[interview] Die Antwoord's Ninja on digging deeper and becoming the enemy
Yo-Landi Vi$$er and Ninja of Die Antwoord Photo: GETTY
If you've heard the music of South African rap-rave fresh-zef sensations Die Antwoord, then you know that DA mainman Watkin Tudor Jones a/k/a Ninja is a complete motormouth: which is why it should have been no surprise that when I got Ninja on the phone, in South Africa preparing to jet to North America for DA's headlining tour that brings them to Boston's Royale Tuesday night (Oct. 26) with Rye Rye, his answers to my questions spewed out over the long distance wires like a never-ending avalanche of words. The Die Antwoord feature that ran last week included a few snippets of the interview, but I felt that it would be wrong to deny Phoenix readers the full-on word-slaught of the complete Ninja experience, so below is the complete transcription of my brief conversation with the man himself-- enjoy!
In your single “Enter The Ninja", you say "I represent South African culture. Blacks, whites, coloured, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu. I'm like all these different things . . . fucked into one." As you have become an international phenomenon, is it any amount of pressure to represent South Africa to outsiders?
Yeah, but it’s a nice pressure, it’s where we’re from and it’s where all our flavor comes from. We represent ourselves, you know, actually, but we come from South Africa and everything in our music and what we think about is rooted here, so it’s natural, it’s not really a pressure, it’s natural to represent where you’re from. And even though we move around a lot, it’s nice to keep that door open, because we really love it here and it’s kind of... broken but also kind of undiscovered, by the outside world, so it’s nice to communicate the flavor of South Africa.
Do you feel like it’s important to represent South African culture, do you feel that it’s under-represented?
No, it wasn’t like that, we just didn’t have anything else to rap about. And the whole zef angle, it’s like South African underdog style, and we thought that was fresh, it was a cool thing to represent. It’s kind of like a zone, something that was always there that we tapped into, and to us that was Die Antwoord-- it was like “Oh fuck, this isthe answer, right here!” Like, even before anyone liked us, we were like “This is the fucking business.”
Die Antwoord seemed, to us on the outside who found out about you on the Internet last year, to have emerged full-formed. When you were coming up with Die Antwoord, was there like a “eureka moment”, where it just came out of nowhere?
Well... you know, a style is a weird thing-- you can’t be like “Quick, think of a new style!” I can tell you now, you can’t do that. It’s really hard to come up with something, a style is something that is born out of a lot of different shit, it’s more of an occurance. And I’ve been rapping for-fucking-ever, I’ve been rapping my whole life, looking for a unique kind of zone. And I started working with Yo-Landi five years ago, and I didn’t know it but we were scratching on a dam wall, but we didn’t know. And like three years ago, we discovered Die Antwoord, and it was like the dam burst. We found this zone, and we were just like “Jesus Christ, let’s do this.”
The weird thing about zef is it’s this super fresh underdog style, but it’s also this kind of apocalyptic style that’s all about this information overload. This age we’re living in, you know, and the zef zone is this like wasteland of fucking debris and whatnot. All that Matrix-y stuff, the-future-is-fucked kind of thing. It’s all the shit that dropped out of the bottom of that whole order-- like a little white kid and a little black kid in a South African ghetto rocking, like, 50 Cent t-shirts. That, to me, is zef. It’s all that shit at the bottom of the barrel-- and we stuck all that shit together and turned it into a fucking machine.
You know a mech, like in manga, the Japanese comics? Those things you climb into? We took all that apocalyptic debris but gave it its own style, and built a machine with all that debris and climbed into it, and it’s called Die Antwoord. And we knew, three years ago, that that machine is fucking indestructable. We knew, it was fucking obvious. It’s like if you’re getting punched in the face, and it’s obvious that you’re getting punched in the face? We got punched in the face.
And the weird thing is that we used to always perform and make music for people. And when you perform you are always kind of a victim of the audience, in a way-- because if you’re doing new shit, the audience is checking you out, like “Okay, what’s this?” And with Die Antwoord, it was like-- well, I mean, I’ve been bullied by audiences before, and the worst shit that an audience can do is have a drink and just talk to each other, discussing who’s wearing what and gossiping and talking a lot of shit, while you’re doing a show. And we didn’t like that, and a lot of Die Antwoord is that we were kind of like attacking that. Like you can’t ignore us! Before we used to get bullied by the audience, so in a way we formed Die Antwoord to bully the audience. You cannot fuck with the show: you’re not watching the show, the show’s watching you! That’s what Die Antwoord is.
We did a show in South Africa recently for some dear friends of us, these friends who always helped us, lent us equipment and all that. So we did a free show to help them out to pay them back. So they did television adverts with the show, which we didn’t have anything to do with because we dont’ know anything about that shit. And so the show wound being like this advertising party, which we wound up playing for free. And once again, we were surrounded by these idiots. After doing this psychedelic freak-out tour thing all over the world, with all of these people just like fuh-reaking out like with techno moshpit shit, and then we played to all these television advertising wankers. And now we thought “Oh man, big mistake, you’re in the wrong room: talking to your friend, having a fucking cocktail, walking around in your high-heels.” And it was almost like a fucking riot, I smashed so many people’s drinks onto the floor, and Yo-Landi was saying the most rudest stuff, I even slapped someone in the face, I said “I’m going to kick it a capella if you people don’t cut the chit chat and shut the fuck up!” And this guy at the bar is shouting in his friend’s face, saying “The rapper says he’s gonna kick it a capella now!” And like I was gonna go poes this guy at the bar-- poes means hit someone in the face-- what the fuck is that guy doing at that party, what the fuck, why do people come to shows if they don’t listen? And I slapped the guy in the face, pretty hard, then I went to the stage, and he was all disorientated and went up towards the stage and then I realized that I knew this guy! He was an old friend, Francois, who I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I was like “Francois, what the fuck’s wrong with you, why are you here? Go somewhere else, take some cocaine, come up with an idea for an advert, whatever man!”
That type of thing can really suck your energy, and Die Antwoord has a fire burning, on our own. People love us, you know, and they add their flame to the fire. But when people don’t like us, they’re not water, they’re gasoline, you know? So that’s what we discovered, on our own. And that night, that was similar to what happened when we played parties before anyone knew us, and that sort of this was what Die Antwoord was born out of.
You guys have a real obsession with the grotesque: in your presentation, your lyrics, your videos, there’s so much disturbing material, but it’s almost kind of like psychedelic horror, you know? Like the “Evil Boy” video, for example.
A lot of our music is subconsciously driven. Most of the time if we’re thinking of songs, we love breakthrough stuff. And the best way to have a breakthrough is to break through your own mind. It’s exciting, it’s scary, it’s thrilling. And it’s not gross to me, it’s amazing and really cool to discover new places-- and the best way to do that is in your own mind. There’s a surreal kind of thing comes out of that-- but you can’t really try and be surreal, you know? It’s like trying to be weird and it just falls flat and doesn’t work. but true surreal is really really real but embedded in your subconscious, actual issues or fears or undiscovered territory in your own mind. All our music is hugely personal, a dive into a new area. Every time we write a new track we are digging deep into ourselves, almost kind of defeating ourselves, you know?
Your song “Beat Boy” is really fascinating: it’s surreal, but also kind of unrelenting, just 8 minutes or so of non-stop bizarre rapping.
Well, we got really into the whole rave thing. And the thing with rave music, is that rave rappers, they’re fucking terrible. They’re the sloppy second guys who couldn’t make it in hip hop and crossed over to rave. But people go to a rave, or listen to pop music, and they don’t listen to the music, they just want to party. So a song like “Beat Boy”, we made it fucking long! That song was tough to get down live, to master “Beat Boy” was hard. We discovered Die Antwoord while making that song, it was the first Die Antwoord song. People don’t need to listen, but it’s fucking good.
Yeah-- your stuff still works in a catchy pop way sometimes, as bizarre as it is.
You know, there’s lots of layers to our stuff, we like to work on a pop level, our stuff is like super pop. To me, pop is generous, not about being cool or clever, but it’s there for you. It’s spoon-feeding, but the ingredients, what you put in the spoon, is up to you. Our ingredients are, like, this kind of alien juice that tastes strange, exotic-tasting but has a strange effect on you. If you don’t like it, spit it out, no problem, fuck you. But if you do like it and start getting addicted to it, it will transform you into something different. We do this same thing to ourselves, we feed ourselves the medicine, it comes from this strange subconscious place.
When you guys emerged as an internet phenomenon last year, a lot of talk was about how you were a fake band. What did you make of all of that?
it’s kind of like some things are relevant and some are irrelevant. And people not knowing what they’re dealing with is irrelevant. They don’t matter, they’re not really there, those people. And to them, it’s a big black joke, I laugh myself to sleep at night. To other people, it’s a futurist religious experience. It’s a funny thing to say: like if I have a glass of water on a table and I’m holding it and I take a drink and put it back down on the table. And I turn to the camera and say “That was a nice glass of water,” and people say “No no, there’s no glass of water on the table.” And I say back “That’s bullshit, I just had some, it was very nice, the water.” And they keep saying “No no no,” telling all my friends that there’s no glass of water. “There’s no water, that’s, like, CG water or something.” And they go tell a hundred thousand fucking million people that I didn’t have a sip of water! And I dunno: me, I’m gonna have another sip, you know? Because this is really nice water. And you can have a sip too, or you can go tell all your friends that there’s no glass of water-- it really doesn’t affect me and my glass of water.
How did you come up with your Ninja persona?
You know what happened is, when I was young, I always used to like ninjas, like when I was a boy. They’re so cool and shit, and they kill people who fuck with them, that sort of thing. And it’s always been in my brain, you know: ninjas are cool, nothing’s fucking cooler than a ninja. And then what happened is I read the samurai philosophy-- which isn’t really ninjas, I know, but it’s kind of the same thing-- and it said “Become the enemy.” And I was like “What the fuck does that mean, ‘Become the enemy’?” And it says, like, if a you have a house, and a thief breaks into the house, and you have a child or whatever, you don’t want that guy to become the enemy-- you must become the enemy. You know? And with all the music projects I did, none of the projects were super brave. I wasn’t brave, I was doing things that were throwaway. And I didn’t know this then, but I hadn’t broken through into this part of my brain, and I hadn’t “become the enemy” yet. I was, instead, the victim at that stage of my life. I mean, you have reality, and reality is manipulatable, you can make your own reality, because we’re in the future now. But reality is also a structural thing around you, this group consciousness. And if you haven’t worked yourself out, you can be victimized by this reality. And it took me years to fully absorb that sentence, “become the enemy.” It was like truly learning what, I dunno, E=MC2 means. And I basically learned, through all of this shit, to become a master of reality. Called Ninja.
So Ninja was something that you needed to become?
Pop music was, ultimately, the enemy I had to become. I mean, pop music is in control of the whole world, and the retards are winning. Not anymore. Die Antwoord are here.
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