Monday, the Tenth day of August in the Hundred-Score-and-Five-and-Tenth year since B.C.(E.)
  We wanted to see Die Antwoord and we got word the opener, Get Weird, wasn’t worth watching, so DJ and I intentionally showed late just as the wayward warmup got offstage and what we’d paid to see got underway. The LC Pavilion was filled with White people from all walks-of-life and economic backgrounds. But so many White people at a hip-hop show? Why?
  White rappers.
  I played “spot the other non-Whites” and found a total of maybe two-dozen Brown people and ten Black people, not counting those who appeared masked onstage. I may have miscounted, but the multitudes were White. I felt like Ahab, swallowed into the Great White Whale.
  Prints of childish, Moby-esque faux graffiti covered the stage. The show opened with this empty landscape and the choral overture from 2001: A Space Odyssey, followed by the opening bass tone from Also Sprach Zarathustra, representing the death of God. Then the band hit the stage, vocalists Ninja and Yolandi as well as their background dancers, showing the phoenix-like rise of man in Pokemon costumes.
  Whatever you want to say about the personas of Die Antwoord only contributes to their art: under the performance are the performers who are 100 percent performance artists of the highest caliber. But let us consider the art.
  Die Antwoord expresses from the Zef school. Zef is a South African counterculture movement akin to “putting on the Ritz” for poor people, and slumming for rich people. Similar to early ‘90s grunge, it seems to be an attempt to find non-Marxist economic equilibrium in our world. Of course this leads to Die Antwoord, promoting the movement, then gaining more and more from it, and thereby having to stoop more and more to meet their audience and maintain the sense of “scene.” Kurt Cobain faced that problem shortly before losing face, altogether.
  The more Die Antwoord represent that scene, the more they earn and all the more falsified their representation becomes. But it is a scene based on intentional falsehood to begin with, lying to others believably begins with lying to yourself and believing it. It is quite easy for the well-to-do to dress in rags, but it is not so easy for the other side to reach for fineries.
  Every part of their show is about the blending of rich and poor but it is also about contrasting the Black and White as easily unified separate-but-equal entities.
  There was a subdued minstrel show atmosphere. It became stark halfway through the performance when the music stopped and Yolandi, a White African, had a masked Black African woman do a series of tap steps and shake her ass on command. I know the performers knew what they meant but I wonder if the audience understood the comparative to human ownership. Of course, Yolandi was doing similar steps and moves throughout her performance, but never on command.
  The show ended with a big-screen video showing CG animations representing passage through a black hole into a tesseract, essentially the “Beyond Jupiter” sequence from 2001. As an encore they performed their first international hit, Enter the Ninja.
  Ninja, the lead performer, wore a shirt and trousers that featured the same graffiti as was depicted on the stage. He did a stage dive and when he came up, floating on the hands of his fans, his shirt was gone. We stole it. As Socrates said of baseball and of San Dimas, Ninja said he loves Columbus.
  Finally the performers knelt at the edge of the stage awaiting the audience’s passage of judgment. They did not bow.