It was kind of like that, but it doesn’t go away.Ĭoachella was your first show in the States, right? Yeah yeah yeah. What was that experience like? Have you taken acid before?

You guys went from obscurity to being kind of a big sensation really quickly. After Die Antwoord fell out with Interscope, they released Ten$ion on their own Zef Recordz, which due to a bit of contractual judo on the band’s part was not only founded using Interscope money but is also distributed by Interscope’s parent company, Universal.

But after landing a million-dollar contract with Interscope and rereleasing their debut, $O$, with the label’s backing, the trio-vocalists Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er and beat maker DJ Hi-Tek-revealed themselves to be cunning pranksters with an intensely strange visual aesthetic, refined on the fringes of the South African art world, that works amazingly well with their manic rave-rap. When Die Antwoord’s video for “ Enter the Ninja” went viral in 2010, the South African group rocketed to Internet superstardom largely on the strength of the LOLs generated by their “zef” image-sort of a Bizarro-world mashup of Hype Williams and Gummo.

Little guy in die antwoord videos