![]() We are invited to see Zef as surface: even if we know their “next level” Zef style is birthed from these working class roots, we also know that neither Ninja nor Yo-Landi grew up in this neighbourhood and they have reinvented Zef to signify something else. As becomes clear in this video, DA’s version of Zef takes place against a backdrop of easy inter-racial or cross-racial interaction, in an English heavily inflected by Afrikaans accent and dialect. ![]() Zef side was filmed doccie-style on what is claimed to be Yo-Landi and Ninja’s homeground – they hang out with their “neighbours” in a working-class neighbourhood, and everyone waves and smiles jovially at the camera. Viewers were introduced to this fluidity in an early video, Zef side, in which DA defined their take on Zef, resurrecting it from its working class roots in the 60s and 70s, and redefining it as a positive and desirable tag that extends to their sense of style, fashion and talk. And it is exactly this insistent crossing of race, class and language barriers that has become a defining aspect of Die Antwoord’s style. This point might be lost on DA’s substantial international following, but rooted in its South African context this video is jarring and iconoclastic. Clearly, a mobile phone and that model car cannot exist simultaneously, and the police vehicle is therefore inserted to signify an old order, in defiance of which this staged narrative takes place.īut the artifice of this narrative is the result of more than a simple Lolita-esque fantasy with barefooted Yo-Landi dressed in the uniform of Hoërskool Bid Saam when race is added to the mix the video becomes much more loaded in a South African context with the addition of interracial sex, race and prison gangster culture, it starts grating on many an open nerve in South Africa’s brittle psyche. Now I’m not enough of a car buff to know the exact year of that vehicle but its appearance clearly signifies “old order” and “apartheid” – these vangwaens were ubiquitous in the suburbs when I grew up in the 80s, removing undesirables – mostly black – with callous efficiency. It starts out when Yo-Landi bends down – revealing sensibly flesh-coloured underpants – to pick up the mobile phone she dropped, and is ogled by policemen in a yellow, old-style police vangwa sporting the words “Zef side”on its side. What could have been a seamless sexual fantasy is really a narrative of incommensurate and incongruous realities, deliberately staged, I believe, to disorientate the viewer. But whereas that video’s bafflement had a lot to do with the rather startling cameo appearance of DJ Solarise, a long time survivor of pre-mature aging, in this one the sense of disquiet is more because of the artifice of the setting. Thematically Cookie Thumper returns to DA’s first video Enter the Ninja that introduced the world to Yo-Landi, the naughty high school girl (with interesting hairdo), fantasising about her Ninja, aka Ninja. She meets Anies on her way home from school for a chat and an illicit drug transaction and admires the tjappies (tattoos) that Anies has accumulated in jail on his rather impressive six-pack. The video tells the story of a barefoot high school girl (Yo-Landi) in an orphanage with a crush on a recently released gangster named Anies. ![]() “Cookie thumper”, as you can probably figure out, is slang for penis. In the myriad internet posts about their act, the most common thread seems to be something akin to “What the fuck did I just watch?” or “Are they for real?” i This bafflement was there when the first video, Enter the Ninja,went viral in February 2009, it intensified three years later when Fokjullenaaiers was greeted with shocked allegations of homophobia and misogyny, and is unmistakable in the fuss caused by their latest video Cookie Thumper. Even though Die Antwoord apparently found an answer to something, most responses to their work still fall squarely in the category of complete and utter incomprehension.
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