Dis Fokken kwaai musiek. Lekka lekka my broe. Maar wat die mieste van djulle fokken poese nie weetie is dat die fokken lanie Ninja nie a regta gangsta issie. Hy het homself ge-reinvent djulle naaiers. Wiet djulle wat is 'n naai? 'n naai is net soos 'n poes. Hierrie ou, die Ninja blaar, is eintlik 'n anner ou en sy naam was eers MaxNormaalTV. Check it maar uit op die interwebs like ek se. Hoe kry djy 'n fokken kappie op die e van "se" in "ek se"? Nou dja...check dit uit my bra's, my blare, my chommies, my chinas, my gabbas.
En by the way....fok julle almal julle dom poese. ha ha ha...julle moetie my serious vattie, ekke maak 'n grap ek se.
Hieso is 'n bietjie background oor die hele scene oppie Kaapse vlaktes.
http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/ntama/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=57&Itemid=39&showall=1http://www.mgmix.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=809:the-cape-flats-smile&catid=37:mgm
Bietjie background orie fokken blaar homself. MaxNormaal aka Die Antwoord.
http://www.overtone.co.za(...)loads/reviews/venuesParalysis by analysis. This is what I see - American gangster rap + crap '80s pop/rap synth music marinated in SA culture potjie for a few decades, then seasoned with Cape Flats gang culture and the raw satirical '80s asthetic that worked for District 9 and Corne and Twakkie, finally mirrored back at the world through the web.
A white guy with a crap hairstyle doing spastic dance moves accompanied by a boeremeisie who rolls her Rs and has an even crapper hairstyle comes across as funny and visceral. I'd bet that no deeper social commentary was intended, Ninja just found a persona that worked for him. Nobody else has done it.
Firstly, I like Die Antwoord, and my problems are with how Die Antwoord is interpreted and framed.
To me, Die Antwoord is basically blackface and blackface is tricky; it exists on a continuum from satire to parody to mimicry to misdirected appropriation, but the points on the continuum are given valency by reception. As Ninja and Yo-landi are personas, I'll take Die Antwoord as satirical.
But what are they satirising or parodying? The people on which the personas are based? I.e. the 'coloured' gangster or 'gangster' or youth? Or is it white working class youth, the select few who due to new proximities in working class and lower middle class neighbourhoods, are now developing habits and mannerisms that will not raise an eyebrow on the Cape Flats taxi-line?
This to me is interesting: that Die Antwoord suggests a fusion of white Afrikaans working class and 'coloured' working class identities, expressed in the most eloquent way through dialect/s.
But it cannot escape parody. Waddy Jones is, after all, not white working class Afrikaans (maybe he has roots there, I don't know; he lives in Higgovale. Although language identity may be slippery here); at the class remove that he inhabits, yes, the racial remove too, the adoption of the persona of Ninja treads that difficult and exhausting terrain of South African entertainment culture wherein 'coloured' people almost always figure as coon - delightful language skills (Afrikaans, after all, was born on their tongues) enhanced by gold-capped teeth. Tattoos that mimic the style of prison-garnered 'tjappies' (stamps), but tattoos that KNOW to stay well clear of any other direct references to gangs. For me the depth of the INVENTION is probably the most troublesome, because it reveals an anthropological bent: it is not a persona that has emerged in any organic way, such as our identities change in different environments; rather, it is a persona invented, but clearly based on detailed anthropological study.
Had Ninja been white working class with actual regular, day-to-day interaction with people on the Cape Flats, then the parodic would have no purchase; nor would accusations of appropriation. Or had Ninja, for instance, rapped in a mixture of white working class English and Afrikaans and Cape Flats English and Afrikaans, without developing the visual embellishments, then the social commentary and satire would have stood out in relief. And it would have been an interesting point about fluid identities emphasised. But the visual embellishments - especially the tattoos that tread gingerly between celebration and disavowal of prison-gang style and the gold teeth - do point to appropriation and Waddy Jones has not suddenly discovered his 'inner coloured'.
Or is Die Antwoord parodying gangsta hip-hop in the US itself? If rappers there can garner fame and fortune by adopting gangster stances (if they were not Original Gs), what would it mean to do this in South Africa? What would 'gangsta rap' a la mode in South Africa look like? Die Antwoord could be the answer to that question. Imagine, on a whim the musician wonders: Let's take hiphop, what is happening in it now, transport it to SA, but with all its logical conclusions. Doing this, Die Antwoord then happens also onto all sorts of interesting conjunctions.
1. The breathless celebration of Die Antwoord making it on Boing Boing etc. and "Die Antwoord are exotic, furious, and, most importantly, new...But what their lyrics mean — or what they stand for precisely — no one in Brooklyn or Paris or São Paulo can say".
I've been through some comment threads, and while some commentators there are 'international', South Africans swarm to Antwoord threads.
2. 'White trash' - I hate this loaded phrase. It is demeaning and it also signifies, in this instance, exotica, which takes me back to the coon. White or coloured, the working class are not exotic coons.
3. "his accent is unfathomable" - No it's not. It's a mixture, but the ingredients are recognizable. English spoken with an Afrikaans (Pretoria dialect) influence and Cape Flats English/Afrikaans dialect.
4. Historical awareness: "recalls a South African peanut-butter commercial from the ’80s", which was cribbed from the Atlas bodybuilding adds in American comics. . Die Antwoord are not the first to rap in dialect in SA: Brasse Vannie Kaap were on the original tip - i.e. they used dialect as their preferred medium to mark their authenticity; Prophets of Da City used dialect to comic effect in 'Net 'n Bietjie Liefde' ("When you get out of the texie, you look so sexy, I nearly drop my Getsby").
Sometimes one would like to see reference to such historical examples so that one can see the 'newness' for what it is. It's like SA critics who gushed over Mzwakhe Mbuli for 'revolutionising' English poetry when they had not heard of toasting and dub-poetry (sorry, old hobby horse). More of this when Poplak insinuates BitterKomix into the same historical moment as Fokofpolisiekar: "Bands like Fokofpolisiekar brought a hardcore punk sensibility to the conversation, and anti-art movements like Bitterkomix undermined Afrikaner nationalism and exceptionalism, viciously lampooning the rugby, barbeque, and lager set."
5. "Zef-rap, the musical currency Die Antwoord have invented and trade in, is born of the badlands that seethe behind Table Mountain in South Africa’s second-largest city, Cape Town. Centuries before apartheid was institutionalized, the Cape flats were seen as the solution to what successive regimes considered to be the city’s most pressing problem, the so-called “coloured” population. The Cape coloureds are a racial mixture of the Khoisan people, white settlers, Malay slaves brought in by the Dutch, and blacks from other areas of southern Africa; their language reflects this mélange. They have long been considered a bastard race, and banished accordingly. (The most tragic of these instances was the razing of District Six that began in the late 1960s.)
The flats lie on a swathe of bitter, barren plateau. Its hoods are defined by rows and rows of single-storey brick houses, rusting chain-link fence, and coils of barbed wire. The streets are owned by the walking dead — crystal meth addicts, drunks, AIDS-emaciated wraiths. There is a vibrant gangland culture, a fuming streak of Islamic fundamentalism, and thousands of good families trying to make a go of it in the mayhem. As such, it is an incredibly rich cultural environment. Zef rap was birthed here, an ungodly potpourri of Top 40 hip hop, chintz house, rave music, DIY beat making, and bad techno. And this is where Ninja spent years, mining for meaning among the violence, the misery, the strong familial bonds — developing not just a style, but an entire persona."
I mean, really. I know it's journalism and not a history textbook, but still. Then, Antwoord invented Zef rap, and yet it was born on the Cape Flats?
And how about distinguishing 'Zef' as a white Afrikaans adjective that describes 'bad taste': fur on the dashboard, plastic-covered furniture, etc. etc., which most of central and southern Cape Town associate with the northern suburbs, rather than the Cape Flats. While there are commonalities between Cape Flats working class culture and Northern Suburbs working class culture (magwheels anyone? Cortina Big Six, anyone?), 'Zef' needs that distinction in terms of its etymology, especially in the context of those two paragraphs which lack cohesion and leave one with a wrong impression of historical connections.
And what about 'their language reflects this melange'? Afrikaans and English? One would imagine that Cape Flats speech is not intelligible to the rest of South Africa.
And, where exactly did Waddy Jones/Ninja spend years picking up the lingo? Durbanville? The Cape Flats itself is a very large area, with wide varieties in class and language. It starts at the M5, but I don't think Durbanville forms part of it. It's the work-in-progess kind of writing of the article that irritates me - where things should have and could have been teased out, it's all just left as is, making one wonder whether the writer was just rushed or whether he believes in this potted history.
6. "When the Guardian hastily compared Die Antwoord to London white trash garage rap, the paper missed the nuances of Ninja’s brilliant appropriation of Cape flats culture."
Implying that he has his finger on the pulse, instead.
7. "No South African community embodies this more than the Cape coloureds"
The romance continues.
8. "By moving to the flats and buying wholesale into local gangsta culture, Waddy is reframing South Africanism anew. While Afrikaans punks positioned themselves in opposition to the ultra-conservative, Calvanist ethos of die volk, what Die Antwoord are doing is not an act of rejection, but an act of embracing."
I wish this was true. As I said before, if this happened without the visual accoutrements, then such a project - if it is Waddy Jones's intention - could have ethical worth; but, I say again, the completeness of the invented persona points to a distance between such putative convictions in this regard. But such distance between artist and persona also opens it up to all sorts of accusations, among them cynical appropriation. Does Waddy Jones believe in this act of embracing? Why then not use his real name? Why displace it onto a persona?
9. "Ninja has sculpted, both with his flesh and his music, the ultimate South African. He is everything in the country, “fucked into one person.” That he is willing to go so far to embody this idea is thrillingly, gloriously radical. It is also an essential step for the South African generation tasked with healing, so that future generations can answer Mandela’s question — Can we one day unite and govern outside of race? — with a resounding “yes!”"
No, WADDY JONES has sculpted, in Ninja, a persona of what embracing different cultural identities in SA might mean.
Or, no, Waddy Jones has sculpted, in Ninja, a persona of what might be if a South African wanted to follow the trend of 'gangsta rap' in the states. If you want to strike a gangsta pose in the Western Cape, this is what you should/would look like.
The one thing that is certain is that Die Antwoord opens up the space of double-speak, characteristic especially of slave society and known, from my 'coloured' background, as 'kak-praat' or 'gat-krap'.
Hieso is regte capies
Gangsta boys in South African townships
[ Bericht 0% gewijzigd door Tokkelos op 21-02-2010 13:15:45 ]