Eccentric South African rap-ravers Die Antwoord have set alight with their provocative new video for “Fatty Boom Boom.” The video is as complicated an act as they are — it at one point finds the duo donning what appears to be blackface, and there is a worthwhile exploration of that element here — and worth unpacking a bit, particularly the part where they totally clown on Lady Gaga and her taste for “freaky things.”
The video begins with a tour guide welcoming a Lady Gaga doppelgänger to Africa with a tour of South Africa’s “Concrete Jungle,” where stoplights are called “robots” and shop owners keep black panthers as guard cats. When they come across Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er performing on the sidewalk, Gaga pauses to admire their “freaky fashion” and has just begun to wonder if she might “get them to open for me” — a gig they’ve actually turned down — when the van gets highjacked. Gaga sets off running and somehow winds up at a dentist/gynecologist’s office, where she births a gross and goo-covered bug because she is indeed the Mother Monster. And in the end, they let the Lion King of the Concrete Jungle eat her. Read more…
