Blog Archives
Die Antwoord on Letterman Monday night
Now here’s a sentence you probably never thought you’d read: Die Antwoord will be joining Giants quarterback Eli Manning as the guests tonight (Monday, Feb. 6th) on The Late Show with David Letterman. Set your TiVos, you fokken chommies.
In other zef rap-rave news: Ten$ion, the second album from Ninja, Yo-Landi and DJ Hi-Tek, arrives this week in all fine record shops and e-tailers. You can stream the whole thing here, but play nice and buy that shit, because Die Antwoord turned down a million bucks from Interscope Records so they could go indie and release the weird-ass record we were all hoping for.
They’ve also got some U.S. tour dates. We’ll see you out at that LA show gettin freeky.
02.09.12 – Philadelphia, PA – Trocadero Theatre
02.10.12 – Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club
02.11.12 – New York, NY – Irving Plaza
02.12.12 – Washington D.C. – 930 Club
02.14.12 – Toronto, ON – The Phoenix Concert Theatre
02.15.12 – Chicago, IL – Metro
02.18.12 – Portland, OR – Roseland Theater
02.19.12 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom
02.22.12 – San Francisco, CA – The Regency Ballroom
02.20.12 – Seattle, WA – Showbox at the Market
02.22.12 – San Francisco, CA – Regency Ballroom
02.24.12 – Los Angeles, CA – Club Nokia
02.25.12 – Las Vegas, NV – House of Blues
*We’ve since learned that Die Antwoord apparently plan to release Ten$ion only digitally and on Flash drives because, in their words, “CDs are like motherfucking VHS.” Truth! Lies! You can buy the motherfucking CD version here.
Update: The video from their epic, unsettling performance is now live. “There’s your Super Bowl halftime show!”
New Die Antwoord track: “I Fink U Freeky”
Those hipster bastards at Pitchfork scooped us again. Today, they premiered “I Fink U Freeky,” a new track off the latest album from our favorite South African zef-rap-rave crew, Die Antwoord. “Freeky” is basically Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er’s version of a soccer techno anthem, with lots of Godzilla-sized synths and builds and breakdowns and whatnot. It’s what the Brits (and the South Africans, too?) call a huge choon, I believe. Or a right fokkin teef-grinder, innit?
Die Antwoord’s new album, TEN$ION, drops Feb. 7. Head on over to Pitchfork to hear “Freeky” and watch this space for more Die Antwoord news you can use.
Dirty Sanchez
(Photo by Austin Young)
Today’s band was suggested by a reader called Hola-Ebola…and no, they have nothing to do with the Jackass-like British TV series Dirty Sanchez, although those guys are pretty great. This Dirty Sanchez is an electroclash band from Los Angeles. What is electroclash, you ask? Well, I’m no expert, but as far as I can tell, it seems to be an intentionally cheesy/campy style of dance music with lots of songs about cocaine and gay sex and Hollywood. I think Lady Gaga probably ripped off half her act from the electroclash scene.
Anyways, there are loads of weird electroclash acts out there, like Fischerspooner, Peaches, Chicks on Speed and Princess Superstar. But Dirty Sanchez stand out for a couple reasons. First, many of their songs are just flat-out, hilariously bizarre, as you can tell from just the song titles alone: “Fucking on the Dancefloor,” “Really Rich Italian Satanists,” “Tranny Sex,” “We Hate Youth and Beauty.” Second, they seem to be one of the few (only?) electroclash bands to feature a full-on tranvestite as one of their lead singers. His/her name is Jackie Beat and even though I feel kinda gay for saying this, she rules. In their early videos, she’s like a cross between Dee Snider and Cher. Now she looks more like a cross between Eddie Izzard and that fat chick from The Gossip, but she’s still pretty fabulous. (Did I just use the word “fabulous” to describe a drag queen? Wow, now I really feel gay.)
Dirty Sanchez seem to have been inactive since 2008–that’s the last time their website news was updated (back then, they said they were working on a new album, their second one, but it doesn’t seem like it’s ever come out) and also the year they released a new single, “Give Head and Be Beautiful.” Here’s the video for it, which for our money is the most awesomely weird thing they’ve ever done. Next time I go out dancing, I’m totally gonna picture everyone with their heads off.
(Update: It seems like Jackie Beat is now based in New York and might be more focused on her cabaret act and her solo career–although it also seems like she forgot to pay her domain name bill, so it’s hard for us to confirm this. Still, this parody video posted in late 2009 does feature fellow Dirty Sanchezian Mario Diaz, so there’s still hope we may hear more from Dirty Sanchez yet.)
Links:
- Dirty Sanchez official site
- Dirty Sanchez on MySpace
- Jackie Beat official site (currently down)
- Barbeau official site (Dirty Sanchez DJ/producer)
Gangpol & Mit
Several of you good people out there—most recently, our homey James Sooy over at Unsound Music—have suggested that we check out this duo called Gangpol & Mit. Or sometimes it’s Gangpol und Mit—even though we’re pretty sure they’re from France. Anyway, whatever the hell they’re called, we finally decided to fire up some of their videos on YouTube, and man. Meet your new favorite legal high, people. This is some trippy shit.
Gangpol & Mit are actually both musicians and graphic designers, and most of their songs come with nifty cartoon videos that are sort of a cross between that swingin’ ’60s tiki guy Shag and “Itchy & Scratchy” from The Simpsons. They all look totally groovy, baby, but they nearly always end in horrible violence. (That’s actually a pretty good nutshell description of the ’60s in general, come to think of it.)
The music, much like the cartoons, usually has some groovy elements, but it tends to erupt into electro-spazz freakouts and/or 8-bit breakdowns at unexpected moments. Put the two elements together—music and cartoon videos—and madcap hilarity ensues.
It’s impossible to single out just one Gangpol & Mit video as their weirdest, but this suggestion from James Sooy is definitely right up there. Stay with it, it really goes off the deep end at about the one-minute mark.
Links:
Tumbleweave
Well, kids, it’s happened again–for the second time ever, a band posted on our Submit/Vote page has been voted onto The Weird List by you, our shiftless, dope-smoking readers. So give it up for Tumbleweave, people! They join Richard There as the only democraticly elected members of The Wierd List.
Tumbleweave is a drums/synths duo from Florida and they’re pretty new at this whole band thing. When they first wrote to us, they admitted they’d only been at it for about two months. Well, they’ve now been at it for a whole three months, and we’re happy to report that all that extra practice time has done nothing to make their music any less spazzy or unpolished. They still basically sound like somebody stuffed a few angry kittens, some old Sega Genesis consoles, and one of the guys from Yip-Yip into a sack and set it on fire. So as you might imagine, they’re a bit of an acquired taste.
We were positive that we were gonna be trend-setters and be the first blog to write about these guys, but no–this fucker called Buddha Khan totally beat us to it. Khaaaaannnnnn!!!!! (That was us channelling William Shatner, btw. In case you weren’t sure.)
Still, we’re pretty sure we’re the first blog to embed this YouTube video of a recent Tumbleweave gig. So we’ve got that going for us at least.
Links:
- Tumbleweave on MySpace
- Tumbleweave on Bandcamp (free three-song download)
The Emotron
(Photo by Dianna Augustine)
When was the last time you found something really, truly offensive? If your answer included the words “Lady Gaga,” fuck off and go read some nice CCM blog. Girl-on-girl kissing and re-enacting Tarantino movies with Beyonce is so inoffensive in this day and age, they got a friggin’ sandwich spread to sponsor the video. Okay, how about that M.I.A. video? Meh. Too obvious to be offensive. Plus that super-gorey ending was actually kinda cool in a Gears of War kinda way.
My point is, it takes a lot to offend us these days. As a culture, we’ve been pretty thoroughly desensitized. Which is why when someone recently turned us on to this guy who calls himself The Emotron, we were blown away. I mean, this guy works overtime to be in-your-face, hide-the-children offensive. It’s like if GG Allin and that yams-up-the-ass lady who got an NEA grant had a love child, then raised it on Atom and His Package, Jackass reruns and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Musically, The Emotron (real name: Jason Kyle Knight) is basically just a one-man punk band whose weapon of choice is a cheesy ’80s synthesizer. But the music is kinda secondary to the whole Emotron experience–although several of his songs, especially “Michael Jackson’s Dead”, are undenyably awesome. No, where The Big E really brings it is at his live shows, which typically feature some or all of the following: tying rubber bands around his head to mash his face into various greusome configurations; nudity; vomiting (real and/or simulated); lighting his dick on fire; and stuffing objects into a flesh-colored leotard to make himself look like a disfigured circus freak. He also usually cusses a lot, covers himself and the audience is various mysterious powders and fluids, and sometimes does all this shit dressed up like a Texas trucker. Oh, and he drinks alot. Okay, we’ll say it: we have a huge man-crush on this guy.
Emotron’s live show has definitely been a work in progress, and a lot of the older clips on YouTube don’t really do him justice. The sound really sucks on this one, but it at least captures The Emotron’s signature move, which comes at about the 5:20 mark. You’ll see what we mean.
Links:
Max Normal (or, Die Antwoord v.1.0)
Of all the weird bands we’ve blogged about here on TWBITW, the one that’s gotten by far the biggest response so far is Die Antwoord, the South African “zef rap-rave crew” fronted by a scrawny, prison-tatted MC named Ninja and an even scrawnier singer/rapper/fly-girl named Yo-landi Vi$$er. Like a lot of baffled yet undeniably delighted observers, we suspected the whole thing might be a put-on, but there was something so awesome about the group’s outlandish attitude that we decided they were probably for real.
Well, it turns out we were had—sort of. Die Antwoord is actually the latest incarnation of another group called Max Normal, an earlier hip-hop crew which also featured the inimitable Ms. Visser (minus the dollar signs) and a fellow by the name of Waddy Jones, an actor/musician/artist/troublemaker who, before he created the Ninja character, fronted his Max Normal crew in a three-piece suit and (according to a band site that’s been taken down but is still viewable in archive form) performed “motivational speaking style raps” to deliver “high energy hip-hop power point presentation[s].” Quite a far cry from Die Antwoord’s ghetto fabulous approach, although judging from the above publicity photo, both groups do share the same Keith Haring-esque design aesthetic.
Waddy and co. have clearly attempted to cover their tracks: the old MaxNormal.tv website has been taken down and replaced with a deliberately primitive-looking WordPress “advertising blog” [Update: It's now been taken down altogether] ; www.waddyjones.com similarly features a very plain-envelope article directory link farm, which we’re guessing (although we can’t find an archived version) has not always been the case. Even the Max Normal Wikipedia page was just taken down yesterday—ostensibly for copyright infringement. [Update: It's since been restored and gives a very good and seemingly accurate history of the band.]
Not that we’re complaining about any of this. As the rest of the blogosphere has already widely proclaimed, what Jones and his crew are doing is so clever that an added layer of Borat-like chicanery is all just part of the fun. So enjoy this Max Normal video—which, as near as we can tell, is about two years old—and appreciate a.) how fucking versatile these guys are, and b.) how much better they’ve gotten in just a few years. If Waddy Jones doesn’t have his own HBO special by this time next year, we’ll guzzle the juice in this fish paste jar.
[Bonus factoid: the dude in Die Antwoord with progeria has been widely identified as an artist named Leon Bartha. Another zef rap-rave mystery solved!]
Links:
Die Antwoord
We gotta say, 2010 has gotten off to a pretty slow start here at TWBITW. There just isn’t much genuinely weird shit out there these days. Note to bands: There were over 100,000 new albums released last year. You might wanna try to, y’know, stand out a little.
So thank Christ on a crutch that someone finally hipped us to this “zef rap-rave crew” from South Africa called Die Antwoord. Frontman Ninja is fond of mentioning in every one of the group’s songs, videos and interviews that his crew is onto some “next level futuristic shit” and we gotta say—dude ain’t lying.
Die Antwoord—whose name apparently means “The Answer” in Afrikaans—also consists of singer/dancer/future American Apparel model Yo-landi Vi$$er, producer/DJ Hi-Tek (who will no doubt be getting a cease-and-desist letter shortly from this dude), and a little guy with progeria syndrome whose main job seems to be to stand around looking weird. Based on the intro to this video, you’d think the whole thing was a joke, but then Ninja starts rapping like a white South African Busta Rhymes over Hi-Tek’s squiggly beats and Yo-landi’s helium-voiced croons and something undeniably awesome starts to happen. What that something is exactly, we’re not sure, but we like it.
It’s hard to pick just one of Die Antwoord’s videos because they each showcase a different aspect of the group’s goofy, slightly malnourished charm. But the one that probably blew our minds the hardest was “Enter the Ninja”…especially the little inspirational monologue at the 4:05 mark. If you’re hungry for more, we’d also recommend the video for “Wat Pomp,” which appears to use the same set. Recycling—it’s da bomb, baby!
P.S. For a long time, the above video wouldn’t play as an embed, but since Die Antwoord ended their contract with Interscope Records, it’s back. Sweet!
P.P.S. See also our post about Max Normal, the “motivational speaker-style” rap group that Ninja and Yo-landi were in prior to Die Antwoord.
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