Chris Roper nailed it on the head in his Mail & Guardian article about Die Antwoord – now post-Coachella festival, where they took the yanks on a beautiful ride.

Here is the footage from Coachella, including HILARIOUS interviews with mainstream American TV.

Die Antwoord Are God

Damn, I love Die Antwoord. It’s like we’ve taken all the Disney Princesses at Stereotypes R Us, pulled off their wigs, forced their little legs together, and rammed them down the throats of the American purveyors of pop culture dreck, the soulless marketers who make millions every year by selling ersatz imperial myths to the rest of the world.

Okay, perhaps Die Antwoord aren’t achieving quite that level of utter cultural domination, but allow me our little victories. The sight of Americans taking Yo-Landi and Ninja seriously is so delicious, I can almost forgive some of the excesses of the music. There’s a 20 minute interview with Die Antwoord on Boing Boing, around their debut at the Coachella music festival in California, and it’s a marvellous exercise in satire.

Of course, there is a downside to this small cultural victory. Die Antwoord are, alas, just The Lion King for drunk people. They’re peddling a similarly exotic Africa, one that is as much a pastiche as a parody. But you know what — I don’t care. They’re geniuses, they’re ours, and they’re fabulous.

There’s an excellent article by Kevin Bloom on The Daily Maverick, where he makes the point that we’ve exhausted the subject of Die Antwoord. He takes Yo-Landi’s metaphor for Die Antwoord’s music, and comments on her “insight.”

“‘I think our style of music is like … we make car-crash music. Like when there’s a car-crash, everyone looks. It’s like, kids dancing in the rain, no-one’s really paying that much attention. But when there’s an accident everyone’s checking it out, so that’s our style.'”

Kevin Bloom comments: “Maybe that should be the last word. There’s never much to say at an accident scene.”

For once, I disagree with Bloom, and the David Bowie song title Always Crashing in the Same Car comes to mind. You don’t need to say anything at an accident scene, it’s always fresh. Every accident is unique, in the same way that every Die Antwoord moment is always of that moment, and fresh. It’s a performance piece acting itself out, and like all great performance, the audience is as complicit as the actors.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST (plus more footage)