Hostile crowd... whoever made them open for a "serious" dance act is a tard:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/musicnightlife/2013163663_antwoord15.html?cmpid=2628
Concert Review |
Much-buzzed South African hip-hop crew Die Antwoord kicked off its first major North American tour in front of an inattentive audience at Seattle's Paramount Theatre Wednesday night, opening for Canadian dance music producer Deadmau5. The pairing raised an important question: Between a group that features a foul-mouthed, pint-size Barbie doll who spells her name with dollar signs and a DJ who performs while wearing a giant cartoon mouse head, who flaunts the dumber gimmick?
A moot point for Die Antwoord, an Internet meme come alive. Gimmickry is only one facet of the group's art-school conceptualism and culturally-plundering spectacle. Husband-and-wife duo Ninja and Yo-landi Vi$$er — backed last night by tour DJ Fishsticks — are one of the most nuanced developments in hip-hop this year. Their videos demonstrate a jarringly grotesque visual aesthetic; their major label debut "$O$," released earlier this week, obsesses about miscegenation and deviant sexuality. And Wednesday night's 50-minute performance revealed undeniable star power.
Still, DA's heavily-accented, slang-ridden English/Afrikaans rap zoomed over the heads of the majority of the baby-raver crowd, most of which was there to dance to the cartoon-mouse house music of Deadmau5.
When tour DJ Fishsticks emphasized the Euro-techno side of their sound — most significantly on the thumping "Wat Kyk Jy?" — the audience was snagged like bait fish in a dragnet. But when Ninja went a cappella mid-set to deliver a furiously precise freestyle ("I'm the one and ugly/Only god can judge me") the audience tuned out. When he tried leading a hilariously vulgar call-and-response Afrikaans dis, it fell entirely flat.
"We don't like you!" someone yelled.
Accentuated by the visual signifiers made famous in their YouTube videos — Vi$$er's gold-lam track suit and platinum-blond mullet hairdo, Ninja's prison-style tattoos and Dark Side of the Moon boxer shorts, Fishsticks' bucktooth mask and monk's robe — Die Antwoord played most of "$O$" in sequence. They began with "Enter the Ninja," the track that launched them to international attention, Ninja's lyrical swirl of daft boasts and wide-eyed humility endearing, his thousand-yard-leer equally comical and threatening. They rendered other Internet-famous singles — "Rich B*tch," "Evil Boy" — menacingly, bass and lyrics blasting from the Paramount's enormous sound system.
They closed with "Beat Boy," Ninja unloading its eight minutes of verses with relentless speed and unintelligible diction. Ninja and Vi$$er were clearly frustrated with the crowd; she doused the front row with a water bottle and got middle fingers raised in response. Ninja was undeterred — he finished the song in full force and stalked offstage, leaving Vi$$er to offer a farewell: "To all the rich kids who don't know what's going on, [expletive] you in your [expletive]."
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