Part III: Ask no questions, hear no lies: Staying on Die Antwoord's surface

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Notes

⁶³ See for instance “Die Antwoord prompts a big question,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2010.

⁶⁴ It emerged that these notorious lines are an almost verbatim quote from boxer Myke Tyson's response in 2002 to a reporter at a news conference who yelled “get him in a straight jacket!” Tyson shouted back “I'll fuck you in the ass, you punk white boy. You faggot. You can't touch me, you're not man enough. I eat your asshole alive you bitch. Fuck you you ho … You scared coward, you not man enough to fuck with me. You can't last two minutes in my world bitch … I'll fuck you till you love me faggot” (Memorable quotes for Tyson). These lines, rapped by DJ Hi-Tek wearing a latex mask in “Fokjullenaaiers,” stood at the centre of Die Antwoord's row with their California-based record label Interscope in 2011 who wanted them to rework this song for “more pop appeal.” Choosing complete creative independence Die Antwoord severed ties with Interscope and walked away from a million dollar guarantee, to release their new album Ten$ion on their own Indie label Zef Records. See Jardin, Die Antwoord leave Interscope (online).

⁶⁵ In “Scopie,” for instance, Ninja records his fruitless attempts to get laid and ends by saying “But I am the one, the one wat fokkol poes vannaand gaan kry” (roughly translated as “the one that will get no pussy tonight”). In “She makes me a killer,” he recounts a girl called Sophie's disappointment when she learns that he is still living with his mother, leaving him “soos ʼn jagse doos sonder ʼn ereksie” (leave him like a horny assehole without an erection).

⁶⁶ Letterman, Late Show.

⁶⁷ See for instance the debate between Rustum Kozain and Richard Poplak in February 2010 (Kozain, “Response to Richard Poplak”; Poplak, “Richard Poplak Writes on Die Antwoord” and “Cape Flats Calling”).

⁶⁸ See Nuttall, Entanglement.

⁶⁹ See Jonny Steinberg's The Number: One Man's Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs.

⁷⁰ Interview with Michael Mechanic, Die Antwoord on Cultural Overload (online).

⁷¹  Zef is as Die Antwoord Does, Bold Type (online).

⁷² Urban Dictionary 2012. Also Wikipedia.

⁷³ In a May 2011 interview, Ninja and Yo-Landi stated that they wanted South Africa to be associated with Zef rather than apartheid. Zef is as Die Antwoord Does, Bold Type (online).

⁷⁴ “Skeem” used in Afrikaans slang is derived from English “scheme,” here meaning think; “rou” is Afrikaans for raw but here stands for cool; the phrase is punctuated by that universal Afrikaans expression of astonishment “jislaaik.”

⁷⁵ See Kozain, So Many Questions, and Response to Richard Poplak. See also Haupt, Lecture on Hip-Hip (online).

⁷⁶ Kozain, Response to Richard Poplak.

⁷⁷ This same fan base is probably baffled by the recent success of singer Bok van Blerk whose song De La Rey, De La Rey has stirred a new wave of nationalism under some Afrikaners who might feel threatened by the realities of contemporary South Africa.

⁷⁸ Roughly translated as “Careful, I’m still fucking poisonous.”

⁷⁹ Yo-landi raps “go through your pockets—no, we not gonna make love // go through your wallet—woah! // look at all this paper! // what a fuckin' sucker, see you later, masturbator.”

⁸⁰ In Postmodernism, Jameson describes “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms” (9).

⁸¹ Ninja in Enter the Ninja.

⁸² Interview with Jardin, Coachella festival (online).

⁸³ Ninja in Faggot.

⁸⁴ Nuttall, Entangelment, 87.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 107.