It seems like just last week that a new viral sensation was born: Die Antwoord. A couple totally mysterious, compelling YouTube videos appeared and Die Antwoord was, to quote the group’s MC Ninja from their “Zef Side” track, “all up in the Interweb, worldwide!” Three days ago, no less a tastemaker than Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber declared on his twitter that Die Antwoord “just made 2010 official.” DA is a trio comprising a disturbingly scrawny, crudely tatted MC frontman, Ninja; a sexily strange blonde sprite with a bizarre bowl cut named Yo-Landi Vi$$er, who serves as hype girl/eye candy; and the looming, slightly damaged  seeming DJ/beatboxer Hi-Tek. Together, this motley crew have taken the M.I.A template for success and pumped it up with a combination of some strange, cheap ghetto drug and art-school sophistication. Like M.I.A, they hail from a third-world area torn by civil strife and identity issues up the yin-yang (not for nothing is one of Ninja’s trademark clothing items a yin-yang t-shirt) and have fun freaking semiotic signifiers. As well, they play an M.I.A-esque polyglot music that liberally bogarts from any number of revolutionary urban musics: crude rave, raw digital dancehall, crunk, Miami bass, and the pumping hip-hop of Public Enemy, Eminem and Dr. Dre all get thrown into Die Antwoord’s Molotov cocktail. There’s also no small hint of dance-music agitprop iconoclasts of eras past like Atari Teenage Riot and Sheep On Drugs; DA also evokes a ruder, more insane and weirdly more sophisticated Buraka Som Sistema. Ninja’s vivid rapping, fractured as it is with South African accent and slang, owes as much to the flows of Maya Arulpragasam and Marshall Mathers as his haircut ironically references Vanilla Ice. Sonically, they’re infuriatingly infectious and totally annoying: songs like “Zef Side” and “Enter The Ninja” prove that rare combination—an endurance test while listening that you can’t wait to rewind and hear again. Pitchfork aptly called it “Ali G meets Harmony Korine meets Hi-NRG… This act makes the people on “Jersey Shore” look downright normal.”

Die Antwoord hail from Cape Town, South Africa—not exactly a locus for buzz bands—and their name means “the answer” in the Dutch-based Afrikaans language of their home. But what compels about Die Antwoord is not the answers, but the questions. In their videos and media, DA offer up a ready-made, self-created mythology: that are childhood friends from the white Cape Flats suburban ghetto, making “authentic” music from that experience. At the same time, the artiness, stylization and humor of the DA videos—the musical and visual dissonance, the Keith Haring references, rodents crawling everywhere, Yo-Landi staring at Ninja’s chubby bouncing in “Dark Side of The Moon” short-shorts—is what makes them stand out. In their recent burst of Internet fame, bloggers have been disputing the genuine nature of their music, but in fact it is the post-modern, Malcolm McLaren-esque bogus scheming of the whole affair that is almost as beguiling as the music is immediate. This publication of 25 “facts” about Die Antwoord only opens more doors as shuts them. Apparently Ninja has been hovering around South Africa’s hip-hop scene for a minute, as well as tweaking it with conceptual gambits. And while in the “Zef Side” video Ninja claims he and Yo-Landi are childhood friends, other reports put them as husband and wife with a five-year-old son, making them the Jack and Meg White of the international weird-rave music scene. Even their name flips the script, especially coming from racially explosive South Africa: “the answer” sounds an awful lot like “the solution” of National Socialism, but its clear that these lot are hardly fascists just from their references and embrace, ironic or not, of ghetto culture. It’s more that “the answer” lies more in the viral blending of cultures, pop and otherwise, that happens in ghettos and Interwebs alike—they seem to rubbing the fact that ghetto culture is taking over the world in the face of those less enlightened. In other words, if you get the joke, you’re cool, and if not, eff off: this is provocation with a brain, hidden under all the low-culture salvos. DA’s savvy is also clear in their website,

“We like to represent South African style – we like to show things from here you won’t get anywhere else,” Ninja says in this alternately illuminating and inscrutable interview, and it’s probably the most accurate analysis of the growing DA phenomenon yet. In that same interview, DA big up Neill Blomkamp, the creator of sci-fi phenomenon District 9, and claim they want to make a feature film with him. Die Antwoord and Blomkamp share an odd legacy: Blomkamp for years wanted to make big-budget action films in Hollywood, but he only broke through to the masses when he made a personal, idiosyncratic work of art that was steeped in the conflicts and contradictions of his homeland. Blomkamp’s example doesn’t take away from DA’s achievement, however: despite M.I.A’s success, raw insane music rooted in the third-world experience mixed with a freaky performance/conceptual art vibe. It all comes to a head in DA’s term for the music they make—a South African slang word, “zef.” “Zef means, like, the ‘ultimate style.’ It’s not something you can really explain—it’s something you kind of experience,” Ninja says. “It’s like a video game when you reach the next level—‘zef’ is the next level.” Clearly, Die Antwoord is the next level. Either way, don’t be surprised if youth grab onto them as the ultimate soundtrack for their rebellion without a cause: with Die Antwoord, it’s obvious the revolution will be Interwebbed after all. Is it all an art school joke? Or “real”?  Or does it even matter? Listen to the entire DA album streaming on their savvy website, and decide for yourself.