If you're unfamiliar, Die Antwoord operate on the principle of "zef," a philosophy of intentional ignorance and crassness. It's the latest in series of personas for rapper Ninja, né Watkin Tudor Jones, but even with that conceptual bent in mind, it's still hard to process Die Antwoord as an idea, especially on Ten$ion where they replace what made them sometimes intriguing and slightly subversive with tired and tropes and lazy lyrics. In some ways it's the worst of both worlds: We've seen and heard it all before, and now it's dumbed-down even further. The blunt simplicity of Ten$ion could be seen as the mastery and refinement of a fledgling aesthetic (stupid for the sake of stupid). But this is a step back. Whatever cultural interrogation Die Antwoord might have been performing with $O$-- and it was hard to tell-- is totally absent here.
Die Antwoord abandoned their deal with Universal because of perceived pressure to be "like everyone else out there at the moment," and it's immediately clear from Ten$ion opener "Never Le Nkemise 1" that their sound has gotten a whole lot more... expensive. Earlier tracks like as "Enter the Ninja" and "Wat Kyk Jy?" hinted at big-room ambitions but still sounded endearingly cheap and shoddy. But "Never Le Nkemise 1" begins with a blockbuster-worthy bit of string-led melodrama and pseudo-choral vocals and quickly slams down into a-- what else?-- dubstep throwdown, all fiery blazes of scorched-earth LFO threatening to drown out Ninja's screeches of "that's why we keep it motherfucking gangsturrrrr!"
Say what you want about this zany group of South Africans, but attention-grabbing early singles like "Enter the Ninja" at least showed a clever dimension to their sound, with quick-fire raps that were easy enough to get swept up in. But there's nothing remotely thought-out or careful about Ten$ion. Not that anyone expected subtlety from Die Antwoord, but this is id rap at its worst, and even their excess lacks scope or imagination.
By its very nature, the Die Antwoord project is style-over-substance, but Ten$ion goes out of its way to prove that point. The boasting shouts of "'EY SEXEE, 'EY SEXEE" on the chorus of "Hey Sexy" are hopelessly awkward, and Ninja's Ludacris crib, "Get out the bitch, get out the way," feels like an embarrassingly misguided attempt at relating this duo to mainstream hip-hop currency-- a decade too late. If their lyrics are emptier than ever ("I took drugs at the age of 13/ Jesus Christ/ What the fuck?"), their attempts at shock value ring disturbingly hollow. If you aren't getting a little restless by the album's ending stretch, "DJ Hi-Tek Rulez" might snap you out of a cock-eyed stupor with its gruff, digitally altered grunts of "DJ Hi-Tek will fuck you in the ass... You can't touch me, faggot," amid other violently homophobic slurs. There's no shortage of allowances made for this kind of stuff in hip-hop, on an album this silly and concerned with dumb, thoughtless fun, it's especially troubling. It doesn't sound anything like a joke in the impenetrably convoluted layers of irony and self-mythologizing that is Die Antwoord.
What are we left with then? Die Antwoord were stuck with the "rave-rap" tag from the beginning, and it wasn't too bad a description, emphasizing not only the trio's danceability and playfulness but also its stark-raving-mad, go-for-broke tendencies. But this time around, the emphasis is on the "rave." Which is great for the in-house production but detrimental to pretty much everything else. The songs here are even less collected than before, jumping from flashpoint to flashpoint in a frenzied hunger to see how many times they can climax in each four-minute chunk of energy. It's exhausting, and the fragmentary, dissociative scatter takes the vitality and primacy out of the music. For a band so obsessed with its own self-consciously humorous image, Ten$ion in part fails because it feels so strangely humorless.
So while they might have succeeded in their quest to bypass the constraints of major-label rules and pressures-- apparently Universal rejected the album for being too vulgar-- they've gone and picked the most unfortunate parts of their oversized, manufactured personalities to highlight. Ten$ion is proof that you need more than just aesthetic and press savvy to really get by. They might have left their potentially comfortable new home to forge their own path, but Die Antwoord sound like they have no idea where they're going.
