I, for one, am not much of a football fan. But I have to admit that this year’s World Cup has been a mesmerizing spectacle. Not because of the actual playing (and not because of French team debacle, so aptly analyzed by SocProf), but mainly because of the soundscape. For me vuvuzelas were, like, you know, Luigi Russolo’s “Art of noises” and emergentist theory of human action rolled into one. Don’t get me started on that, because I could go on and on for days and – beyond this blog, you know, I have a life.

So, for those of you that miss that disturbing, spitty, heartfelt, proletarian sound, here’s a – seemingly unrelated – piece of South African culture: rap-rave music, as instantiated by Die Antwoord, the hottest band of the moment [of course, mildly NSFW].

Taxijam presents Die Antwoord from taxijam on Vimeo.

“Here in South Africa the taxis play rave music fokken loud my bru. You can hear it from the next city when the taxi comes through, you hear DOOM DOOM DOOM—they gooi the rap-rave megamixes pumping like a nightclub. So my main inspiration is the taxis. The whole album is based on the sound it’s gonna make when it’s pumping through a taxi—It’s that high energy shit you can’t compare.”

[Watkin T. Jones (aka “Ninja”), lead vocalist of Die Antwoord, interview in Vice Magazine]

Ps. On Die Antwoord’s official website you can listen to their entire first album $O$. It’s definitely worth it, especially if you are not planning to take a Cape Town taxi anytime soon. They are presently touring Europe and the US, so another thing that you might want to do is go to one of their live shows. With a vuvuzela, to blow along with their despicable zef-gansta rhymes…