I never thought I’d long for the good old days of straight zef, whatever the fuck that was. Die Antwoord defined a sound and a style that took the talents of Waddy Jones and filtered them into something inventive and truly original. The fact that the music was accompanied by the surreal visual stimulus provided by Roger Ballen and Jones’ new persona’s schtick as Ninja only made it better. Pitbull Terrier, the group’s new music video, doesn’t necessarily introduce a new paradigm but it does highlight the shift between that original sound and the group’s current ‘thing’.
I’m not as much of an advocate for Die Antwoord as I once was, but that’s mostly because I think their music has slipped into the territory of the monotonous. The visual representation though has only grown, taking us from the original horrific abandoned spaces to a sort of glamorized version of the same. Where it was all dark and unsettling before, it’s now bright and well lit, almost cartoonish. When they first started out, I was excited to see where this ‘zef’ thing might eventually take them, and apparently it’s to a land of warm colors, corpse makeup, Joburg city streets and celebrity parody that panders to the lowest common denominator.
The Pitbull parody in this video borders on the sort of inane humor I figured Die Antwoord was above but it’s becoming a part of their deal and I suppose it puts them in this weird place between Eminem and Busta Rhymes… I guess? The video is still proper well executed and an impressive production, and I like the almost cartoonish level that they’ve managed to push things to. There’s a fair amount of distance between this new stuff and the original Roger Ballen-tinged shit they got away with, but it’s still mostly pretty inventive, even if it’s a lot less ambitious. Gone is the day of the ultra-impressive American music video so it may as well be left to the so called “third world” to seize that gap in the market and produce some weird shit that the kids can love. There’s that bit of the knowing tip of the hat to the audience that guys like Busta Rhymes or Snoop used to play up in their old videos, but the sound just isn’t up to their quality.
What I’m saying is, it’s not necessarily as good or as inventive as it seems to think it is, but I can appreciate it on some level anyway because it’s the sort of thing I grew up on, and so I guess the sort of thing I want from a lot of South African artists.
