Another Awesome WTF Moment From South Africa's Music Scene: Here's "Protein Shake" by DOODVENOOTSKAP

Upping the what-the-fuck-did-I-just-watch quotient that so often comes with South African music videos, Cape Town rap crew DOODVENOOTSKAP’s new video is an ode to masturbation, motivational stock photography, children’s nursery rhymes, ghetto interpretations of Backstreet Boys dance routines, Windows 95, and shitty green screen; soundtracked by a heavy EDM extravaganza peppered with trap beats direct from a free downloads section that’s actually just a repository of y2k viruses. In other words, DVS’s “Protein Shake” is jass.

“Jass” is Cape Flats slang for dope or fly, or the shit, or anything you want to big up, but in typical Cape Flats style, “jass” has an off-kilter air about it. These guys take what’s discarded and make something all their own. It’s a DIY coolness that is determined by proximity (in this case, the local Chinese shop) as opposed to traditional desirability. Labels like Nike, Adidas, and Converse are well out of reach, so they create bootleg versions made from shop junk, customized with ballpoint pen, showcasing a defiant imagination. As you have now gleaned it’s really hard to explain the headspace behind a lot of the vernacular employed in Cape Town rap.

DOODVENOOTSKAP translates roughly as “colleagues till the death” and the crew is made up of core members MCs Hoppie, Slang, Fabio, Doupie, Prince Maharajah, Ern and DJ Khoi-San (who is whichever of the MCs is on beats for that track). Starting out in the ghetto’s of Ocean View they’re now mostly based out of Lavender Hill, another wasteland of projects and unemployment that is part of the area known as the Cape Flats. The area was initially created by the old Apartheid government as a sort of labor repository and is now, 21 years after the advent of democracy, still largely removed from the Cape Town of the tourist brochure, and is mostly only spoken about in reference to gangsterism and crime.

The video—directed by Capetonian filmmaker Jenna Bass and animator Sebastian Borckenhagen—was shot on a makeshift green screen in someone’s backyard. Bass hooked up with the crew through Ern, whom she met at a casting for an unrelated project. They hit it off, to the extent that Bass and DVS are currently in production on 17, a four-part hip-hopera delivered entirely in Kaapse slang. She caught Hoppie laying down “Protein Shake” and found the song so hilarious, their sound so unpredictable, that she offered to make them a video on the spot. But what exactly is “Protein Shake” about? “The song is actually about nursery rhymes,” explains MC Slang. “But at the beginning he says ‘Ek skommel protein shake.’ Now for us ‘skommel’ is slang for ‘masturbate,’ right, and the proper Afrikaans word for skommel is shaking. So we used to have these things at schools melkskommel, it was always a class joke so that’s how some of the lyrics in there. There’s nursery rhymes that people can relate to in our area like cultural games.”

Hoppie continues: “’Protein Shake’ was never meant for wider consumption, it was just us having a nice time.”

Of the group dynamic Ern had this to say: “We feed off each other’s energy. For example, Prince Maharajah knows no girls, but he knows guys. I know maybe more girls are following me and he puts out a song that’s directed to girls…”

Fabio continues: “We’re real. There’s no barrier for us we don’t see the fact that there’s gangsterism here, we see humans. Now everything that we say is real and everything we talk about is real. Like a lot of rappers target three things: Money, cars, women. But there’s so much more. Let's take it back to skommel protein shake.”

Ern claims that the crew’s lack of hackneyed hip-hop braggadocio was the very thing that attracted him: the reality is that everyone’s struggling and there’s a unity in that. Slang picks up the baton and tries to explain further: “When we first started all of us were conscious artists, and we spoke about identity and where you find yourself and where does your identity come from, social topics, social ills, it was all about the community and that type of stuff.”

Hoppie in a diaper with his neighbour's kids!

But back to the video and the song about jerking off.

“I never knew that you could set up a green screen by yourself, so we set up a green screen DIY-style, next to the neighbours and we had fun,” laughs Hoppie. “I had a diaper on and acted like a baby. It was just us having a nice time and children came onboard and they wanted to have this nice time. Then Jenna said she had a friend, Sebastian, in the field of expertise of kwaai (South African street slang for “cool” but also “hard"), and then Sebastian asked us to write a list of stuff that we wanted to project behind us.”

“For some reason,” says Sebastian, “They wanted a lot of frogs.”

Frogs! Roger Young is a filmmaker living in South Africa. He keeps us up to date on what's happening down there. Follow him on Twitter.