Zef as a Second Language

Die Antwoord remain one of the genuinely strange things to have happened to music—a South African duo from Cape Town, Ninja and Yolandi Visser, who built a whole universe out of zef culture: working-class Afrikaner kitsch pushed until it becomes something feral and confrontational. Fok Julle Naaiers is exactly what it sounds like if you speak any Afrikaans at all, and if you don’t, the video explains it in other terms. Yolandi’s baby-doll shriek against Ninja’s aggro bark, the deliberately ugly production that somehow sounds exactly right—they’re not for everyone and they know it, which is probably the point. That the whole thing holds together as art rather than provocation-for-its-own-sake is what keeps me coming back.