The Bowery Presents

Music Hall of Williamsburg upcoming shows

Die Antwoord
official website
myspace
Die Antwoord lead vocalist Ninja (born Watkin Tudor Jones) was a part of South African hip-hop scene for many years, fronting such acts as The Original Evergreens, Max Normal.tv and The Constructus Corporation. He is known for adopting different stage personas. In the case of Die Antwoord his persona is Ninja: a hyper violent character who is very different from his previous incarnations.

Die Antwoord was later created as a group in 2009, consisting of performers Ninja, Yo-Landi Vi$$er, and DJ Hi-Tek.. Their debut album $O$ was made available as a free download on their official website. $O$ features Cape Flats rappers, Jack Parow, Jaak Paarl (AKA Jaak), Knoffel (AKA Garlic Brown), Scallywag and Isaac Mutant. In 2009 South African cinematographer Rob Malpage (along with co-director Ninja) shot the video for their single "Enter the Ninja." The video became a viral phenomenon on the internet nine months later, delivering millions of hits to the official Die Antwoord website. Their original South African hosting provider, Hetzner, disabled their hosting account following massive bandwidth overage caused by the traffic following the site launch. The group were forced to move their hosting to a US-based hosting provider to handle the traffic. The "Enter The Ninja" video also features South African progeria sufferer Leon Botha, a prominent Cape Town artist.
Boy Crisis
official website
myspace
A couple of years back, Newsweek ran a cover story about falling standards among young men, a problem the magazine attributed to the "biologically disrespectful education system" as well as to the different ways in which male (cf female) brains are hardwired. Their term for this phenomenon was "Boy Crisis", and it was treated with the utter solemnity it deserves by all right-thinking adults. Apart from five twentysomethings from Brooklyn who just thought it would be a great name for a pop group. Besides, these five young men were clearly not suffering from boy-crisis syndrome so it wasn't really their problem. For starters, they attended the same prestigious hall of learning, Connecticut's Wesleyan Art College, as MGMT (and the soon-to-be-fawned-over Amazing Baby). And furthermore (your honour) the music they had begun to make was both ingenious and irresistible: late-70s punk-funk with a tough veneer and a mid-80s gloss, like Duran Duran if they'd come from the Bowery not Birmingham, or Palladium if they'd managed to get their debut album remixed by Justice before they got dropped.

You will be hearing a lot about Boy Crisis over the next few months because they are the subject of hysterical hype and rampant A&R buzz, because they make music based on a shared love of Prince, Talking Heads, Chic, Pet Shop Boys and Zapp – and for once it actually sounds like it – and because they are the hottest electronic pop group to emerge from America since, ooh, MGMT at least. Only, as that list of influences suggests, they're more funktronic than psychedelic: Studio 54 disco with a hint of CBGBs grit. They've got a song called 1981 – a choice of title which seems to acknowledge that said year was the greatest ever for pop music, and they might not be wrong – and it's steeped in 1981-era punk-funk: it reeks of Ze Records, it genuflects before Contort Yourself by James Chance & the Contortions, only it's slower and more sultry, with a shinier production, crisp handclaps, references to Mao Tse Tung and a series of ever-rising falsetto shrieks from Victor Vasquez. Put it this way: if it had been on Sign O' the Times it would have been the third best track; if it had been on Lovesexy it would have been the standout. Get the picture? It's gorgeous.
-Paul Lester, guardian.co.uk
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