You’d think I’d know better. After spending the better part of three years examining the course of American pop culture in the Muslim world, I’ve waded into another fraught cultural cage match, thus inviting a second volley of apparently endless, staggeringly well-argued commentary and hate mail. Woe is me, and all that. The reaction to “Cape Flats Calling,” my Walrus Blog post on the so-called Zef-rap outfit Die Antwoord, along with the general interweb frenzy regarding the band, is a reminder that 150 years after Manet outraged the Paris salon with his Olympia remix, art can still get folks hot under the collar. Millions of Die Antwoord–related bits and bytes have been uploaded, a fair bit of actual ink has been spilled; it thus appears that a quick revisit is called for.
Die Antwoord are a white South African rap group, lead by a gangly fellow named Ninja, who channel (or appropriate, or ape, depending on your view of these things) Cape Town Flats–coloured gang culture, creating a mash-up of grime, rave, and old-school hip hop. In early February, after a number of influential blogs picked up on their free-to-download album $0$, they became the first genuine internet phenomena of this brand new decade. Entirely complicit in all the promotional brouhaha, Die Antwoord have surfed the capricious wave of Web 3.0 on, some say, the backs of a marginalized community who will decidedly not be joining them on the stage at Coachella. The band is now negotiating with the home of the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, and M.I.A., Interscope Records. Them’s the big leagues.
If journalism is literature in a hurry, then web-journalism is literature at warp speed. In my first post, I made a number of errors — since corrected — that somehow escaped the sentinels at my normally impenetrable factual firewall. For those, I was rightly taken to task. Interestingly, a measure of the criticism directed my way comes from a piece on indie music Mecca Pitchfork, in which Ninja called my assessment of their music “quite fuckin’ brilliant.” I have thus been labeled a Die Antwoord booster, as if the brokest band in the known universe sent a Lear Jet round to schlep me off to gigs, softening me up with tik, coconut bongs, and luxury guided tours of Cape Town’s ghettos. There was also some suggestion that Die Antwoord’s popularity was driven mostly by the fervour of people just like me, white South African expatriates who spend their time in Australia, the UK, and Canada trawling the net for: (a) anything that confirms the fact that SA is now an unlivable disaster zone rife with violent crime, thus validating their decision to emigrate, and (b) anything that scratches their paradoxical itch for home. But Interscope does not consider signing bands based on the listening requirements of white ex-Johannesburgers; Die Antwoord must thus be considered a genuine global pop cultural phenomenon. It’s worth considering why that may be.
“Culture,” wrote the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “is context.” As I suggested in my first post, it’s difficult to understand Die Antwoord’s importance — or to understand them at all, really — without locating their place in the stream of South African culture which, of course, is so intimately related to South African politics. There are those who argue that I did not do this as comprehensively as I might, a fact pointed out most succinctly by South African poet and cultural commentator Rustum Kozain in his lengthy takedown of my piece. (I’m spanked for, among other things, use of the term “white trash,” and the precise cultural provenance of a South African peanut butter commercial. You’ll thus be unsurprised to learn that I stand by my initial read of Die Antwoord’s place in the larger picture, and won’t regurgitate any of that here.) Kozain’s post has made him something of a South African literary celebrity, a designation of which he is no doubt worthy. But there are a few points in his gentle fulmination that bear some scrutiny, mirroring as they do so many of the criticisms flung at Die Antwoord over the past couple of months.
Kozain opens his post with an equivocation — “Firstly, I like Die Antwoord” — and then swings the argument into the oncoming headlights of Edward Said’s oeuvre — “[M]y problems are with how Die Antwoord are interpreted and framed.” I become instantly drowsy at lines like that, but was harkened by Kozain’s reminder that he can’t possibly know what the band had in mind, short on the heels of which comes the following sophism: “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 [is a] persona, I’ll take Die Antwoord as satirical.”
What did the creators have in mind, one wonders? Says Ninja: “I’m just engaging my inner zef, which everybody has. It’s not a persona, it’s an extension of myself, an exaggerated version of myself.” That takes care of that, then. But artists are notoriously poor parsers of their own work, and I’m unwilling to throw out the babies of satire and parody with the bathwater of “valency by reception,” but we’ll get back to that in a moment.
I find, in Kozain’s opening comments, an uneasiness with the fact that Die Antwoord will be accepted by most of their new fans, South African or otherwise, entirely out of context. They therefore come to represent, in a rather unflattering manner, an entire South African community that is far richer — culturally, often financially, and certainly sartorially — than Ninja and company can ever suggest. It’s an argument that some have applied to hip hop in general, that the music and attendant culture defines black Americans for the entire world as bitch-slapping, dope-smoking, crack-slinging, 40-drinking gangbangers. This denies, however, the richness of the genre itself, not to mention Tyler Perry, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and numerous other examples of African Americans who fit firmly and unthreateningly in the middle-brow milieu. Yet we cannot deny the allure of the ghetto, and nor, if I may fumble with J.M. Coetzee’s aphorism, can we deny an audience their misreadings.
Mr. Kozain, meanwhile, is clear in how he reads things, but we cannot know what he actually feels about Die Antwoord because we’re insulated from his gut-level response by layers of academia-lite. One wonders: Is he offended? Appalled? After all, Ninja has dressed in the guise of lower-class coloured gangstas from the ghetto, used that world as a backdrop for his now highly successful brand of invented music, which is sold on the basis of its outrageous otherness. But implicit in so much of the criticism is this: We must protect lower-class coloureds from Die Antwoord, because they have not the voice to do so themselves. This is a noble position, undercut only by the fact that Die Antwoord have gigged heavily in Mitchell’s Plain, and indeed hatched their concept in the company of those they were supposedly parodying.
Who are these coloured representatives who handed Ninja the keys to the appropriation manse? If we’re to believe the bands’ testimony, they’re fellow artists, random dope peddlers, hip-hop party-heads — hardly a quorum. But if one considers the arc of Ninja’s South African journey, in which he has lived a broad experience from the ’burbs of Jo’burg to Alexandria township to Hillbrow to the ’burbs of Cape Town to couch surfing in the Flats, I’d say he’s earned a solid A in his attempt to come to terms with what it means to be a South African. An established artist, he has located in the Flats a vector for his experiences, donned the raiments of those he identifies with, and used the Lego blocks of their culture in order to create something similar, certainly, but also distinct. (It’s exactly this last point that I argue so vigorously in my book The Sheikh’s Batmobile, with regard to Muslim artists borrowing from American culture.) Die Antwoord are toying with identity, which has long been the preserve of pop music. It’s very dangerous ground. That’s why it’s so damn exciting.
Yet, when we strip away all the flourishes, when we remove all the fancy molding from “interpreted and framed,” what Kozain and those who agree with him can only be saying is that Die Antwoord are thieving piss-takers. I see it another way: Die Antwoord are reverential for those that they borrow from, investing in them a (perhaps misplaced) sense of cultural summation. “Isn’t sticking to your own culture ruthlessly a type of stagnation, a type of incest?” asked the late South African writer K. Sello Duiker. “Isn’t that a bigger transgression than going beyond the boundaries?” I’ll repeat the gist of my previous piece: Die Antwoord’s work is one of embracing; they exhibit the possibility of the South African cultural mash-up, without articulating it intellectually. Their satire, such as it is, exists on a different plain.
Kozain stumbles toward where that plain might lie. Are they parodying gangster rap from the US, he asks? No more so than the Beastie Boys. They are too tight, too accomplished, too respectful to be a novelty act. He suggests a number of ways in which Die Antwoord might have avoided parody: If Ninja were a working class white with a PO box in the Flats, or if he had left it at the linguistic mash-up and forgone the ersatz gold teeth and prison tjappies (stamps, or tattoos), then all would be right with the interweb. But Kozain is missing the point. Without the accoutrements, Die Antwoord are neutered as performance artists. It’s the whole hog, or nothing.
Which brings us back to our question of why the band has emerged as a global, rather than a local (or expatriate) pop cultural phenomenon. I realize that this is the instant in an internet buzz band’s lifespan where I’m supposed to bevel the edges of my earlier enconium, and assure you that I’m way too cool to get excited about anything, ever. But if I am to do any revising, it would have to be upward. I love their music, I haven’t stopped listening to it, and they’re happily ensconced in my personal hip-hop pantheon, high-fiving Ghostface and Raekwon, back-slapping Nas. Too little has been written of their chops, but after decades of hip-hop consumption, I’ll assert that Die Antwoord are indeed poes groot. No doubt that has something to do with their popularity outside my narrow demographic.
As far as I’m concerned, what Die Antwoord are ultimately parodying is that need for the suburban soul, white, black, or otherwise, to put a hand up to the dangerous face of the ghetto. They’re expertly representing a sometimes toxic, often enervating, occasionally explosive mixture of guilt, boredom, rage, horniness, and desire for the exotic that bubbles up from the suburban experience. The gangsta, at least according to the fantasy promoted by Interscope and their like, is free. Not so the homie in a two-bedroom house in Johannesburg, LA, Leeds, Barcelona, São Paulo, Seoul, or Santiago. Suburbanites everywhere have for decades donned baggy jeans and ball caps, “appropriating” the aspect and attitude of the black gangstas of North America — a cycle of posturing that has turned over on itself countless times, to the point where we can no longer distinguish an actual gangbanger from an MIT undergrad. Die Antwoord are not endorsing, but rather delving into the heart of the suburban desire to be ghetto fabulous. They’re not blackface, they’re ’burbface. And that’s why the bean counters at Interscope are considering a tasty deal: The band is universal.
Ah, but from the outside looking in — this is, after all, the website of a Canadian magazine — the whole Die Antwoord kerfuffle may seem like a storm in the teacup. Let me assure readers the stakes are indeed high. We’re talking about a culture only fifteen years removed from apartheid, struggling with the idea of a post-racial national identity. Local cultural debates are thus jacked with voltage. One need only look at the superb responses to Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 to get a sense of how seriously South African intellectuals are taking the cultural conundrums that come their way. And it’s worth pointing out that not only is there a similarity in both the content and stridency of arguments regarding District 9 and Die Antwoord, there is an actual bridging of the two products: An alien “prawn” was at one point the band’s Facebook profile picture, and Blomkamp is reportedly directing their next music video. This makes for pretty good corporate synergy, but there is also an aesthetic symmetry, if you will.
What District 9 and Die Antwoord so effectively deliver what it feels like to be in South Africa. They communicate a febrile energy, a sense that anything is possible, up to and including alien landings. Their immense popularity outside of the country suggests that the South African experience — and not only in terms of its racial history — holds some larger lessons. We’ve already discussed Die Antwoord’s universality, but let’s quickly consider it in terms of District 9. That film’s depiction of Johannesburg suggests where the rest of the planet’s cities are going: a hyper-industrialized developed world married uneasily to a barely functioning third world, sutured together by barbed wire, divided again by race and ethnicity. Blomkamp’s take on the city functions as a plausible vision of a global future. The vast, variegated, impossibly rich South African experience — about to be broadcast to four billion odd from those lovely new soccer stadiums — has something to offer audiences everywhere.
South Africa is a country still working through its wounds, thrust onto main stage perhaps before it is ready, but thrust all the same. Geertz could easily have re-jigged his famous statement: Culture is war. There will always be those who seek to define who can speak for whom, and those who narrow culture down to essentialist readings of precise cultural nuances that cannot — must not — be misinterpreted or misaligned. Their motives are manifold, their intentions often good ones. It’s not for me to tell these fine people to cease and desist, and acts like Die Antwoord deserve all the scrutiny that comes their way. What the band proves, however, is that South Africa is currently riding the rapids of the cultural mainstream. It’s gone global, baby. And when that happens, you wake up in the morning to learn that you own nothing, not even your hard-earned prison tjappies. All that remains is to widen the context.
(Photo of Die Antwoord by Sean Metelerkamp)
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
Mark: It’s not just in Canada, it seems all over artists don’t get the local recogtnition they should. I was in Malaga where Picasso was born and it is much different, but then he is...
Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
Jefry: I do not really like to read a story like a novel or a real story but I think this is very interesting and need to be read
Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
Djzklj: Pretty interesting article, despite that I don’t wanna make a voyage there
Sanyo Seiki: I love this game! Very addicted! Sanyo Seiki
Anonymous: People are so disconnected from reality these days, it seems like the only thing that matters to them is materialism and celebrity gossip, disgusting! http://poemti.me