Spoek Mathambo's music video for his song Control from the album Mshini Wam, released last year, had 176,942 YouTube hits.

The videos were both directed by renowned South African photo artists. Roger Ballen did Die Antwoord' s video and Pieter Hugo collaborated with cinematographer Michael Cleary for Spoek Mathambo.

The videos are both shot in stark monotone and depict the performers interacting with people from outside mainstream South African cultures. Ballen and Hugo are both masters of depicting characters from the dark underbelly of society.

Ballen is known for powerful, disturbing psychological studies of people and animals interacting in creepy, desolate places.

He has been criticised for compiling what some have called ''a voyeuristic freak show".

Spoek Mathambo: Control

Ninja, front man of Die Antwoord, told Elliot Sharp of the Philadelphia Weekly (the group performed in that city last night), that ''Roger Ballen is my favourite artist, or whatever, like, in the world".

Die Antwoord have adopted a lot of Ballen's iconography and have become, in many ways, a living interpretation of his work. Ninja has referenced elements of characters from Ballen's photographs to develop his persona.

Ninja said: ''We started Die Antwoord because of him, basically."

Ballen's video with Die Antwoord began with stills he took of the band for their album.

Die Antwoord: I Fink U Freeky

Ballen says: ''Most of the sets started with a 'Roger Ballen still life'. Then we might have added in a mouth or foot or hand, and then we went into them cinematically."

Like Ballen, Hugo's lens couples the aesthetics of the bizarre and violent with an acceptance of the mundane.

Art critic Kisa Lala says: ''[Hugo's] work depicts the tragic and abject lives in some of Africa's major cities and rural townships, while celebrating the wild styles and fetishes of the people."

The collaboration of Hugo, Cleary and Mathambo on his darkwave township house cover of the Joy Division classic She's Lost Control is felicitous. Mathambo has interpreted the Joy Division song (previously a thinly veiled ode to singer Ian Curtis' epilepsy) to be an agitated, surreal examination of ritual.

According to Mathambo's website, the video ''explores the world of township cults, street preachers and teen gangs and was shot in Langa, Cape Town."

What both music videos have in common - besides the strong overlap of the styles of artist and performer - is the menacing fictionalisation of a reality that is buried deep in our fears, irrationality and repressed delirium.