You know, it’s fucking South African white zef rap rave shit. We didn’t know that anyone in America would like us. “All we ever wanted to do was a) make music, and b) make a music video, and 3) take photos of ourselves and put it all on the interwebs. “Seriously, it’s so fucking simple,” explains Ninja by phone from Osaka, Japan, where Die Antwoord are touring.

Is it a joke? Performance art? The future of music? In reality, it might be a little bit of all three. With music, visuals, and oversize personalities that seem almost too freaky to be real, more than a few people have begun to question whether or not Die Antwoord is serious. It’s also fair to say that no musical act in recent memory has generated such an intensely polarizing WTF?! kind of reaction. No small feat considering that their signature music-a rough-and-tumble amalgam of hip-hop and high NRG rave beats-is almost entirely informed by South African “zef” street culture. Ninja (known for performing in nothing but a floppy pair of Pink Floyd boxer shorts), a co-vocalist called Yo-Landi Vi$$er (a blonde pixie with a high-octave voice and a razor-sharp mullet), and backed by self-proclaimed “beat monster” DJ Hi-Tek (who rarely participates in photo shoots with the group and, at 25, is one of the world’s oldest known survivors of the disease Progeria, a genetic condition that causes sufferers to appear to prematurely age), the band is arguably the first-ever pop phenomenon to spring out of Cape Town.

Fronted by a gold-toofed, heavily tatted Watkin Tudor Jones, a.k.a. It also instantly transitioned the group from an obscure novelty act into a bona fide global phenomenon. The two-and-a-half-minute “Zef Side” clip-which features the band members being interviewed on the dusty streets of their suburban Cape Town, South Africa, neighborhood before exploding into a lightning-fast rap-dance track-became an Internet sensation, garnering more than two million views. When Die Antwoord’s videos for “Zef Side” and “Enter The Ninja” leapt online in late 2009, it was as if someone had doused the Internet in gasoline and lit a match.

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