If you haven’t heard of Die Antwoord, you probably will. Well, technically you just did. This is a rap group from South Africa that MF and I have been in to for a few months now. Their most recent video is catching some major momentum on the interwebs, and rightfully so. I remember the first thing I saw of them was MF nudging me with his laptop saying “hey, get a load of these guys” and showing me this here (NSFW) video-

My first reaction was to laugh my ass off and question if these guys were for real. They are.

Their newest video, Evil Boy, is really catching on. I was stoked to hear it when it came out, because we had pretty much exhausted our ipods with all their old stuff. The song itself is a super catchy hip hop song, but then I found out there was a lot more to it.

A comment from when boingboing.net posted this video paraphrases the story behind Evil Boy pretty well:

by Xeni Jardin:
So, the story behind this video and song (or part of the story — there’s so much going on!) is that Wanga felt that he was being coerced into a form of ritual circumcision by his community. It’s sort of taken for granted within his ethnic group that you must do this, so much so that if you are a young man and you do not participate, you are ostracized, as the band explained to me.

The thinking, and this is communicated very directly to the young men, is that if you don’t participate, you’re gay. You’re effeminate. You’re not a real man. You never mature from being a boy to being a man.

He struggled with all of this in real life: with what it meant for his personal and cultural identity. And he came to a point where he was like, you know what? Fuck you all. The fact that I won’t consent to having my penis sliced with an unsterilized knife, out in the bush, and risk infection or worse– that doesn’t mean “I’m gay,” as you say. I reject this tradition. If that’s what being a man is, fuck it, I don’t want to be a man. I’ll be an “evil boy for life,” even if it means I am ostracized from my community.

One can only wonder if now that this tradition has been brought to the light of mainstream culture, more young Xhosa men stand up for themselves if they don’t want to endure this ritual.

And there I was just thinking it was just a bunch of dudes wagging their peens around.