No really. I do. I think it’s genius that there is finally a band out there that represents a cultural response to the recession in a way that speaks to those in recession. Personally I love the way that Jack Parow and Die Antwoord are making it so very easy for me not to have to think about some things! –Hey, maybe that’s why all those other people like them too....?
I mean, like, before them, I would actually have had to get to know someone a little, maybe even have a conversation with them, before deciding whether or not to invite them round to my place. Now, I just have to make sure that they like Jack and Friends and I know for sure that I want very little to do with them. It’s like... social magic man.
During a recent evening out with friends I had the misfortune of arriving at an entrance to the mall shared with the theatre where Jack was performing. I’m surprised I managed to make it to my dinner in one piece, physically and emotionally. Between clawing my way up two flights of stairs that had been turned into a beer-tent version of a slippery-slide and darting under and between 5ft1 poppies teetering precariously on 9’’ clear plastic platforms, so precariously that a number of them threatened to dive, unsynchronised, into their equally tall pints of klippies & coke, screaming “Waahs yaaaaay? Yay’t geseh yay gaahn muy op die korner krey?!” (insert giggle, pause, slurp and “Ooo*giggle*ooops!” as most of the klippies spills down her forearm and into her Eeves And Your Aunt handbag), I found myself madly texting my girlfriends, “What the hell is going on in this place????”
And then I remembered. The other people in the basement parking lot. The teased hair. The fake luminescent fuschia and green crocodile-skin moonbag. The blue polyshorts flashing leopard-print tighty-whities. The gutteral snort of throats hacking at lugees and the distinct smack of regurgitated snot on concrete. Jack Parow was here.
Thankfully dinner was on the other side of the mall and the theatre must have realised their mistake and sound-proofed their auditorium as their doors opened, swallowed the horde and quietly spat them out two and a half hours later.
If only the same could be said for the horde. Who clearly did not realise their mistake. In fact, they were revelling in it. A tide of dispassioned, foul-mouthed, misogynistic males and bouncy boob-waving shut-me-up-and-tie-me-down girls swept past us on their way out; one couple –all that was missing was the chain and dog-collar around her neck- exited with a flourish when the male suggested loudly that his “girlfriend” “Shut the fuck up or else”. She troddled on faster behind him in her spiky heels and ripped tights. Another lady of class bounded past us flailing her t-shirt screaming, “Mei tehte!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Awesome.
Now while before Jack Parow I may very well have run the risk of looking up at said-misogynist and thinking that a polite smile and a courteous Hello may have gotten me into the parking ticket pay-station ahead of him, I now know to take a wide berth and possibly walk to the pay-station on the other side of the mall in the hope of not meeting his wrath for simply being a woman. Similarly, Mei Tehte and I may actually have had to converse before she offered to show me her boobalicious tramp stamp and I made the mental note to not have her over –whereas now, thanks to Jack, meeting people and making friends is just that much simpler. Jack Parow: the litmus test.
I have never been one for the moral high-ground –and I understand that I am supposed to appreciate the Parow/Antwoord factory as a profoundly ironic and, thus, meaningful commentary on culture spawning culture, etcetera, etcetera. But irony is not, in itself, profound and embracing everything this factory churns out is reducing us to a society that thinks it is. Just because you have the ability to comment on yourself, doesn’t make you self-aware -even a chimpanzee would look in the mirror and decide to take off that leopard-print peak-cap.
-Soba.
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