[MUSIC] Die Antwoord, "Baby's on Fire"

[rfmcdonald]

"DIE ANTWOORD - BABY'S ON FIRE (OFFICIAL)" (Watch on YouTube)

I have absolutely no doubt that the cultural grandees of late apartheid South Africa would be appalled--probably are appalled--that South African group Die Antwoord is not only massively successful at home but is quite possibly the most successful Afrikaans-language pop music group in world history. I'm sure this is exactly what Die Antwoord wants.

I acknowledge that I'm not South African, that my encounters with that country and its cultures have all been at a remove. I do think that I'm correct in seeing Die Antwoord as a reaction against Afrikaner Calvinism, the profoundly conservative and hierarchical Protestantism that not only defined Afrikaans-language culture for so long but arguably provided the necessary intellectual infrastructure for apartheid. Apartheid was a regime that first and foremost inflicted terrible suffering on non-whites, but just as totalitarian was its vision for South Africa's white populations. Degrees of cultural conservatism that would have been out of place in the societies that South African whites of that era considered peers--the settler societies of the British Commonwealth like Canada, the United States, western European states including the United Kingdom and the Netherlands--were state dogma. Television, as Rob Nixon observed in July 1999 in The Atlantic, was profoundly controversial.

On July 20 thirty years ago my family -- like millions of other South African families -- was huddled around a crackling radio, listening to the moonwalk. Nobody in the entire country could watch it on TV. Television was verboten -- a criminal technology under apartheid. Not until 1976 did South Africa's first TV sets flicker into life.

I remember Neil Armstrong's epic stroll as the event that marked the beginning of the end for the apartheid government's conviction that South Africa could remain a fortress against television into the next millennium. By that time even the Americans, the government argued, would have recoiled from TV's innate degeneracy and returned to the more civilized pleasures of radio. Albert Hertzog, South Africa's Minister of Posts and Telegraphs from 1958 to 1968, warned the parliament that "inside the pill of TV there is the bitter poison which will ultimately mean the downfall of civilizations." Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd likened television to poison gas and the atom bomb. The little box was a threat "to the racial struggle on a global scale," he declared. "TV would cause absolute chaos to South African life."

As I understand it, Die Antwoord's music and image is a profound rejection of this image. Looking at their compelling videos, Die Antwoord exists in a very pluralistic society, one that has rejected the pieties of old for a more unsettling and diverse future. That hip-hop is the group's chosen medium is itself profoundly telling. I do not defend the group and its messages uncritically, but I do see them as firmly belonging to the first post-apartheid generation.

I love "Baby's On Fire". The annotated lyrics at Genius say it all, as does the wonderfully stylized video. (Yo-Landi thanking God, as she opens her family's prayers over lunch, for the FHM cover and for their wonderful dog Satan is but one high point, as is her defense of her right to a sex life.) The music is also profoundly catchy and danceable. I long for a chance to introduce "No need to get so deep/Nothing quite like a motherfucking techno beat" into a conversation and have it fit perfectly.

10 out of 10, this. Keep it up!