At the Commodore Ballroom on Sunday, February 19

For the benefit of anyone in Vancouver who thought Zef was, like, so 2010, Die Antwoord showed up at a sold-out Commodore determined to serve notice that this shit is far from over.

The group’s masked DJ was the first to hit the stage, pumping out his signature track, “DJ Hi-Tek Rulez”. Its opening line, “DJ Hi-Tek will fuck you in the ass,” encapsulates all the elements that make up Die Antwoord: it’s crass, vulgar, and threatening, but it’s also too over-the-top to take as anything other than winking irony. (It’s also appropriated. The words to “DJ Hi-Tek Rulez” are lifted almost verbatim from an infamously expletive-strewn Mike Tyson rant.)

Even though this was Die Antwoord’s third visit to Vancouver, the South African rap crew hasn’t completely lost its “what the fuck?” factor. It’s a known quantity by now, but there’s still something undeniably odd about its blend of raver-friendly beats and English-language rhymes peppered with Afrikaans slang. And the group’s two MCs are still as compelling to look at as a train wreck: the lanky Ninja with his home-job tattoos and Fu Manchu moustache, and Yo-Landi Vi$$er with her signature cropped bangs and disconcerting black contact lenses.

How much has changed since their first local show, a mere 20 months ago? Well, in that time Die Antwoord has signed with and then severed ties to a major American record label, released two albums, played The Late Show With David Letterman, and weathered the beginnings of a backlash from the very blogs that helped break it in the first place.

The consensus among detractors is that Ninja and Vi$$er’s shtick is wearing thin, and that even if Die Antwoord is an elaborate piece of performance-art provocation (which is almost certainly is), crassness for its own sake isn’t a very deep or satisfying well from which to draw. The new album, Ten$ion, has taken a serious critical lashing.

Even so, the group continues to play, and sell out, bigger venues, and if Sunday night was any indication, that’s not necessarily a good thing. The sheer douchebaggery on display included drinks being tossed and elbows flying liberally, and did that seven-foot-tall dude really need to push his way to the front? Really? He couldn’t just the watch the show over everyone’s heads? At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, the July 2010 show at Venue—at which the Zef-rap crew played to a much smaller audience of people who mostly knew it only through repeated viewings of the “Enter the Ninja” video—was more enthralling, if only because everyone in attendance left knowing they had witnessed the start of something that could very well get much, much bigger. Oh, and that crowd wasn't full of unrepentant dickheads. That helped.

What hasn’t changed in the world of Die Antwoord? Pretty much everything else. Die Antwoord is sticking to its guns, aesthetically speaking, and why the hell not? What the naysayers are missing is that this music, and all its attendant recycling of global pop-culture detritus, are a hell of a lot of fun. Ten$ion builds on the same formula as its predecessor, $O$, and its best tracks (“I Fink U Freeky” foremost among them) also proved to be highlights of a live show that was long on live-wire energy but disappointingly short in length, with Die Antwoord exiting the stage a little over an hour after launching into its set.

The show closed, perhaps predictably, with “Enter the Ninja”, which still sounds like a revelation, followed by anticlimactic instrumental. And then they were gone, without so much as an encore. That was a damn shame, too, because if the current backlash hastens the end of Die Antwoord’s career, it would have been nice to hear “Evil Boy” one last time.