The trend continued for sometime, until someone in the group made the mistake of inviting an Irish student to join them. (“You’ll love this…”) She was, quite understandably, horrified. For her, “Irish car bombs” were not a boozy joke. They were a deadly and daily risk growing up in a nation that had endured over 16,000 bombs placed across the streets between 1969 and 2003. She had met mothers bereaved by the Omagh bombing, the real-life “Irish car bomb” which sought to derail the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
The “Irish car bomb” wasn’t just a drink. It was a very particular form of lazy provocation and identitarian signalling. And if a smart music producer had decided to turn it into a band, they would have come up with something that looked a lot like Kneecap, the hip-hop trio from Belfast which is now a social media phenomenon.
Yet ever since 2018, with the release of their first full album, 3CAG, Kneecap have been a significant presence in the social media landscape, particularly among young people with a hazy memory of the Troubles, a penchant for terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism”, and a taste for rebellion.
If Kneecap are the “Irish car bomb” of bands, then like the cocktail they are fundamentally sophomoric. The band have bottled the type of edginess that hints at radical intention, but rarely have the courage of its convictions or the rigour for serious argument. In promoting this brand, they have been helped inordinately by the foolishness of Establishment figures reacting to the provocation, but failing to make the case to Kneecap’s fans as to where the problem truly lies.
Nonetheless, this is clearly a claim that many people, across Ireland, the UK and the United States, do make on a regular basis, and falls easily within the bounds of legitimate free speech. Amnesty International makes the same claim regularly, while fundraising, despite having to rewrite its longstanding definition of “genocide” in order to retrofit Israel’s military actions into such a fashionable term. This is not a reason to revoke the visas of Amnesty workers. Similarly, declaring “F**k Israel” may be childish – imagine the same phrase with “India”, “Pakistan”, or “China” in the title, and realise that a nation of people is not the same as its government – but it is not incitement to violence.
square KATE MALTBY
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Read MoreTake the clip from a gig last November, in which one member of the band chanted “Up Hamas, Up Hezbollah”. There should be no real question that this constitutes support for proscribed terrorist groups. Most of us, however, weren’t supposed to catch this chant – or at least, those of us over the age of 30.
It is too simplistic to suggest that Kneecap don’t know about the legacy of the Troubles: they hail from some of West Belfast’s most deprived areas, the latest expression of a longstanding subculture of urban republicanism. The name is another trap set for their critics: the band claims that “Kneecap” is a reference to a paramilitary punishment now mainly meted out to drug users. The band insists that their name aligns them with victims of kneecapping, not the perpetrators.
Kneecap’s fans, among them Gerry Adams, might claim that all this demonstrates their mastery of subtle irony and allusion. Yet their view of the world is as simplistic as that of their densest critics. If they have abandoned the 70s tribalism of the Belfast ground war, it is only to replace it with the 2020s tribalism of social media brand loyalty, where anyone with an Instagram account can buy into the nebulous myth that England, Israel and America are interchangeable expressions of the same ancient order of capitalist-colonialism (and buy merch accordingly). Kneecap may condemn the practice from which it took its name, but they also invited Adams, alleged to have been the head of the IRA at a time when “kneecapping” was its trademark punishment for traitors (something he denies), to make a sympathetic cameo in Kneecap, a film about the band’s origin.
But just like students lining up to order an “Irish Car Bomb”, Kneecap’s jesters are going to have to decide whether terrorism is an edgy joke, or a legitimate political legacy worth defending. It can’t be both.
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