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Die Antwoord Reschedules Dallas Show Amid Controversy. We’re Not Surprised.
Chelsey Norris | September 26, 2019 | 4:00am

Thousands of fans woke up to an email from Ticketmaster early in September informing them that South African hip-hop collective Die Antwoord’s Sept. 24 show at Toyota Music Factory was “still on, but has been rescheduled.” The show will now take place in May 2020, but ticket holders needn’t distress — their tickets are “still good,” according to the email.

Die Antwoord, whose main members are Watkin Tudor “Ninja” Jones and Anri “Yolandi Visser” du Toit, uploaded a video to their website shortly after this announcement. In the video, titled “A MESSAGE FOR U,” Ninja states: “We’re busy with so much fucking shit at the moment.” He goes on to list all their current projects, including a new album and a “feature film,” that are dropping in 2020 before continuing, “Our people booked this tour for us in America before then, and we’re like … fuck.” Basically, that they’re too busy to come all the way over to America right now and would rather us be the first to hear them perform material from the new album scheduled for next spring.

But let’s be real here. We all know what’s been going on with them lately and the more likely motivation behind this tour “postponement.” In case you haven’t been following along, here’s the gist:

The group’s former cameraman recently came forward with a video he shot during a festival in Australia back in 2012. The 11-minute video shows bits and pieces of an altercation between members of Die Antwoord and gay musician Andy Butler. One of the most disturbing and controversial things about the video is that Yolandi can be heard in the background cheering on the fight and shouting things like “Run, faggot, run!” Toward the end of the altercation, she can even be heard laughing hysterically after Ninja hit Butler —  that is, until Ninja tells her to stop.

Ninja then seeks out festival officials and accuses Butler of assaulting Yolandi in the restroom earlier in the evening and claims that was the reason for the fight. As they are all escorted back inside, Ninja comments on Yolandi’s “Oscar-winning performance,” since she quickly went from laughing and being excited about the fight to crying when they told their story to the festival officials. The staffers took this accusation very seriously and escalated it up to the director himself, who suggested removing Butler from the lineup and even having him arrested. Ninja insists in the video that he merely wants an apology from Butler and doesn’t want to see him go to jail.

Long story short, the video went viral and resulted in Die Antwoord being dropped from two high-profile festival lineups. Now, all of a sudden, they’re bailing on their U.S. tour this fall as well.

Ninja took to social media to defend their actions, claiming that the videographer “cleverly edited” the clip to make it look like a hate crime and stating, “This was just a fight with someone who fucked with us …This fight had nothing to do with the fact that this guy was gay. We don’t care about people’s sexual preference. Our DJ and best friend DJ HITEK is gay, and a lot of people in our crew are gay.”

The group posted a video response for fans as well. (Which, by the way, if anything is “cleverly edited,” it’s this video.) During the course of the video, Ninja details their interactions with Andy Butler throughout that music festival leading up to the fight, beginning with verbal confrontations and finally culminating in the alleged attack on Yolandi in the women’s restroom.

All of this doesn’t amount to much of a defense, honestly. As things usually go, the truth of the matter most likely lies somewhere in the middle. Whatever the real story may be, their behavior, both in that video and during the aftermath, is pretty cringe-y, and this is not the first time they’ve dealt with controversy.

Earlier this year, Australian rapper Zheani came forward with disturbing allegations that Ninja “trafficked” her to South Africa after becoming obsessed with her because of her resemblance to his and Yolandi’s teenage daughter.

Die Antwoord has built their career around glorifying the “zef” culture, which is the South African equivalent of, well … "white trash." While that very well may be just a persona that they embody onstage, they’ve been at this for over a decade now, and it’s not a stretch to assume that some of those ideas have become part of their actual lives as well. Bottom line, there are real-life consequences for acting like terrible human beings in today’s society, and Die Antwoord seems to be finding that out the hard way.

Pitchfork wrote:Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s debut album, a despairing and sweeping document of post-rock.

...So after the opening monologue concludes, “Dead Flag Blues” drifts—first come the screeching wheels and chugging motor of a steam train, and then gossamer slide guitar tones so quiet you begin to notice the ambient noise in the room you’re hearing them in. These are the album’s two essential features. The vibrating string sound—whether made by guitar, violin, or cello—evokes cables snaking down brick buildings, power lines framing the horizon as the sun sets, flaccid balloons snagged in barren trees. And the train sounds remind us of what the machines carry away, whether it’s a product of industry or the people who worked to create it.

The edits keep coming, as the band stitches together fragments, only some of which sound as if they were initially designed to fit together. After a middle section of “Dead Flag Blues” that’s as close as F♯ A♯ ∞ comes to a spaghetti western soundtrack, the piece shifts back to hammered guitar strings, like the sounds you get when you strike a cable that keeps a telephone pole upright. The first side then shifts to a tuneful vignette led by glockenspiel, a jaunty melody you might find in a music box, the sort that people decades ago put on to forget their problems. And then it concludes with what sounds like an improvised piece for voice and banjo, where the player asks “What’s my motivation?” as if speaking to a director as the camera is about to roll.

Come on you know WJPG x pic.twitter.com/7Wwh4yil8n

— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) April 11, 2020

So I snuck in and met with AZAPO, the Azanian People’s Organisation, who were like a more radical, violent version of our Black Panthers. They were actually on the front lines blowing shit up and stuff like that. And I had to plead my case to them, because they were sort of the hard line. And I said to them, “Look, all due respect, man, you’re not gonna win this fight. I don’t blame you for picking up guns and defending yourselves.” Because it was brutal; the regime down there was brutality. “I don’t blame you, but you’re not gonna win. You cannot win this way. Let me please try my idea, and I’m gonna win this war for you in the media, on TV.”
Now this already would’ve been a stretch for most people, but when you’re trying to tell this to people who don’t have electricity, that you’re about to win their war on a box that you plug in somewhere, they looked at me like, “This guy is really nuts.” [laughter]
If you thought Stevie’s kidding… the truth of the matter is that South Africa, for a very, very long time, well into the ’70s or early ’80s, did not have television for exactly this reason. There was no television if you’d been talking to a white South African.
Yeah, because when you’d go into Soweto, which was this huge area — I mean, it’s huge — you’d see, like, two or three feet of fog all over the ground. No lights. And it just had this very, very surreal feeling to it, because that was all from the coal-fires and whatever they were burning for heat. So it was like a really interesting movie-scenario sort of thing.
And I met with AZAPO, who had a very frank conversation — I was talking to the translator — about whether they should kill me for even being there. That’s how serious they were about violating the boycott. I eventually talked them out of that and then talked them into maybe going kinda with my thing.
They showed me that they have an assassination list, and Paul Simon was at the top of it. [In 1986, Paul Simon recorded tracks for his Graceland album in South Africa, in direct violation of the cultural boycott–Ed.] And in spite of my feelings about Paul Simon, who we can talk about in a minute if you want to, I said to them, “Listen, I understand your feelings about this; I might even share them, but…”
I was with you the first time you saw Paul and talked to him about this, at [entertainment attorney] Peter Parcher’s 60th birthday party.
That’s right, that’s right, that’s right! I’m glad you were a witness, because wait’ll you hear the latest on that. Anyway, I said to them, “Listen, this is not gonna help anybody if you knock off Paul Simon. Trust me on this, alright? Let’s put that aside for the moment. Give me a year or so, you know, six months,” whatever I asked for, “to try and do this a different way. I’m trying to actually unify the music community around this, which may or may not include Paul Simon, but I don’t want it to be a distraction. I just don’t need that distraction right now; I gotta keep my eye on the ball.” And I took him off that assassination list, I took Paul Simon off the U.N. blacklist, trying to…
You mean you convinced them to take him off…
Yeah, because this was a serious thing…
Because this was gonna eat up the attention that the movement itself needed.
Yes, and the European unions were serious about this stuff, man. You were on that [U.N. blacklist], you did not work, okay? Not like America, which was so-so about this stuff, man. Over there, they were serious about this stuff, you know? Anyway, so yeah, this was in spite of Paul Simon approaching me at that party saying, “What are you doing, defending this communist?!”
What he said was, “Ah, the ANC [African National Congress, the organization of which Mandela was President at the time of his arrest and imprisonment], that’s just the Russians.” And he mentioned the group that [murdered black South African activist Steven Biko] had been in, which was not AZAPO …
Was he PAC [Pan-Africanist Congress]?
It doesn’t matter [for this story], but [Paul Simon] said, “That’s just the Chinese communists.”
Yeah, yeah. And he says, “What are you doing defending this guy Mandela?! He’s obviously a communist. My friend Henry Kissinger told me about where all of the money’s coming from,” and all of this. I was, like, all due respect, Paul…
I remember it very vividly, because it was aimed at everybody standing in the general direction.
Yeah, but mostly he was telling me.
Well, yeah, you were the one… Everybody knew who to get mad at first. [laughter]
He knew more than me, he knew more than Mandela, he knew more than the South African people. His famous line, of course, was, “Art transcends politics.” And I said to him, “All due respect, Paulie, but not only does art not transcend politics… art is politics. And I’m telling you right now, you and Henry Kissinger, your buddy, go fuck yourselves.” Or whatever I said. But he had that attitude, and he knowingly and consciously violated the boycott to publicize his record.
Well, to make his record. That’s the violation of the boycott — to make his record.
Yeah, and he actually had the nerve to say, “Well, I paid everybody double-scale.” Remember that one? Oh, that’s nice… no arrogance in that statement, huh? [laughter]
Now, the punchline. Cut to 30 years later, or whatever it is. He asked me to be in his movie [Under African Skies, the documentary on the making of Graceland, included as a DVD in the album’s 25th anniversary boxed edition]. I said, “Alright, I’ll be in your movie, if you don’t edit me. You ready to tell it like it is?”He says, “Yep.”
“Are you, like, uh, apologizing in this movie?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. I’m not gonna be a sore winner. I’ll talk to you.”
I did an interview. They show me the footage. Of course, they edited the hell out of it to some little statement where I’m saying something positive about Paul. [laughter] And I see the rest of the footage, where he’s supposedly apologizing, with Dali Tambo [founder of Artists Against Apartheid and son of late ANC leaders Adelaide and Oliver Tambo]. He says, “I’m sorry if I made it inconvenient for you.” That was his apology.
In other words, he still thinks he’s right, all these years later!
You’re the only person who’s ever met Paul twice who thinks that’s surprising. [laughter]
I mean, at this point, you still think you were right?! Meanwhile, that big “communist,” as soon as he got out of jail, I see who took the first picture with him. There’s Paul Simon and Mandela, good buddies. I’m watchin’ CNN the other day. Mandela dies, on comes a statement by Bono and the second statement’s by Paul Simon. I’m like oh, just make me throw up. You know, I like the guy in a lot of ways, I do; and I respect his work, of course. He’s a wonderful, wonderful artist, but when it comes to this subject, he just will not admit he was wrong. Y’know, just mea culpa. Come on, you won! He made twenty, thirty million dollars at least, okay? Take the money and apologize, okay? I mean, say “Listen, maybe I was wrong about this a little bit.” No.
Well…unfortunately we live in a country where the money means you don’t have to apologize, and let’s leave that there.

op,op,op...zalajala kera ... pic.twitter.com/1ZKhSxVenS

— Aca Milićević (@milicevic_aca) July 27, 2020