Review: Die Antwoord live in Belgium – ZEFFING HOT!
On the way to watch Die Antwoord last night all healthy eating habits were broken as we chowed down at our local fastfood outlet to get to the show on time. Behind us two young women in their early 20s were perched at a window booth doing that annoying noughties thing, playing music on their cellphone at full volume. It was a depressing set of soppy badly-produced RnB and as my partner-in-crime put it so aptly, there’s no worse ‘bad RnB’ than French RnB. The girls loved it though and sang along to every lyric mimicking the sadness, the heartbreak, the ecstasy of whichever madamoiselle’s mediocre voice was blaring out. I was on the brink of heartburn from the sheer painfulness of it all until they suddenly switched stations and I sat back enraptured. The RnB turned into a Bollywood hitsong, the girls jumped giddily up during the opening notes and began to act out a choreographed dance routine while singing every word of the song. The point is, they certainly didn’t look or sound Indian and yet they knew the lyrics by heart. You see, they’d bought into the package deal of the Bollywood song, they clearly loved the exotic melody, the high-pitched rise-and-fall singing style; and their clean dance moves showed they’d spent hours imitating the music video. They loved it so much that they’d learnt the words, every single one of them, while more than likely not understanding a single one. Little did I realise that I would experience this same feeling of awe times one million a little over an hour later, as I listened to hundreds of European fans singing along to Die Antwoord’s mishmashed South African lyrics in a beautifully rof yet finely perfected South African accent. So much of naas. I just couldn’t get the grin off my face throughout the performance, and looking back, nor could most of the audience. It was absolutely thrilling – Die Antwoord is the modern-day antidote to boring live music performances. I’m no music fundi but I am certainly a music lover and I can attest that throughout my lifespan and certainly way before that, English language songs, largely from UK and USA based artists, have dominated both the global music charts and the mainstream ones in South Africa. For how long have South Africans complained about the rest of the world not knowing about our music, about how much we hope to enter the international music scene, about how we dream of people knowing more of our artists than the legends Johnny Clegg and Miriam Makeba. From Rock to Kwaito to Folk to Soul to...
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