Ian Bekker (North-West University, South Africa)

This research provides a socio-stylistic analysis of the linguistic and visual elements in the Baby’s on Fire music video by zef-rap- rave South African band Die Antwoord, ‘zef’ being definable as an ideological positioning that is local, working-class and which attempts to transcend existing boundaries of language and race within the South African milieu. The analysis shows that a full understanding of the meaning of this text requires an appreciation of its use of vari-directional voicing (Bakhtin 1984, Rampton 1995, 2006) to create both a parodic and, arguably, meta-parodic (Morson 1989, Dentith 2000, Coupland 2007) stance on racial, class and gender politics within the context of contemporary post-Apartheid South Africa. On a purely parodic level, the text is shown to clearly provide a critique of traditional Afrikaner identity as well as two more modern manifestations of this identity: nouveau-riche femininity and what we refer to as ‘hip-hop masculinity’, both responses to globalisation. The status of zef itself as a socio-ideological phenomenon is, however, shown to be more ambiguous. On the one hand, by drawing on Bakhtin’s (1965) work on the carnivalesque, we are able to provide some evidence for a meta-parodic stance that is inherently ambiguous, self-reflexive and open to self-critique. On the other hand, it remains clear that Die Antwoord’s project (as reflected, for example, in Baby’s on Fire) has, quite legitimately, been the subject of accusations of cultural appropriation (Haupt 2012, Scott 2012) given their use of salient elements of so-called ‘Coloured’ culture as part of accruing large amounts of material capital.