This Saturday will mark my one year anniversary with Die Antwoord. I encountered them for the first time at Ramfest 2009, doing a duet with Jack Parow sans his usual partner in grime, Rufio Vegas. What a spectacular show! Yes: a show – an explosive, uber-entertaining one at that.
That was a year ago and Die Antwoord has been seemingly quiet until recently. In the past two weeks, Die Antwoord shot to international fame, the kind that many national (even international) bands can only dream of. Viralicious stuff indeed. “All over the interwebs, my blaar”. This wasn't due to a great show they played or a fantastic review in Rolling Stone, it’s because of something that seems inexplicable: the power of online content and its potential to go viral. It’s nothing new. OK Go did something similar in 2006 that shot them to almost instant fame.
It seems the Internet’s providing something that bands never had previously - in fact, nowadays, most of the musical acts invading our social networking spaces have little true talent. (Although I would argue that most of the music today is bland, given the greatness that was the 60s and 70s – but that’s just my view and is totally beside the point). It seems as though fame does not have anything to do with producing great work anymore. Producing strange and fresh entertainment that lends itself to the viral capabilities of the Web is the way to go.
Minus Die Antwoord’s strange looking trio, the over-the-top tackiness, the smoothly art directed videos, the rough Afrikaans accents and the explicit lyrics, they’re just another rap hip-hop crew trying to hit the big time. Thanks to the Internet, they succeeded. "I was famous before all of this in my own brain - the online thing was just a channel," Ninja said in an interview with the Times. "It was just waiting to come out. We're f***in' famous, everyone just goes online to find out about us. Everyone wants to book us. Live Nation, the biggest events company in the world, wants to make a deal with us. There's an international bidding war going on at the moment over who's going to represent us. EMI Worldwide and Interscope Universal are bidding for my soul."
An article featuring Die Antwoord appeared on BoingBoing on the first of February after blogger Xeni Jardin picked it up on a friend’s blog, Sophisticated Funk, possibly via YimiYayo who blogged about them on the 28th of January.
Also, on the first of February an article in The Guardian UK featured Die Antwoord. An article also appeared on Buzzfeed and MetaFilter. A day later and DListed picked it up via BoingBoing, featuring it on their site too (under the section Hot Sluts of the Day), calling it “equal parts horror and awesome”.
Two days after their initial post, BoingBoing posted a more in depth follow up post. It seems it was only the beginning. On the same day they were featured on American television’s hugely popular Attack of The Show. Then Europe picked it up with a post on pop culture blog, TasteLikePizza.com. Ah the Dutch - always adoring Afrikaans artists even though Die Antwoord is surely not rapping about kitties.
On the 5th of February Die Antwoord was featured on New York Times.com and on Dutch VK Mag, whose community call them all kinds of nice things like “Vette shit” and “echt te dope” with their “lekkere beats”. On the 8th they featured on iAfrica.com.
The band also got mentions from Katy Perry and Fred Durst on Twitter, which by the way is still giving them a lot of love if you check out the search results.
No one could actually believe what they were seeing and soon enough speculation started – how hard core is Die Antwoord really? Is this some kind of experiment, an art school dropout genius’s latest project? A post on VideoGum sort of confirmed it: “All fake, skewering the movement of middle-class kids with Apartheid-supporting parents becoming Afrikaner posers, basically.”
But what’s the problem, really? This after all it is the Interwebs – that wonderful place where all’s fair provided that it’s good entertainment.
And the figures speak for themselves: more than one and a half million views on YouTube for their videos combined, and 36 762 Facebook fans.
In 2008, Waddy Jones aka Max Normal aka Ninja, predicted that his new project Die Antwoord “will also be presented to the world as a wild and savage rap crew from the deep, dark, depths of Africa. Die Antwoord rap crew is going to perform live before the screening of Die Antwoord feature film at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s gonna be hot.” Impressive, maybe if Ninja’s music career doesn’t work out he should give fortune telling a shot – I even heard a rumour that there’s a movie coming soon...
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