castbops.blogg.se

So you were playing at hip hop clubs in Johannesburg at this time? There’s about a million Yo-landi Vissers. Yo-landi Visser’s like the most common, shittest Afrikaans name. She started swearing at shows and we started using new names when we rapped, changing our names every two weeks. It’s just this total fluke, this thing that she just went into. Then she’d speak to someone in Afrikaans and I said, ‘you should rap in Afrikaans, it sounds so dope.’ She started rapping like how she speaks, like, rough and raw, and started twisting this shit into a rhyming war. Ninja: I didn’t know she was Afrikaans (at first) because she was hiding her accent because she was embarrassed about it. So Yo-landi really influenced your zef aesthetic from the word go? We just wanted to do something that was violently South African and not be mistaken for fucking anything. And all the rappers with American accents, everyone sounds like they’re from the 90s, everyone sounds like the fucking Wu-Tang-Clan. South Africa is trying to do shit that looks like overseas shit. We just wanted to be as extreme and as ‘fuck you’ as possible because South Africa is… you’re not getting out of there. Ninja: It was just us being punk and stupid, a lot of it was joking about. Well, if zef is looked down on and you’re owning that… Why did you guys want to become a mouthpiece for outsiders? Ninja: It’s the blackest joke, Yo-landi just being like, ‘Let’s be zef.’ She started telling me all this zef slang and I’m like, ‘Jesus, they swear so bad.’ She started swearing and swearing and saying ‘we zef’, which is like saying ‘I’m a piece-of-shit scumbag, I’m that person you hate, I’m that thing you’re embarrassed about.’ It’s a word made up by non-zef people, Afrikaans people talking shit about their dress: ‘Eurgh that dress is so zef, it’s disgusting.’īut that’s interesting, because in your early videos like ‘ Zef Side’ you make zef look enviable. It was an insult, it’s like eurghh, talking shit about people. Zef is like dirt, it’s like scum, there was no zef movement before we came along. So you weren’t part of zef culture before Yo-landi? Yo-landi started teaching me all about all this zef slang. Afrikaans culture is very right-wing and conservative, very proper, and you get this hidden underbelly, the zef side of Afrikaans which no one knows about. Her dad’s a priest – he’s high up in one of the churches and he’s a sweetheart – but she’s, like, fucking rebellious. Ninja: We were doing other music and she just started swearing on this one track. What were your early collaborations with Yo-landi like? Someone told me that overthinking kills fun, and we’re a lot more fun now. I don’t even remember who I was before. It flipped both of us, we transformed into these new, hyper, upgraded versions of our old selves. And then, as time went past, I was enjoying this shit so much that I was like, ‘This is more me than me.’ We worked on each other, but we didn’t know we were being autobiographical. Ninja was my shadow self and Yo-landi was Yo-landi’s shadow self. I just started taking my filters away and saying anything and whatever the fuck I thought. We did it by accident, we tapped into that shadow-self shit – all that shit that I was too scared to say. Bam! That’s both of us when we are fucking with Die Antwoord. You’ve got your two sides of the brain: your conscious mind that’s actually here speaking to me, and then you got your subconscious – all your fears and desires and dreams…Īnd all the fucked-up shit that you never say. Ninja: I was hanging with Money Mark from the Beastie Boys, ’cos we’re homies, and he said a weird bunch of shit to me about Jung and the shadow self. You’re walking around the streets like you’re that person. In your mind you’re a superstar before you are a superstar, this hyper motherfucker who is on camera and on stage. I was always flipping through characters. That’s kind of what we have done with Die Antwoord, playing with characters. Do you know Method Man’s real name? Or Elton John, Marylin Monroe? You make up this character. A rap dude has his rap persona, his hyper version of himself. Yo-landi said that she really became ‘Yo-landi Visser’ when you cut her hair into its signature mohawk for ‘ Enter the Ninja’. Eyes glistening like a werewolf, he lets us into his and Visser’s hive mind. Now he’s tearing up the multiplexes with Chappie. Taken from the spring 2015 issue of Dazed. Read our interview with Yo-landi Visser hereįrom his early days in horrorcore outfit The Constructus Corporation to his current helming of rap-rave crew Die Antwoord, Ninja has dragged listeners to hell and back with his psychotic verses and intense stage presence.