But while their barn-burning 15-minute Coachella set had possibly the best reception of the fest, the El Rey's crowd oscillated between ravenous crowd surfing and confusion that the answer to their "WTF?" take on Die Antwoord wasn't quite what they'd prepared for. To give in to Die Antwoord's deadpan majesty involves suspending some disbelief that this music really is as deliriously fun as it feels like.

Rap has conquered the ethnic music of nearly every culture on earth, and rave sounds have underpinned American pop for the last two years, and global club music for much longer. But Die Antwoord blows both up to such previously unseen caricatures that even pop culture's outsized appetite for the bizarre has trouble processing it. We love to be played with by our artists, but with Die Antwoord it's hard to know who is yanking who's chain.

Fortunately, Die Antwoord allows for any number of takes, and the least fulfilling one may be attempting to pull back the curtain on them. When Ninja's hypnotically vulgar pelvic thrusts collide with Vi$$er's I'll-cut-you grin and a techno beat so massive it can unite continents, cultures and every corner of those aforementioned "interwebs," who needs more of an answer than that?

-- August Brown

Photos, from top: South African rap-rave trio Die Antwoord perform at the El Rey Theater, and Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er get into the music. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

When they aren’t spitting Afrikaans-accented sex rhymes over “next-level” rave-rap beats, helping pet rats deliver a litter of babies or just generally toying with rabid fans’ sense of reality, the members of Die Antwoord have apparently been laying the groundwork to launch a global musical assault.

After months of speculation, the South African hip-hop trio – which provoked both shock and awe with its galvanizing 20-minute set at Coachella last month -- has reportedly signed a deal with Interscope Records to release its debut album.

Although the group’s label reps did not immediately respond to a request for comment, in keeping with the viral nature of Die Antwoord’s popularity so far, a “Guess What” tab on dieantwoord.com reveals a grainy, 44-second video of front-man Ninja getting a full back tattoo – swords impaling S-shaped serpents, flanking a yin-yang symbol to form the word “$O$.” Not coincidentally, this is also the name of the 17-track mix-tape that streamed until recently on the website.  

According to the video, a 23-track version of “$O$” will be dropping “soon on Interscope Records.”

Angeleno fans can decide for themselves on July 17, when Die Antwoord takes the stage at Los Angeles State Historic Park, as part of the lineup for Hard L.A., appearing alongside more established acts including N.E.R.D., Sleigh Bells, M.I.A. and Flying Lotus.

-- Chris Lee

Photo: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

If we haven't already convinced you that Die Antwoord are the mulleted, Pink-Floyd-boxer-clad saviors of everything good and right about music, then you can go take a proverbial walk off a proverbial pier. But if we have won you over with our treatises to the South African "phat rap-rave" trio, you'll be pleased to know that July 17's HARD Festival at Los Angeles State Historic Park just got significantly more Zef.

The festival just added Die Antwoord and the equally Fres (but decidedly less Zef) Flying Lotus, Sleigh Bells and N.E.R.D. to an already packed lineup headlined by M.I.A., who will hopefully not be exacting vengeance on redheads that night. Tickets are on sale now for $60, and I'd be willing to barter a couple for a Die Antwood sweatsuit, as seen above on the ever-fun-to-type Yo-Landi Vi$$er. 

-- August Brown

Photo credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

[UPDATE] Added the date of HARD L.A. and corrected Yo-Landi Vi$$er's last name. Least Zef typo ever.