What Wanga Did

Die Antwoord make videos designed to be impossible to unsee, and "Evil Boy" is that principle taken to its limit. Behind the giant prosthetic dicks and the trademark South African chaos is Wanga—a young Xhosa man who publicly refused ulwaluko, the traditional circumcision initiation rite, because he didn’t want the manhood it would confer on the terms being offered to him. Ninja and Yolandi built a whole song and video around that refusal, and the result is somewhere between absurdist provocation and something that might actually be solidarity. I go back and forth on where exactly the line falls. What I don’t go back and forth on is Wanga himself—he’s interesting, enormously so, and the spectacle around him is at least honest about what it’s doing with his story. Die Antwoord in 2010 were unlike anything else in pop music. Exhausting, brilliant, and absolutely not safe for work.