Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — The song's called "Revolutionary House" and it's gone viral.
But its creator is difficult to track down. It takes several probes on Twitter, a lead from YouTube, an Internet search full of blind alleys, some e-mails and a couple of cold calls to strangers with online pseudonyms before someone responds with a tweet.
Eventually, a call comes. "I'm the one you want," says a deep voice.
Hours later, David Law, 25, with disobedient, bristly hair and solemn eyes, turns up for an interview in a shopping mall. He's wearing low-slung jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt.
He says he doesn't want to make money from "Revolutionary House." He wants to make people think, an impulse that places him in a long line of South Africans who have used music to protest and to inspire.
Law says it didn't take him long to craft the song on his computer. It combines a thumping electronic beat and excerpts from a tirade by a leader of the ruling African National Congress, talking ominously of revolution and railing at a white BBC reporter who had jokingly pointed out that the leader lived in a cushy suburb.
"Don't come here with that white tendency!" said Julius Malema, the ANC's youth leader. "Not here! …This is a revolutionary house.… Bastard! Go out! Bloody agent!"
The outburst by Malema, a charismatic 29-year-old who inspires great loyalty among many young disempowered, jobless black men, crystallized the anxieties of the country's white minority 16 years after South Africa's first democratic election buried apartheid.
For whites fearful that the country is sliding into an abyss, and haunted by the example of neighboring Zimbabwe, Malema is a charged symbol: an advocate of nationalizing mines and land who is also known for his fondness for fast cars and his ostentatious wristwatch.
Law's "Revolutionary House" is one of several songs by that name that surfaced after Malema's eruption.
"The thing that stood out for me was the 'revolutionary house,' " says Law, who is white. "It's things like that that make you question the government."
Duh-duh-thwacka, duh-duh-thwacka, duh-duh-thwacka, duh-duh-thwacka.
Blood-ee agent! Drrr-m-drrr.
Bastard! Drrr-m-drrr.
The televised tantrum, which drew a rebuke from President Jacob Zuma, undermined South Africa's efforts to showcase itself as a tolerant, modern African democracy as it prepares to host soccer's World Cup next month.
Racial tensions were already high in the country. A court had recently barred Malema from singing in public "Shoot the Boer," an apartheid-era song calling for the killing of white farmers. (Malema had made a habit of singing it at political rallies.) Soon after the court ruling, white supremacist Eugene TerreBlanche was killed by two black farmworkers.
Law, a musician and sound engineer who produces jingles and music for advertisements, sliced up Malema's invective from the news conference and laid it over a track of house music, a genre known for a heavy drum track and synthesized bass line injected with vocal samples. The result is rhythmic, punchy, funny and danceable.
Law comes from a white middle-class family anchored in Africa and calls himself a liberal. He got his first guitar at 14, took to songwriting and has been playing in bands ever since. No matter what happens, he says, he'll never leave South Africa.
"I thought, it's my country too, and I don't want it to be tarnished by deluded individuals."
Mtu Ntuli, 27, a black cartoonist and computer programmer, created his own song parody after Malema's news conference. But it wasn't fear, anger or even politics that got him thinking. It was the overheated, slightly absurd quality of Malema's rhetoric.
"Firstly, everyone was angry at [Malema]. Later it became like a joke. When someone started criticizing someone else, they would say 'Don't be an agent!' " says Ntuli, who goes by the name DR Underscore.
To Ntuli, there's "no way" Malema represents South African youth: "I didn't vote for him. Most people didn't even vote for the guy who is representing youth in the country.
"He's trying to push this whole thing, trying to fight for the land, the Boer," he says. "It's not a reality in this country and everybody knows it. In my office, we have blacks and whites. We don't feel this whole thing."
Ntuli and his peers were too young to take part in the struggle against apartheid. But the music of the era still lives in their souls, a collective memory.
Music was a potent inspiration for apartheid's opponents, from the rousing ANC struggle songs sung in the townships and by political prisoners on Robben Island to the joyful fusion of jazz and traditional African music of Miriam Makeba, who teamed with Harry Belafonte to sing about the plight of black South Africans in the 1960s.
